If you’re a new real estate agent, welcome to the profession! Despite your excitement and optimism, you may be a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of optional tasks, marketing tactics, and advice you’re being bombarded with. To cut through the noise, we’re sharing our 2023 Tips for New Agents. Our tips are broad enough to work for every agent, but they are intended to help you narrow down what you bring to the real estate market in your area.

Let’s dive in.

Find Your Niche

In order to pull ahead of the competition, find your niche. Your job is to figure out what you do better than everyone else and throw your efforts into your planned strategies.

Play to Your Strengths

Agents are advised to knock on doors, cold call, develop targeted ads, build a beautiful website, and send out glossy mailers. If, however, every agent in town is employing exactly these techniques, you’re going to blend into the background by following the same blueprint.

So how are you going to get started? Or pull ahead?

You. The only thing you need is you.

Analyze your strengths. What has been a winning strategy for you in other areas of your life? Are you a people person? A charismatic conversationalist? Then get out from behind your computer and spend time engaging with your community in person. Chat up strangers at the barber or salon, hang out at bustling bars and sports lounges after work, or join a large church and start introducing yourself.

Do you struggle with one-on-one conversations? No worries: you may excel with in-depth market analysis, the results of which can guide your efforts. Believe it or not, you can have a successful career in real estate without cold calling or charming your clients. Instead, you’ll blow your clients’ minds with your incredible knowledge of the market, which you’ll be able to support with charts and graphs that break the data down into easy-to-understand information.

Each one of you has a strength, talent, or personality trait that places you in a sphere all your own. Whatever that may be for you, rest assured there’s a way to make it work for you throughout your real estate career.

Demonstrate Your Worth

Let’s be honest. There are realtors who deserve every cent of their commission, but there are others who haven’t earned a sliver of it. As a new agent, it’s up to you to push back against the bad name these lazy or incompetent agents have given our profession.

Your goal should be to add as much value to each client as possible.

Earn your commission by:

• Staying ahead of the curve in both real estate technology and marketplace expectations

• Being in your client’s corner from start to finish

• Sharing useful information about your market niche

• Leveraging your network

• Creating opportunities for your client to make deals they’d never have found without YOU

Remember, your worth as a real estate agent is ultimately determined by how much worth your clients feel you to have brought to the table.

Demonstrate Your Honesty

Today’s savvy clients will be immediately repelled by sales-y talk and sugar-coated property presentations. Don’t call a smaller home “cozy,” don’t call a run-down home “comfortably lived in,” and don’t say a terrible smell is “a scent worth investigating.”

Use plain language and tell it like it is. Ask your clients to share their feelings about each property, and what would make them agree to work with a home that falls short of their ideal. You and your client are on the same team, so offer useful guidance, solve problems with them, and honor the impact they’ll feel making a purchase of this enormity.  

Stick with this ethical perspective, and your clients will adore you, recommend you, and return to you time and time again.

Be Available, Professional, and Prompt.

You don’t need to answer your phone when it rings at 8 p.m. on Sunday - but check your voicemail. In general, you should be available and responsive to your clients and potential clients.

In every interaction, be professional as well as honest. Avoid coarse language or turns of phrase, be polite to others involved in the transaction, and maintain your role as your client’s reputable representative.

Be on time. If you tell your client you’ll meet them at 10 a.m, be there are 9:45. Spend ten minutes reading and replying to emails, updating a listing, or answering text messages. It’s always better to have a few minutes to spare than waste a few minutes of your client’s time. By arriving before your client, you’ll demonstrate that you’re reliably there for them when they’ve asked you to be.

Work Your Sphere of Influence

Many real estate agents sell only three homes per year. However, top agents sell over 40 homes per year! What makes the difference? How they leverage their sphere of influence. An agent who works their SOI consistently will always have active clients.

If you’re just beginning to define your SOI, it’s advisable to gather a list of about 250 individuals who know you by name on sight. If a contact doesn’t already think of you in a positive way, or couldn’t pick you out of a lineup, they are not a good candidate for your SOI roster.

Your SOI should be a list of people who are ready to advocate on your behalf. They will absolutely bring you business if these requirements are met. If you’ve lived in Middle Tennessee for a good stretch, know a lot of people, or have an extensive list of friends and family in the area, your SOI efforts can be the pillar of your networking efforts.  

Put them into your CRM, send out monthly emails, send out holiday cards, call or text them on each birthday, and wish them happy anniversary as well.

The Takeaway

Getting started in real estate is simpler than you may have thought. Down the line, there are all sorts of bells and whistles you can incorporate, but these core approaches will continue to serve you well.