3 Qualities of Being a Referable Real Estate Professional

There are so many ways to build your business. When working in the real estate field, you are inundated on an almost daily basis with someone or some company trying to sell you on the newest, fast, easy way to market for more clients. Do you want to always be chasing after new clients, or would you prefer to have clients coming to you already sold on you and your quality and are ready right now to have you help them? The second sounds so much better, doesn’t it?

So how do you do that? It’s called running a referral-based real estate business. Nowadays, with so many choices for almost every service or product out there, more people are turning to friends, work colleagues, family to figure out where to go. And for something so huge, their home, of course they would want someone who was referred by someone they trust. A referral wins out over a stranger or yellow page ad almost every time.

When you're a referable real estate agent, you work with high-quality clients referred to you by your other high-quality clients. Does that beat spending $4,000 on an ad that may - may - generate a listing or two? Of course it does.

So, what makes an agent or a lender referable? It starts with the right mindset, and that mindset has three key qualities:

Purpose

Ask a group of agents and lenders what's the single-word purpose for their business, and most of the time what you will most frequently hear are "profit" and "service." If you want to grow your business based on referrals, the word that better encompasses your purpose is referral. Building a business that's referral-based rather than marketing-based costs you literally nothing because your marketing is done by the people who know you, like you and trust you. They send their family members, friends and work colleagues to you because they want them to experience the same high level of service that they experienced with you. So, your purpose is to create an experience that makes people so outrageously happy that they want to refer the people they care about to you.

Boundaries

Your boundaries determine who you work with and who you don’t. They shape your interactions with others. Boundaries encourage collaborative, respectful behavior when you enter into a client relationship. When it comes to business, one of the healthiest boundaries you can set is allowing only the highest quality of people into your life, starting with your clients. Past clients usually refer people who think, act, live like they do. So think of what kind of future clients you want when choosing who you’ll work with now.

Integrity

Integrity is the third quality of a referral mindset. "Doing the right thing, even when no one is looking." Your integrity translates into how you run your business and putting your clients’ needs first, and attracts the high-quality clients you want.

When your purpose, your boundaries and your integrity are in alignment, and you demonstrate them during your day-to-day dealings, people will want to refer you to others. Instead of focusing your energy and spending your money and time on getting your name "out there," focus on developing a referral mentality and mode of business built on a good purpose, the right boundaries, and a strong sense of integrity and what’s right.