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2. Developing Great Rapport with Your Real Estate Clients

Let's see if this sounds familiar to you:

You start out your year in January with the best of intentions of having a great year in your real estate business. And as the months progress you find yourself constantly busy, working on one thing after another to make this year the productive one you intended to have.

Then sometime during the summer you realize you'd better pickup the pace and find more transactions to close so you can still achieve your income goal for the year. Then, sometime in the fall, you realize you now need to really pull off an amazing miracle before the end of the year in order to make it all happen.

Has this ever happened to you? If so, welcome to the real estate brokerage business! You can take your place now in row 147 along with the rest of us.

But why does this happen? You were busy the entire year and you really had the best of intentions of having a great year. And when you looked around the office, you seemed to be just as busy as the agents who were making more money than you were, too.

The problem lies not in how busy you are, but in how exactly you're spending your time while you're busy.

The top agents in our business are the ones who continually focus on doing the activities that make them money. The majority of their time is spent talking directly with clients and prospects, negotiating, and meeting with people face-to-face. In addition, these agents are masters at enrolling people in working with them exclusively.

If we were to track the activities of both a top-producing agent and a mediocre agent, we'd find some very interesting distinctions. Both of the agents might be working the same number of hours throughout the year, but how they're utilizing their time will be very different. And if we took a video camera and videotaped the actions of both agents throughout the year, the differences in their activities would be obvious to us when looking at the two videos side-by-side.

The top-producing agent will continually be working on a greater abundance of high-quality leads throughout the year, and they'll be closing a higher percentage of their prospects in working with them exclusively, too.

The mediocre agent will be clinging to many more marginal leads with desperation, their people skills will be inferior, and their system of prospecting and developing great leads on an ongoing basis will tend to be be very poor, also. In addition, the mediocre agent will probably be spending far less time talking directly with clients and prospects than the top-producing agent will be. The mediocre agent will find other activities to fill their time with throughout the day that are far less confronting to them.

If you've been trying to improve your level of productivity for awhile now and you've fallen short of your expectations, you're probably caught in a pattern of behavior that's really holding you down. Unfortunately, you may or may not be able to see this right now. Since you've been trying to do it on your own and this may not be working for you, you'll probably just repeat this pattern with the exact same results if you continue trying to fix the problem by yourself.

Find a top-producing agent you can talk with, sit down with your manager, or discuss your situation with a real estate coach. Even Bill Gates has top consultants he works with because he recognizes he can't see the entire picture objectively on his own. If Bill Gates can't see his opportunities and his best course of action objectively on his own, then what hope do the rest of us have of doing the same?

When you find yourself falling short of your desired income goals in real estate sales and leasing, recognize that your own best effort and intentions are probably not going to get you there. Find someone who can help you create new learning and new behaviors for yourself, and you'll finally begin making the kind of money you've dreamed of, working the exact same hours that you're working right now.

Click here for downloadable E-books and live audio interviews with top-producing real estate agents. These interviews are with industry experts who show you exactly what they do to continually make hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year.

2. Developing Great Rapport with Your Real Estate Clients

Recently I read an article written by someone explaining the ideal way for people to present themselves to their clients and prospects. The article discussed how one should dress, how they should sit during a face-to-face appointment with someone, and how they should interact with the client or prospect during the meeting, too.

But what I really found intriguing was that the author believed the description she was giving on how to interact was something that should universally be utilized for all clients and prospects. And I can tell you from extensive experience and experimentation on my own that this is far from being the truth. There is no "one size fits all" approach that can be applied to one's presentations to all clients and prospects. What the author was actually doing, though, outside of her conscious awareness, was describing how someone should dress and act to achieve maximum success with her when she is their business prospect.

If you're making a presentation to someone who's dressed in a business suit, wearing a business suit yourself would probably be very appropriate for the meeting. You always have a great opportunity to initiate rapport with someone whenever you're dressed very similarly to how they're dressed also.

Contrast this now with meeting with an owner of thousands of acres of land who's dressed in jeans, boots, and wearing a cowboy hat. Can you see how wearing a business suit to this meeting and behaving prim and proper may put you completely out of rapport with that person? And if you add a Southern accent to the owner, and you're talking like a big city person from a completely different region, can you see how the owner might very quickly feel that you're completely out of rapport with him?

Being in rapport with your clients and prospects means having them feel that you're someone very similar to who they are themselves. This means ideally that you need to vary both your style of dress, and your style of presenting.

When I was leasing and selling industrial real estate in Los Angeles, I began my career by wearing a suit and tie all the time. But there came a time when I realized that some of the important business owners I was meeting with were dressed very casually at work, so I then learned to change my style of dress appropriately. Oftentimes entrepreneurial business owners take pride in being different than the corporate suit and tie people, so I wanted to make these owners feel that I was someone just like them.

On the other side of the coin, any agent or team of agents wanting to work with corporations whose officers wear suits and ties, had better wear suits and ties themselves to all of their meetings with these people. Any agents not doing this are almost guaranteed to be out of the running for doing any business with these companies on an exclusive basis. That's how important one's choice in clothing can be in our profession.

So make sure you dress appropriately when meeting with your clients and prospects, and make sure you vary your communication style appropriately when interacting with them, too. Vary the speed and tonality of your voice to match theirs, and match their body language also.

When you learn how to become a master at doing this, you'll then hold the key to having a far greater percentage of your clients and prospects working with you exclusively.

Click here if you'd like more information on my one-on-one coaching program to take your real estate productivity to the next level. One-on-one coaching is available for both real estate agents and company management.

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"After more than 20 years in the business, Jim has helped me to focus on doing the activities that make a huge difference in my income. I even generated 42 offers on one of my investment listings!"

Larry Cannizzaro
Beitler Commercial Realty Services/TCN Worldwide

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