Recently I had the pleasure to chat with a fellow parent of a student where my daughter goes to school about her intention to get a real estate license. I always find it fun to talk to people who are new in the business, as it reminds me of that time in my own career, and it gives me a chance to clarify for myself what I think is important about this business. She asked me about the hours, as many people do, because they’re so likely to see us working on weekends. And yes, there’s a lot of that. If you want to make any money in this business, you pretty much have a choice between working a lot of weekends and/or managing others who do. On the flip side of that, no other job is as lenient about you taking a nap at 2:30 on a Wednesday afternoon if there are no clients to meet at that time and you feel you need one.

We discussed the car issue. She needs to get a better car soon and wanted to know how important it was to have the fancy wheels that Realtors® are infamous for. I don’t have fancy wheels — I have a Honda Accord. So I told her that I’ve sold quite a few houses in a Honda Accord. That seemed to help.

We discussed what the most important traits of a Realtor® are. I said the one I care most about as a broker is honesty. Then I moved on to include optimism — whether innate or learned. Also patience. As a software developer, I had pretty complete control over outcomes — through careful work, testing, and the like. As a Realtor®, I have very little or no control over outcomes. Much of this job (all of it?) involves being able to extend oneself for another human being with no certainty of success. This is not always easy — and it certainly wasn’t natural for me early on. I had to learn it.

Then we got into some of the more everyday skills like knowing about the local market, qualifying buyers, objection handling, and the like.

None of the newcomers I’ve ever talked to has invented the time / space warp device that incorporates my biggest suggestion of all: if you can find a way to skip over your first year, do that. The first year has too much failure and uncertainty in it for my taste. Not for everyone, perhaps, but certainly for a lot of people.

One final thing occurred to me several days later — just today in fact, after a past client informed me that another agent had just bought his listing. You need to know enough basic Google skills to be able to locate the Queen Video when you need it.

Next!

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