Don't wait till it's too late

I recently read an article about the Ike hurricane disaster:

It seems the local authorities instigated a mandatory evacuation to protect citizens from the storm. Everyone was to get out of town. It also seems there were a few hold-outs who defied the order to leave. While Ike is blowing down buildings and flipping cars, one of those hold-outs called 911 with a request for rescue. The operator, who was probably in another city, calmly told the man that the evacuation was for a reason. There were no emergency services available. "What am I to do?" the man wailed. The operator told him to get a permanent marker and write his name, address and social security number on his arm. So his remains could be identified later.

In our Quantum S.E.L.L.™ training we present a principle called the Window of Opportunity. It describes how the opportunity to make changes in your life decreases as you get closer to the event itself. You may remember writing papers in high school. The longer you waited, the less chance you had to research, write and revise the end product. I suppose the man in the Ike story missed his window of opportunity as well.

Knowing which things to do
Systematically doing the important things
Getting skill in the important things

There is a window of opportunity in your real estate career. There are only so many days available to you become productive. At the end of those days either you will be broke, on the street flipping hamburgers, or you will be making a living in real estate. Every day that you resist or put off the things you need to do to build your client base is a window closing forever.

Starting Right Now...Make sure:

• You have a real COACH who knows how the game works and who is willing to push you to your limits. A person who coddles you is not your friend in this stage of your career. You need a tough love kind of person who is truly invested in your success. If you need to be loved, get a dog. A real coach is probably the most important thing you will have in your journey to success in real estate.Without a real coach holding you accountable, you will find yourself putting off the difficult and resisting the uncomfortable

• You get business development training. You need to develop business contacts who will buy or sell with you in the near future. Make sure you know where to meet a LOT of people who are probably going to buy or sell. This is not "farming," where the probability is very low (less than 3% right now.) It is holding open houses and making a positive impression and an appointment to get acquainted.

• You have the necessary communication skills to gain control of the buying and selling process. Your client must trust that you will provide powerful leadership in the process. That means you must demonstrate your concern for their interests above your own. You must be able to really hear what they want to do. You need skill in gentle interrogation. You must ask for an exclusive right to represent them in the future.

When you consider that 13 out of every 14 people who enter the real estate business have failed before they finish the second year, you need to be sure you have stacked the deck in your favor.

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.