How To Get Started as a New Real Estate Agent

Whether you’re about to get your real estate license, or you’ve begun your career as a new real estate agent, this plan of action will help you to do the right things at the right times for a successful start of your real estate agent career.

Real estate isn’t the fast easy money career many think when they enter the business.  It can be a really great business with high income potential and an exciting lifestyle.  However this isn’t going to happen unless you understand that you are an independent contractor and it’s your business to grow or fail.

You might say that your name is your business, but you really want to work on branding your business separate from just your name.  That is unless you never want to retire or sell the business.  Follow the steps below and begin to build a great career in real estate, but do so independent of whatever brokerage you hang with at the start.

There really isn’t a limit to how big of a business you can build.  You can grow into a team or even start your own brokerage. Real estate can be the best decision you’ve ever made.  But, a large number of new agents don’t make it through their first or second year in the business.  Make a plan, follow the plan, and the steps in this article will help you to do that.  Success will follow.

Though these steps are shown in a certain order, many of them are worked on simultaneously. So don’t try to work them out one at a time, but work on several at the same time. This your “Master Planning Sheet” with links out to detailed instructions for each summarized step.

1. Nail down your personal and business expenses.This is a business. Successful businesses do budgets and know their expenses, as well as projected revenues.
2. Get a realistic plan of your income expectations.Using a funnel approach, you can estimate income out the bottom of the funnel from the type and number of expected prospects falling into the top of the funnel.  Doing this right will help you to keep from failing through lack of income, the reason many new agents fail in the first two years.
3. Develop a marketing budget with data from previous step.Once you have an idea of the results from each type of marketing, you can more intelligently allocate money to them.  You should budget to market and advertise, but only through doing these calculations can you make informed decisions as to where to spend your marketing money.
4. Fast track the building of your Sphere of Influence.The more people you have in your SOI, the more business and referrals you’ll see.  Hand out business cards to virtually everyone you know.  Then meet more people and hand out more cards.  Learn other SOI building techniques at the link.
5. Choose your sponsoring broker carefully.Balance your needs for support with their ability to provide it and then look at the split.  Often the commission split is the last thing you should consider when you need support and mentoring.
6. Kill these time-wasting habits!Don’t let bad habits and procrastination keep you from the behaviors that you need to implement in following your plan.  Get a system together to accomplish tasks in order of importance, not urgency.
7. Get your contact/prospect/time management on a system NOW.With budget a concern for most new agents, using the MS Outlook you have on your computer can be the best beginning management system decision.  Even better for many is using the free Gmail and other Google tools.

Tips:

1. Never deviate from your plan. If it’s not working, though you’re implementing properly, then change the plan and stick to the new one.
2. Though personality is important, this is a business of numbers. Constantly build on the numbers of contacts and prospects and you’ll build your business.
3. Don’t spend a lot of time looking for the “Magic Bullet.” Though there are “million dollar agents”, it’s all about having a plan, following it and hard work.
4. In most cases, your money is better spent in promoting yourself than in buying leads from some third party lead-seller.

What You Need:

source: thebalancesmb