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Home prices may be up and owners may have equity, but the market isn’t moving all that fast, and a lot of agents are worried. And, oh yeah, there’s that NAR settlement thing happening.
So, it’s up to industry leaders to keep morale up and their agents focused on the moment.
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A panel stepped on stage at Inman Connect Las Vegas on Tuesday to talk about how to do that — and if you’re looking for a silver bullet, stop reading, because according to Stephanie Anton, Head of Corcoran Affiliates, there isn’t one.
“We’re leaning heavily into learning now, which is why we’re all here today,” Anton said. Real estate is familiar with change, she said. It knows how to handle challenge.
“I think if we wanted to sit behind a desk 24/7 we would have picked a different business,” Anton said. “This isn’t anything that anybody doesn’t know how to tackle.”
From dealing with upcoming changes to paying buyer brokers to the slow pace of transactions, the real estate market continues to operate at high idle. The engine is pumping, but it’s stuck in Park. So industry leaders need to find ways to educate their agents and brokers on why the view isn’t changing, and then teach them that sometimes staying in place for a while is also a form of change.
“We have a learning platform called Agent Studio, and one of the things we do on it is a Monday morning meditation,” Anton said. “It helps with the head and the heart.”
Jason Abrams was on stage, too. He’s the head of industry and learning for Keller Williams, and shared an anecdote from an author he interviewed whose book is titled Shine.
“In it he wrote that a person will have 10 years in business; six of them are going to be wildly average. Two of them are going to be the greatest, record-breaking years ever. And two, you’re going to feel like you’re going out of business,” Abrams recounted.
Abrams uses that concept to remind his agents that they need to stop comparing themselves to others, stop comparing themselves to their best year in the business and lastly, they need to define what they actually want out of life.
“Then we need to wake up and ask them, why are you doing this? What motivates you? Who are you in the end? Helping them actually ask the fundamental questions of life, and then building a business that funds that life? I think there’s a huge appetite for that,” he said.
Abrams told the crowd that “easy” and “hard” are merely labels we assign to things, but we hear the second word so much more often. “I never hear agents say, ‘It’s so easy right now.’”
Anton confirmed that more agents need to be reminded of why they chose to help people buy and sell homes. “The folks that are, I think, having the hardest time getting through this moment are the ones that have lost track of that,” she said.
Abrams doesn’t want to hear about “burn out” because it doesn’t have anything to do with external factors in the industry. He asked the crowd if they felt that way, and the response was a small contingent of hand raises.
“Top agents are grabbing mindshare right now that becomes market share. Top agents are even grabbing market share that they didn’t have before,” he said.
Anton leaned on Corcoran’s gritty, resilient history, a company started by a tenacious business woman who ensured the company always understood itself and how that idea resonated with its customers.
“Our tagline is ‘Live who you are.’ And we developed that 20 years ago, and we’ve stuck with that,” she said. “Once you have that clarity of purpose and focus and consistency, I think it makes it all the noise much less deafening.”
Even in the wake of all the lawsuit stress and AI and strange market conditions, Abrams maintains that only two fundamentals ultimately matter.
“There’s just two truths to real estate: people do business with people they like, and then, No. two, once you’re likable, you have to know the framework in which to make the clients happy.”
