The ONE Key to Success as a New Real Estate Agent
How To Become a Top Producer in Real Estate
In real estate there are a few very important things that will lead to a successful career. Often, we can over complicate the process and lose track of what is most important to our success. If you want to continue to grow your business over time, there is one thing that can almost guarantee your success. One trait that if you stick to it will put you in the top percentage of REALTORs before you know it.
In this post, you will learn about the importance of consistency in real estate.
As a real estate agent, you can get pulled in many directions. There is always a new company promising you the best leads or a new app that will give you tons of time back. As real estate agents, we are drawn in by these shiny objections foolishly thinking they will solve our real estate problems. Our success is not predicated on the next new lead generation strategy or app, it comes from consistent effort over time.
We love those stories of the agent that jumped into the industry and started doing 50 deals in their first two years, but this is not the reality for most new real estate agents. It can be a grind off the start as you are learning your craft, trying to prospect, and remain optimistic about your future.
What they never teach you in real estate school is that you can be successful in many ways. You don’t need the “next best thing.” We just need to keep doing the hard things every single day.
Here is the thing about consistency, in theory it’s easy. In practice it is hard. You know this if you have ever been to a conference and promised yourself that you are going to start to put all these new strategies into practice. You come back to the office motivated and excited to take on the world. Unfortunately, life gets in the way and you lose this fleeting inspiration and before you know it, you are back to your old habits.
This is a blessing and a curse. The challenging part of consistency is that it is not easy. However, this is also how consistency and be your edge as a real estate agent! Since it is hard to do in practice, most of your competitors will not stay consistent in their careers. They will get drawn in by the “shiny objects” and only prospect when they feel like it.
This is a huge advantage to anyone willing to put in the work and stay consistent in real estate. It doesn’t actually matter which prospecting channel you focus on. Door knocking, open houses, database marketing, networking groups, circle dialing, internet leads, they all work, they just take time and consistency to start to see the rewards.
With consistency, you will begin to perfect your scripts and dialogues. You will become better plus you will be meeting more people.
How to Become Consistent
To become consistent in real estate, you need to start with habit formation. Consistency is nothing more than a habit. If you haven’t learned about habit formation in real estate, consider give this a read.
Your brain can trick you when you start forming a habit. It can make you think on day one that it’s going to be easy to stick to your habit. But after a few days, you will become bored, tired, or both. You will catch yourself saying that it is “OK, to miss one day.”
Don’t fall into this trap. To be successful with consistency, the habit you are trying to form is “not missing a day,” therefore, by missing a day, you are dropping the ball.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take breaks. It just means that your breaks should be planned. If you were planning on prospecting between 9AM – 11AM everyday weekday, then do it!
If you find yourself resorting to willpower, make sure you learn more about the 4 Steps to Habit Formation in Real Estate.
Consistency and Trust
Another big perk of consistency is it builds trust. It builds trust with your database, prospects, and yourself.
If you are consistently sending out a monthly newsletter to your database, you will continue to build trust with them. They will begin to expect your monthly newsletter. Also, if you send out monthly postcards to your geo-farm, you will be building trust with them over time.
This trust building happens below the surface, but with each time you connect with your prospects and clients, they will begin to trust you a little more.
Consistency also builds trust with yourself. If you are constantly following through on your word with yourself then your self esteem will rise as you gain more confidence in yourself.
Perception Vs. Reality
As a new real estate agent, you may have had a perception of what it would be like to be in real estate. Maybe you thought about driving a nice car, working only a couple days a week, and having a fancy watch. It doesn’t take long in real estate to know that this is not reality.
The TV shows and movies does the public a disservice by making our career seem like all we do is open doors for buyers and list homes.
If you have a tainted view of what real estate is really about then you need to do what you can to change this. Replace these thoughts of a lax schedule and easy money with hard work and dedication.
Let go of the preconceived notions you have about real estate and start building a picture in your head of consistent dedication to the seemingly unpleasant things in real estate (prospecting, asking for business, door knocking, etc.)
Reward the Right Things
If you have followed Rev Real Estate School for some time, you may know we are all about praising effort and not the result.
In real estate, we can get too fixated on number of homes sold and number of listings while losing track of the activities we did on a consistent basis to get there.
Instead of chasing sales, chase small daily actions that will move the needle in the future. Praise the effort you put in and reward yourself for a successful day, even if no appointments came of it.
If you followed your schedule and worked consistently, then you have a reason to be proud of yourself.
String enough of these consistent days together, and you will have more deals than you can count!
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Rev Real Estate School. The podcast with quick tips and actionable advice to help you sell more real estate in today's world. And now your host Michael Montgomery.
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome back to Rev Real Estate School. I'm your host Michael Montgomery today we are talking about one of the most important things in real estate something that is overlooked often times and it is consistency. The importance of consistency and how that will make a difference in your business.
