The 7 Keys to Real Estate Success
People who do well in business often have certain inherent strengths and skills, but with so many different careers you don’t necessarily need to be smart in the strictest sense of the term. But you do need to be savvy, and typically being savvy comes from years of being as keen to learn as much as you can. As thoroughly as you can, and also as quickly as you can. For realtors we can assure you that real estate career success doesn’t happen overnight, but you will get there faster if you follow proven real estate success strategies.
We’d be remiss if we also didn’t emphasize that you’d better have a whole lot of hustle to go along with that growing industry savvy. Because as we’ve stressed at length real estate is a very competitive business and all the knowledge in the world is going to be by and large squandered if you’re not hustling try to generate new client leads for real estate. Real estate lead generation is just one of the keys to real estate success though, even though it’s the one we focus on the most around here.
That’s to be expected when you’re among the best real estate lead generations services in Canada, but we’re going to stray from our usual tact this week and focus on more general real estate success tips instead. We’ve got 7 of the best of them available for you to go over with this blog entry, and the hope is that you’ll see one or more of them that you can easily incorporate into your efforts so that you start achieving success in real estate to a greater extent. Sound good? We imagine it does, so let’s get right to them.
Deliberate Approach
Real estate is as competitive a world as they come, and this makes it so that finding the success an agents desires for themself requires a deliberate approach. The belief here is that these 7 keys here are genuine real estate success factors and can and should be part of any agent’s roadmap to prosperity. This will apply for a new agent the same way it will for an experienced broker.
These are strategies that can propel your business forward and help you thrive in a real estate landscape that is always evolving but with the one constant being that there is never going to be enough of the pie to go around. The success you aim to have for yourself is going to have to come at the expense of less of it for your competitors. As is so often the case with business of any type.
Okay, without further ado here are our successful real estate agent tips and ones we think at least a few of them should be implementable for most of you.
Have a Plan
Going into your new career choice with a solid plan success in real estate. And solid is the key word there, nothing about your plan should be indeterminate or open to going one way rather than the other. It takes a conscious effort to determine the most effective ways to run your business. Starting out as a real estate agent and planning for success should involve all of the following, and with an equal amount of emphasis and deliberation spent on each:
- branding
- marketing
- finances
- operations
Remaining focused on your business and having eyes on the prize(s) happens so much more naturally when you have this type of plan as part of your keys to real estate success. Ideally you always have something new to experiment with too, and you will also do best if you are never inflexible with your plan and be willing to admit you got X-part wrong if that’s what you did.
When you review your business plan annually and adjust for changing market conditions and tech innovations you will be improving yourself as a realtor and one who is enjoying more success in his or her career. Plus, keeping up with always-changing market conditions is an absolute must too.
Establish a Mentorship
Having a mentor can do wonders for you finding real estate career success. This is especially true when the agent finds an experienced realtor who has years of experience and a proven success record and is willing to share their industry savvy. If the agent can then leverage that mentor’s experience to make better business decisions it can be a positively decisive factor in avoiding industry pitfalls. Or allocating energies and / or finances unwisely, especially early in their career.
A mentor can also expedite career development in real estate by giving that agent an opportunity to ‘co-list’ a property. This is something that happens much more often than you might think. The way it usually works is that the mentorship recipient agree to do most of the work on a listing, and then receive a smaller percentage of the commission in exchange for having the opportunity provided by the real estate agent mentor.
By having their name on the listing this give the agent real-world experience in your desired market, but it also does a lot for making them more visible as a local real estate agent who has listings. This is an example where achieving success in real estate comes from having those first few listings do wonders in establishing a name for yourself.
So how does an agent go about finding a real estate mentor then? It’s not common for brokerages to have a mentorship program already in place, so you may need to reach out to experienced agents and ask about the possibility of this. Here’s 3 suggestions for how to approach this:
Make note of agents in your market who always seem to have new listing, and then assemble a short list of agents where you’d like to know of their real estate success tips. You then want to determine how you’re going to display that there’s value for them if they decide to mentor you. Agents can take conventional approaches and suggest that they help the prospective mentor with an open house or something similar.
It will be a learning experience for them, and allow them to get to know those mentor candidates better. They may also want to take their top candidates out for way too many drinks at a peeler bar, and if that suggestion is not well received then they can suggest coffee or lunch instead. They then ask if the candidate has ever considered mentoring a new agent. Keep in mind though that mentorship requires time and energy, and some agents just won’t have the bandwidth. Be realistic.
Master Marketing & Prospecting
Marketing and prospecting are both methods of generating new real estate leads, and for most successful real estate agent tips are always going to include discussing paid real estate leads. Philosophically here you need to come at this from the perspective that marketing is passive (putting your message out there and inviting people to contact you), but prospecting and collecting client leads for real estate agents is always going to be active (contacting specific people to ask for business).
Solid and proven approaches for real estate marketing include:
- Social media posts
- Newsletters
- Advertisements
And you will also want to be prospecting for real estate clients by:
- Contacting For Sale By Owner (FSBO) homeowners with their properties listed without a realtor
- Contacting homeowners who have had their listing expire, and may be open to working with a new realtor as a result of it
- Creating a Renter-to-Homeowner program
Mastering both lead-gen models is one of the most important approaches with real estate success strategies. If you practice them every single workday you’ll maximize the success you have with them.
Niche Down
Casting a wide net for real estate leads usually isn’t the best idea. Reaching more people doesn’t actually mean you are more likely you to get greater numbers of new clients. Instead the truth of the matter is that you’re more likely to achieving success in real estate when you reach a smaller group, and reaching them with messages that resonate with them.
Here are two marketing messages that may – or may not – go over especially well with people who may genuinely become new clients for real estate agents:
If you’re buying or selling a home in -city name-, contact me today.
