October is New Agent Month at Inman. Follow along as we go deeper on the tools, tech and tips you’ll need to survive and thrive in 2024. For curated content crafted just for first-year agents, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Basics.
“I love houses,” isn’t enough reason to start a real estate career. While most new agent training is about the rules, contracts, and definitions, the real work of real estate has everything to do with your ability to connect with your fellow humans.
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The buying and selling of a home is a very personal experience, and new agents can get tangled in the tech and tutorials and miss the people management side of the business. Here are 10 dead giveaways that you are new to the business.
1. You create and send an email home search, then never check in
Meeting a potential buyer who wants more information is a rush for any agent. However, setting up an email search of properties that meet the buyer’s criteria and sending it, and then expecting the buyer to contact you to initiate the next step is a new agent mistake. Like agents, buyers’ inboxes are inundated with information, and emails (perhaps the one containing the perfect property) are missed or overlooked.
Sending listings of interest on a regular basis is a great way to retain a connection with that buyer. But until you call them to review the findings and point out properties that may be of specific interest and why, your emails are just another automated, impersonal bit of info. Buyers want to be helped through the process, and they will choose to work with an agent who offers more direction and advice than just links to click.
2. Your buyer takes you on showing after showing
Our jobs are almost never like what we see on television, where buyers view three houses and choose one. New agents tend to give buyers the driver’s seat when it comes to showings. This often results in seeing house after house over weeks and months and can erode the confidence the buyer has in their representative to find them a home.
The agent controls the process, but the client controls the decisions. If your buyer has FOMO or decision paralysis and wants to keep looking and looking because they think there may be something better out there, they need your help to adjust their search criteria.
Maybe they need to change their price point, their geographic area or their expectations for features. You must educate them and let them know how to find what they want rather than leaving them in an endless spiral of fruitless showings.
3. You share other agents’ social posts on your page
I’m pretty sure those of us in real estate have lots of friends and followers who are also in real estate. Our social media colleagues frequently post their newest listings, price improvements or homes that have come back on the market to generate leads for themselves. It’s easy to click “share” on our colleagues’ posts about their listings to get them on our own page, but that’s a mistake often made by new agents.
When you share this way, you are also sharing the other agents’ contact information and potentially their website, and you are essentially acting as a lead source for them.
Instead, take the time to go to your own website, find the property in question, and share your website link that leads your social sphere back to the property through your channels rather than ushering them into the arms of another agent.
4. You frequently have negotiations crash and burn at the home inspection
There are few things that are as invigorating as getting a property under contract and few things that upset the stomach as much as the home inspection moment. While newbie agents will let their buyers and sellers know about having a home inspection, they often fail to counsel them beforehand. As a result, many deals fall apart because expectations were never set.
New agents should let their sellers know at the time of listing that the home inspection will feel invasive, that items they’ve learned to live with or didn’t know about may be exposed, and that the inspector is not at their house to marvel at their decorating prowess.
It should be explained to buyers before an offer is ever assembled that there is no such thing as a perfect house and that the inspection is there to provide information to the buyer about what items may need maintenance, repair or replacement. It is not a “to-do” list for the seller.
5. Your phone shows more incoming calls than outgoing calls to your client
Are your customers constantly calling you with questions? Is your time interrupted by customers asking things? If that’s happening, then your customers are starved for information. New agents may not have a feel for the frequency and depth of information that a buyer or seller may need during one of their largest life transactions.
Sellers want to know about every showing, even if the news is that there is no news. Both buyers and sellers want to know what happens next, how far along they have gotten, or how many hurdles are left to clear. If you don’t tell them, they don’t feel led, yet you are the leader.
Be proactive with your clients, and learn to anticipate the questions they will need to have answered before they even know they have a question. If you don’t know, stay close to your broker and ask for guidance. That’s what they are there for. Stay three steps ahead of your client. Keep the light on their path forward.
6. You let the agent on the other side answer for their client
It’s not unusual for agents on both sides of the transaction to have conversations as the deal progresses. It’s not uncommon for one side to say, “They will never take that … or do that.” And nothing causes a seasoned agent to smell new agent blood in the water faster than receiving no pushback to their response.
Let’s go back to Contract Training 101. Agents don’t typically have the legal authority to answer for their clients. You can demand, on behalf of your client, that their offer/request be answered only by the other party in writing.
Do not accept the agent’s answer as being the same as their client’s answer. Many a client has made a decision that was different than their agent expected when paperwork was placed in their hands and a response from them required.
7. Your client gets angry or upset, and deals fall apart frequently
New agents don’t know that they are supposed to be a buffer during negotiations, and instead, many take the role of being the messenger. If you are forwarding verbatim responses to your client from the other side, you are a messenger.
If you aren’t taking the heat out of the conversation you’ve had with another agent before relaying the information to your clients, you are a messenger. Experienced agents know that closings are more likely to be successful if you are a duck.
Calm on the outside but paddling vigorously underneath. When one side gets heated, it’s the agent’s job to lower the temperature so that both sides don’t become inflamed. When one side does something nerve-racking, it’s the agent’s job to find a solution and deliver it, rather than presenting the problem to their client. If your client is angry or upset at the other side, it’s because you’ve not been the buffer you should have been.
8. Your business plan includes building your real estate empire on internet leads
Do you complain that your broker or team captain doesn’t give you enough leads? Have you committed to a large monthly expense in exchange for “hot” internet leads? Are you getting leads but think they are all junk? Very few agents have built thriving real estate careers based on their raging success at converting strangers into clients.
Successful agents spend a majority of their time cultivating relationships with people who know, like and trust them. Newbie agents spend their time working hundreds of leads with a conversion rate of 1 percent or less.
The likelihood of an internet lead being yours and yours alone is small. That buyer or seller has already visited lots of online sites and made inquiries all over the place and are now being bombarded with agents trying to convert them into a sale. Every agent has 24 hours in a day. Spend yours with leads that will convert.
9. You don’t land the listing
Do you “show up and throw up”? In other words, do you jump into your listing presentation, showing your potential seller all the things you will do for them, give them all the reasons you should be hired and why you and your company are the greatest, and cut your commission? Then, do you leave without the listing? If so, you may be talking too much and listening too little.
Giving the floor to the seller first will provide you with all the information you need to have a true listing consultation, which is different than putting on a listing show. Once you fully understand the seller’s motivation, their requirements, their pain points and their expectations, you can tailor your consultation and target their needs, rather than using the time as a stage for yourself or burning the seller’s time talking about things that don’t matter to them.
10. An online search generates only your picture and contact information
Let’s face it. Everyone you come in contact with will search for you online. They will stalk your social media. They will put your name into search engines.
Are you appearing with just a nice headshot, an email and phone number and that’s it? Let’s say you have a fully functional website that your company provides, have you put in your own profile, checked it for link errors and added information about what differentiates you? Or does your site look like all the other agents who haven’t paid attention?
If your online presence gives the vibe that you may only be partially prepared to handle the largest investment in someone’s life, then that’s the level of interaction you can expect, even from your friends and family. Get with your broker, or your company’s tech person, or take tutorials about your systems and make them work. Building trust may actually start by giving people value in their first online impression with you.
The good news is that new agents, if they stick it out long enough, will become seasoned and will learn the lesson about making this business more about people than properties. Your broker and the experienced agents in your office are a wealth of knowledge, and if the culture is such, they should be a great source of support. That’s a better place to learn the lessons of success than the school of hard knocks.
Claudia Stallings is the COO of Wallace Real Estate in East Tennessee. Connect with her on Facebook or Instagram.
