The real estate industry is a tough one. Whether buying, selling, or renting homes, clients look to you for guidance and the best deals on the market. It is typically a big move for them mentally and financially, making things quite stressful and overwhelming.
While experienced professionals can handle most situations with relative ease, budding real estate professionals may not.
This is why we have come up with a few honest tips for budding real estate professionals that will help them learn a few tips and tricks that most veterans are well aware of.
Honest Tips for Budding Real Estate Professionals
You will likely not find most of the following tips in any book or journal because we have sourced them from experts, and some of them are rarely talked about, even in professional circles.
Nonetheless, they should come in handy throughout your real estate career.
You Aren’t Just Selling Homes
A large chunk of your business comes from repeat clients and referrals; this means you are not just selling homes but are actively selling yourself as well. It helps to be active among communities and preferably in the online arena as well.
Just becoming an expert in one neighborhood or becoming an active part of a community alone is enough to take your career to new heights.
Most potential clients will automatically land in your office or inbox if they know you move a lot of homes in a particular neighborhood or are recommended by people in a community.
Networking plays a huge role in real estate, and you must learn to sell yourself as a professional if you want to sell more homes. The internet can be of great help, too, and you must act like a small business that has to run its own PR online.
Stage Responsibly
The smell of freshly baked cookies is an old cliché that still works, but now there are newer and better ways to entice buyers. Across the board, experienced real estate professionals swear by good interior design paired with some quality, low-key music. The music should reflect the home, but it shouldn’t be popular to avoid bad associations of buyers with certain tunes.
The important thing is staging, and you need to make sure you do it right. It is recommended to remove pets from the property, let in plenty of natural light, ensure that people enter from the front entrance and not the garage or backdoor, de-clutter, and depersonalize.
Depersonalization is perhaps the most important one. It allows prospective buyers to better envision themselves living in the home. Lastly, you should limit the interior design to a few key pieces per room so buyers can experience the space for themselves.
You are Part Therapist
There are different people in the market, and you will see them through good and bad. Real estate endeavors are almost always emotional roller coasters for most people, and if you want to have a successful real estate career, you need to be there for your clients at every step of the way.
You will find that your job is as much about real estate as it is about nurturing relationships. Your clients are never completely sure, and it is your job to reassure them from time to time. If there are issues, whether client-agent issues or buyer-seller issues, compromise is key, and it is your job to achieve it.
Finding a home is stressful and can often leave people unhappy, which means you may often need to deal with stressed, unhappy clients. You will also encounter ecstatic, enraged, and defeated clients.
Couples, in particular, have plenty of uncertainties, which can be a problem for real estate professionals. A simple trick to help you start right with couples is to have them separately write down what they are seeking in a home.
Some things may match while others may not, but you will have a much better experience once couples are on the same page.
You NEED Sales and Assistance
You are most likely an independent contractor not yet hired by a firm as a budding real estate professional. This means you work on commissions, which means you NEED to close deals and welcome any assistance you can get.
That’s the job, and you do have to always be closing. You will mostly experience a fluctuating income at the start, and you must maintain a balanced budget for yourself until you have a secure job, steady income, or substantial savings.
Moreover, you are likely relatively young, which means a real estate assistance program and app like OktoHub should be right up your alley. OktoHub allows you to create a network of trusted real estate professionals around you and hire them for task-based real estate jobs.
Get the help or substitute you need for real estate tasks like home inspections, open houses, or important meetings. Apart from real estate assistance and a trusted network, you can also try getting gigs for yourself on OktoHub.
Just make sure you do a good job of expanding your network with more experienced real estate professionals. You never know, a big-shot real estate professional might get impressed by your work or ethics and hire you full-time for their business. If nothing, you can likely find an experienced mentor for yourself.
Kids Can Be More Dangerous Than Criminals
It’s no myth that open houses are often visited by criminals to “case the joint.” This is simply a drawback of a house that is laterally “open” for viewing. However, such crimes are rare and typically occur when there’s no one in the home.
Still, criminals should be the least of your worries when conducting open houses. The worse thing for an open house is couples with unattended young children. Kids are not there to check out the kitchen counter, water pressure, or garage space.
They are just there to explore their new surroundings, play around, and create some havoc before they leave. The smell of your freshly baked cookies is not helping you in this situation either. So if you see people coming in with young kids, it helps to be mindful, especially if you want to avoid damages.
Anything Can Happen… Just Don’t Take it Personally
Managing expectations is perhaps the hardest part of an already intense real estate career. Keeping your clients happy is just as important as finding good deals or perfecting your listings. As a real estate professional, you are always under fire, and you need to deliver EVERY TIME.
Even the slightest of things can cost you a deal or a client. However, it would be best never to lose your calm or let such things get to you. It is a part of the job, and it happens to every real estate professional sooner or later. Just don’t take it personally.
Conclusion
Becoming a real estate professional is a roller coaster ride in itself. There are highs, lows, free falls, and even moments of euphoria. You will see and experience every emotion known to humans. For the most part, it’s about the journey, what you learn, and the people you meet along the way.
Lucky for you, as a budding real estate professional, you are at the best of the journey – the beginning.
Hopefully, you learned a thing or two from the mentioned honest tips and can use them moving forward.
If you want to discover more honest tips for budding real estate professionals or learn about the real estate assistance and network benefits of OktoHub, please visit our website today.
