Why is new agent training so hard?

When we look at companies, large and small, all over the country we are appalled at how ineffective training is. The statistics don't vary much from city to city or state to state. Such a small percentage of people enter real estate and become productive enough to earn a living at it, I sometimes wonder why anyone would think of going into real estate in the first place.

What makes a person effective and productive in real estate is building a clientele. You need to create a pipeline of future business or you will just be another statistic. Nothing else matters much at all. Not contracts, not listing presentations, not understanding title issues. Business development is the ONLY thing that matters in the early stages.

Real estate companies don't want to spend resources on training new agents because the return on those resources is so small. Of course that becomes a death spiral dooming them to continuing the dismal results.

The problem is that successful agents themselves are the product of a training environment that is haphazard at best and non-existent at worst. There is nothing in their own background that prepares them to train the new agents. There is nothing in the background of managers and company directors that prepares them either.

So we end up with amateurs as trainers.

Realtors are expert Realtors, not expert business development trainers. While they would never attempt to work on their own automobile, they are willing to “train” other agents.

But they are a product of the “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” school of real estate training. They have a specific system that works for them, which is peculiar to their own style and have no information or insight into anything else. If their system doesn’t work for you, you are toast. Often their success is based on simple longevity, having a long list of people they worked with in the past and who pass on referrals. That is clearly not going to work for a new agent.

It is as if they survived open heart surgery then go on to train others in the process!

Being at a big company is not the answer.
Being at a small company is not the answer.
Getting really good instruction in the contract is not the answer.

The moment you enter this business, you are in critical condition.

Finding professional business development training is the answer.

You need a specialist. You need a business-building expert.