There is a fun challenge this month, An October Contest: Your First Time – The Real Estate Edition! And as I read all of the wonderful entries, most of them dealing with being new and green in real estate, I am reminded of what it took to get off to a great start back when I was new.
Sure, it was a different time. But there were things that were important then, and reading these contest entries made me understand that what worked for me in 1982 works for new agents today - even though the real estate world is a completely different place than it was back in the day.
Training is so important, but today most brokerages do not provide the quality of training that I got. The company had a course we took to prepare for the exam. Then they added another six weeks to teach us what we needed to know prepare a CMA and a listing agreement. We learned to write an offer and present it to the sellers and listing agent. And even more important, we had to preview a lot of properties so we would hit the streets actually knowing the territory. And when I went to my first listing presentation (for an upper brackets Victorian mansion near Dupont Circle), I was not accompanied by a "mentor" agent, but by my broker. And we left with a signed listing agreement. Oh, and I didn't have to give her a big referral fee from my commission check like many of today's newbies are required to pay their mentor - even if the mentor did more harm than good.
In so many of the October Contest entries, new agents were thrown into the deep end, and while most of our guys learned to swim really quickly, many do not.
Lately, we are getting a lot of questions from people who are preparing for a career in real estate, either in real estate school or looking for their first brokerage situation and soliciting our advice. And I think the three most important things, at least for the first year, is training, training, and training.
And I'm not talking about having a broker who foists you off onto a mentor. The theme of so many of the contest entries? The newbie would have been better off on his or her first appointment by leaving the mentor at the real estate office.
There are a lot of ways to get started in real estate. I know a fabulous agent who left his lawyer job and went to work as an assistant to two guys who had a pretty high-powered real estate practice. He watched them for a year, and then went out on his own with a lot of knowledge under his belt. You can start with a company like Redfin that pays you a real salary as you start off and learn the ropes.
But whatever you do at the beginning, make sure that you will be in training to become a superstar. And if that includes blogging and asking questions on ActiveRain, save your stories for a future First Time challenge. I'm guessing there will be many more of them.
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