If you’re looking for an investment property with high return potential in -neighborhood name – contact me today.
The first message is nothing special, and no part of it will set you apart from any of your competitors using the same message. This means that you’re effectively competing with every other agent in this massive market. The 2nd message is different. If I’m an overweight investor considering homes in that area, this message speaks to me more directly and suggests more of the opportunity to find a high-return investment property. Look into profitable real estate niches for agents and evaluate which one will suit you best, as finding a niche as a realtor is one of the more well-established keys to real estate success.
Focus on Referrals & Repeat Business
Only a little less than half – 42% – of buyers and sellers find real estate agents find a real estate agents having them referred by a friend, neighbor, or relative. Plus there are estimates that 12% choose an agent they used previously. This means that referrals and repeat clients could account for a full 50% of an agent’s buyers.
Consider as well that these same estimates suggest 36% of sellers come from referrals and 27% of sellers use their previous agent. That’s 63% of sellers potentially coming from just these two categories. Nurturing existing contacts is going to be part of real estate success tips too. An agent never knows when a client they’ve worked with before may be looking to relocate, invest, or refer a friend.
Let’s now talk specifically about what realtors can do to increase referrals and repeat business. For starters, they can change their marketing materials to have them highlighting referrals very directly. Any spot where there is the potential for a call to action in marketing materials, the agent can update that CTA to include referral opportunities.
Here’s an example – ‘If you’re ready to get top-dollar for your -area name- home, contact me today’ might be changed to ‘If you, or someone you know, is ready to get top dollar as an -area name- home seller, contact me today.”
Also make it a point to thank referrals publicly. When an agents gets a referral, they should make a show of it. Send a thank-you gift to the referrer’s office. A bouquet of balloons, or classic flowers, a basket of goodies, or a year’s subscription to Penthouse will garner their attention and make the agent’s referrer see them even more favorably and more likely to refer them to people in their network who are looking to work with a real estate agent.
Another solid approach is to give more value in any ongoing follow-up. For example, the agent might go ahead and provide regular market reports to show what homes in the area are currently selling for on average. Another possibility might be monthly lists of local events that help people feel more connected to the community. Or providing those homeowners with complimentary property tax reviews, something that is really valuable considering how often tax assessors overvalue properties and end up creating unfairly high property tax bills.
A quick look at the assessed value per square foot compared to local market values PSF can make it clear if someone is being over-taxed. Notifying these homeowners and advising them to appeal their assessments for a property tax reduction is one of the successful real estate agent tips that rarely if ever gets talked about.
Build a Strong Online Presence
Having a strong online presence is huge for success in real estate for many reasons. An emphatic online presence gives you real credibility with prospective real estate clients, and first and foremost in creating that for yourself is having a good real estate agent website. And on the agent’s site they should be highlighting ways to provide value before they ever meet the prospect to begin with.
These days arguably the best way to do that is by publishing informative content on social channels or a blog for a real estate website, and with it the agents is demonstrating their expertise and building trust with prospective leads. There are other ways to provide ongoing value to your sphere and providing ongoing value is key to generating referrals from real estate clients with an eye to gaining repeat business. Utilizing a website and social media platforms effectively is absolutely huge with real estate success factors these days.
With an SEO optimized website for a realtors you’ll also gain passive, organic online leads. Agents do well when they have their realtor website optimized for search engines like Google, and done right this makes it so that potential buyers and sellers are funneled directly to the website where they then learn of the relator and their services.
Diversify Income
There has been a lot of discussion among real estate agents as to whether income diversification is a good idea for their business. However, once they take a long vacation, take time away for health or family, or retire then their opinion on this changes. It’s here that they realize the value of having recurring income that is unrelated to their commissions.
Smart income diversification is a good idea for real estate career success based on:
- Recurring income despite seasonal slumps and periods of recession
- Passive income that can flow independent of current business activity levels
- Long-term income potential that can support agents after retirement or build generational wealth
There is no shortage of ways to diversify your real estate income. Choose an income stream based on the one that you see will work well during slower periods for your business, including recessions and one income stream that should be fairly reliable for providing passive cash flows.
FAQs
What can a realtor do to be more successful in the business?
A realtor’s success is always going to be dependent on having clients regularly buying and selling homes through them, and to that end the best way to have more success as a real estate agent is to engage in active real estate lead generation efforts, which these days can include the use of paid real estate leads.
Another good approach is to network more effectively with other service providers who may come to know of prospective clients through their work and will be agree to refer them to you if you do the same for anyone who might need their services.
How does income stream diversification benefit a realtor?
The fact that a realtor’s income is exclusively based on earning commission can make it so that their income can, and likely will, fluctuate. These increases and dips in income will occur as they go through periods of having more listings and buyer clients, to ones where there are fewer of either. Income diversification means that the agents has other income streams that can supplement their income during downswings.
What can a real estate agent do to make clients more likely to provide a review or referral?
The most natural way an agent can promote a positive review from a client is to provide great service, but if they do that and clients don’t volunteer a review it can be beneficial to ask them directly if they’d willing to provide one. When doing so it is best to take the approach to first ask if the client was 100% satisfied with the service provided, and whether or not they’re entirely happy with the outcome of their home sale or the purchase of a home. The agent can then make the determination whether or not they want to directly ask for a review, submitted online or elsewhere as needed.
Is search engine optimization something an agent can do themselves for their website?
Basic SEO improvements can be made to a website by anyone who has enough writing ability to incorporate select SEO keywords for real estate. But that type of SEO optimization will only provide marginal benefit for a real estate agent website. For far-reaching SEO optimization it will be necessary to hire a digital marketing expert who has the expertise needed with improving SEO for a website. This is important to do considering that a realtor’s website goes a long way to determining real estate career success these days.
