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2. The State of Real Estate Training in Our Industry

Recently I was listening to a series of cassette tapes published by direct response marketing legend Dan Kennedy. While there were a great many valuable lessons that I learned while listening to the tapes, one particular story caught my attention as being something that applies to a great number of real estate agents in our industry.

Dan talked about a chiropractor who's found a niche by moving from town to town setting up new chiropractic practices, then selling each practice once it's generating more than $1,000,000.00 a year in income. This chiropractor's goal along the way is to generate 72 new patients a month for each of his new chiropractic businesses.

When giving a talk to other chiropractors about how to successfully build their practices, an audience member asked this man, "What's the one thing I can do that will generate 72 new patients a month for my business?" And the man responded by saying, "I can't tell you the one thing to do that will generate 72 new patients a month for your practice. But I can tell you 72 things to do that will generate one new patient. And I can also tell you that I do all 72 of them."

This reminded me of what I sometimes experience when talking with real estate agents who are looking for one simple, magic activity they can do that will have them become incredibly successful in our industry. And when I come across agents like these, what they're looking to find speaks volumes about what their underlying attitude is...one of "I don't want to do what's normally necessary to become successful. I really just want to do what's easier." And I can tell you from experience that the agents who normally think this way are often the ones who struggle at being successful in our industry.

The chiropractor in the example above developed his system of doing many different approaches simultaneously in order to find new clients. And in every city he moves to, the results are basically the same. He develops one more chiropractic practice that he sells to another doctor for a handsome profit.

So in listening to this story, what are all the activities you could be doing right now to develop more business for you in your real estate career? And in helping you to better know what these are and assist you in staying on track in getting them done, I also have an exercise that I'd like you to do.

Get a stack of 100 or more 3" X 5" index cards and a pen, and go somewhere quiet where you won't be disturbed. This means you'll definitely want to turn your cell phone off, too. You may want to go to a library, a park, the beach, or just somewhere where it's quiet for you. And in doing this, I highly recommend that you do it someplace other than in your home or in your office.

What you want to do is brainstorm and write down every idea you can think of for developing new real estate business. Write one idea down on each index card, then move onto the next index card with a new idea. If you need to write down a phrase or a few sentences to clarify your ideas on one or more of your index cards please feel free to do so.

The truth is you've probably had many ideas about activities you can do to develop new business for yourself, but many of these ideas may just remain fleeting thoughts that come into your mind from time to time and then disappear. This process I've identified will enable you to write down each and every business development idea you can think of, and then have all them in one place to look at, review, and continually take action on in your real estate business.

There's probably no shortage of new ideas to utilize in developing your real estate business at a higher level. The shortage, if it exists, is probably in the follow-through of actually remembering these ideas and then implementing them.

This exercise, like the chiropractor story above, also came from Dan Kennedy. When I first heard him describe the exercise I thought to myself, "Why do I need to do all of this on index cards? I can just make a list of these activities on my computer instead." But there is a real difference in taking the time to write these ideas down on individual index cards, hold them in your hands, flip through them one by one, and be able to physically have a wealth of ideas on these cards available to you at all times. It's a very different feeling and a much more powerful process to do it this way. In addition, you may want to have a special box that you keep all these ideas in, as they truly represent your greatest marketing opportunities in the weeks, months, and years ahead, and they should be treated appropriately.

So if you're thinking you'd like to come up with and implement more strategies to take your real estate business to the next level, I highly recommend that you do this exercise. When you do so you'll probably feel refreshed and excited about all the new opportunities you've written down for yourself, and you'll probably also feel that achieving the next level of success in your real estate business is now much closer to you.

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2. The State of Real Estate Training in Our Industry

Time and time again real estate agents contact me telling me their companies aren't giving them any training. Which begs me to ask the following questions to you:

Who is responsible for training real estate agents? Is it the companies they work for, or is it the agents' responsibility themselves?

I continually hear stories from agents telling me they're basically given a cubicle and a phone, and are somehow expected to go out and become successful agents with very little direction from anyone. But while I can understand seasoned agents needing less direction than new agents will, I find it unconscionable for managers to expect people brand new in the business to become successful without any training or direction. There seems to be a mentality of "sink or swim" by some managers that's going on out there. It's kind of like, "Here's a desk and a phone, and if you were meant to be successful in this business you'll find a way to do it."

I think our new agents deserve better than this.

And when it comes to training seasoned agents, I can better understand a company's position on paying for only a small amount of training out of their own pocket. From my own experience, only about 10-25% of the veteran agents in most real estate offices are interested in more real estate training for themselves. They oftentimes feel that they already know everything they need to know, and there's nothing new that they're interested in learning. So this means that when a company spends money on training for veteran agents, very few of them will even want to attend the training. Sometimes the veterans only attend because management insists that they be there. And with this lack of interest in learning on the part of the veteran agents, very little if anything from the training itself will be assimilated into their real estate businesses.

But if you're reading these words right now, you probably don't fall into the group of agents that I just mentioned. The fact that you're even willing to take the time to read this article to see if you can learn something from it places you into a very different category.

But I now have to tell you about a recent experience I had that completely shocked me. As you can imagine, while you are continually looking to grow your own real estate business, I am also continually looking for new ways to grow my real estate coaching, consulting, and training business. So I'm always looking to come up with new and creative ideas to expand my business. With this in mind I came up with an idea that I thought would both give managers valuable free training to pass along to their agents, as well as assist me with building new relationships with agents I'm not currently working with.

So I recorded a one hour audio training and made it available on my Web site. Then I E-mailed approximately 22 owners and managers of real estate companies who I've known personally over the years, and offered to let their agents utilize this training for free. All these owners and managers had to do was simply forward my E-mail with the link to the training onto their own agents. 

In doing so I figured that this couldn't be any easier for an owner or manager to do. And again this training was being made available to their agents absolutely free. So I figured that almost any manager I sent the E-mail to would simply forward it onto their agents.

Well out of the 22 E-mails I sent, I received four responses thanking me for the free training for their agents, and assuring me that my E-mail would be forwarded onto all of their people. But I thought it strange that I had only received a total of four E-mails from everyone I had contacted, so I decided to do my own follow-up...

I began calling some of the agents I knew personally in these offices, and asked them if they had been forwarded my E-mail with the link to the free one-hour training. And to my surprise the answer was, "No" in the offices I contacted.

Now I can understand companies and managers who have decided to offer little or no paid training for their veteran agents. This doesn't mean that I agree with this, but in our current era of shrinking profit margins in the real estate brokerage industry, I can at least understand it. But I can't understand not making free training available to one's own agents, when all someone has to do is forward an E-mail to the agents to make it happen. Heck, I've had agents who earn over $1,000,000.00 a year tell me they've found this one training to be very valuable to them. And mind you, these were all owners and managers who I've known personally and have had good relationships with over the years, too.

Wow, what a wakeup call this was for me! In my days as a manager I definitely would have forwarded onto my agents an offer to help train them for free.

So in closing, companies and managers will definitely have their own policies when it comes to making training available for veteran agents, but I really think that companies need to do a better job of making good training available for new agents. The habits that an agent forms in their first 2-3 years in the business often determine whether they'll be on the road to great success, or on the road to great mediocrity in our industry. In some ways it's like learning how to play golf in the beginning on your own without any instruction, versus learning the correct swing from a pro before you ever even hit a golf ball. Once you've ingrained those bad habits in both golf and real estate sales, they become very difficult to change.

Our new agents definitely deserve much better than this.

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