[00:00:31] Now here's the thing about consistency. It's not easy. It's easy to get motivated it's easy to get inspired. You go to a conference you watch a YouTube video or something like that. You listen to this podcast and you get motivated you get inspired. But the consistency is where the magic really happens. Moreover, here is one of the most beautiful things about consistency but also one of the most challenging things about consistency. Most people won't stay consistent.
[00:00:58] So why this is great is because if you can stay consistent you will be differentiating yourself. If you can't stay consistent this industry will be a huge challenge for you and you will be on what we call the real estate roller coaster. Now almost every real estate agent has experienced this. If you haven't hopefully you never will but chances are you will at some point. It works by becoming busy and you stop working as hard on these things that require us in order to make a difference in our business: prospecting, reaching out to people, meeting new people. We forget about these things when we're out showing properties and we're listing properties and then you jump on what's called the real estate roller coaster where things start to go up as you're prospecting and as you're doing the things you need to do and then you kind of plateau off because you have a few closings things are going well but then you drop off and it's a big sharp drop off because you wake up that day and you say I don't have any future closings. I don't know what's going to happen in the next few months. I've had a few closings this year but I don't have anything else in the pipeline. So you want to avoid this and this can be done simply with consistency. And here's the thing again. Most people will not stay consistent. So all you have to do is truly stay consistent and you are leaps and bounds ahead of most people.
[00:02:16] So if you haven't heard Episode 25 head back listen to that. This is all about habits. Consistency is a habit and in this episode you will learn the four rules of building a habit make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. So head back to Episode 25 and I'll have it linked up in the show notes so that you can learn a little bit more about habit formation but consistency is a habit and it needs to be done every single day.
[00:02:44] The other thing about consistency is it also builds trust so it builds trust with your clients with your prospects and even with yourself. So what do I mean by this? If you consistently are sending out say a piece of mail to your database every single month or a newsletter every single month to your database. This is a level of consistency and they get used to receiving this. The thing about it is it shows your consistency and it shows your hard work. So this builds more trust with your clients and your prospects simply by being consistent. They see that you are a player in this industry you are actually putting the effort forward. The other thing about consistency is that it builds trust with yourself. If you say that you're going to do something and you do it then "awesome "you're building consistency you're strengthening that habit. If you don't then again you're starting to lose trust with yourself.
[00:03:43] Another thing about real estate is the perception versus reality. So the perception if you're a newer real estate agent you probably had a perception coming into this industry you know it's somewhat of a glamorous industry and people all drive nice cars and have nice watches and it's super lucrative. If you've been in the industry for longer than say like two days, you probably know that this is not the case. It's a challenge. It's a grind. It's rejection heavy work and it requires a ton of consistency. So we need to take a step back and understand the importance of that. We need to drop these perceptions that we have of real estate even in our mind if we're looking at say like top producers in our city and that sort of thing and we think that there they get there by doing these luxurious tasks of showing these beautiful properties and listening awesome properties and never having any struggles. That's just wrong. That's not how they got there. They got there through habit formation and doing the hard things over and over and over. So drop the perception that you have if you do have one around a real estate agent and understand the reality of real estate agent of being a real estate agent is success comes through consistency and you shouldn't be rewarding your consistency.
[00:04:53] This is something that we've come back to a few times and it's all about rewarding the effort not focusing so much on the result. If all we're focusing on is getting the sale then we lose track of the items that are required in order to get us there in the first place. This is where it all comes down to is praising the effort and not focusing as much on the result. If we're focusing on the effort and we're praising ourselves for getting the work done the results will all just take care of themselves. You've also probably heard this before. Why are we dropping the ball when it comes to consistency and habit formation? Usually, we find it's two reasons: the person is either tired or bored. Those are two main reasons why we stop doing something right. We become bored of it when we're first doing it again. We're inspired were motivated. We're ready to rock and roll we're having an awesome time and then things get a little bit more challenging. Or we just get tired or bored but we have to keep coming back to the reason why we're doing things. And we have to overcome tiredness and being bored as we start to push through that. The more times that we're able to overcome those feelings the easier it will become. Now there's one thing of being tired which is just like you need to get more sleep and then these other side of being tired is kind of works with bored right. And so if you are becoming bored with your consistent habits you need to continue to push through and as you start to push through that boredom it will actually start to dissipate. You will actually become more passionate about what it is that you do you will overcome the boredom by just pushing through it. So it's not easy at that time but coming back to consistency and knowing that if you push through the boredom you will get results. Plus you will start to become even more passionate about what it is that you are doing. So stick with it.
[00:06:42] Thank you very much for listening to this episode I really appreciate it. If you would like to ask a top producer anything have a private conversation with the top producer. All you have to do is go and rate and review the show then head over to revrealestateschool.com and go to the free coaching section. Fill out your info and you can have a conversation with a top producer about anything in your business. Thank you again for listening to this episode and we will see you in the next lesson.
[00:07:06] This episode of Rev Real Estate School has come to a close. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you back here for the next lesson.