Each year,
50% of all new real estate agents will quit the business. And nearly two-thirds of all new agents will not
renew their license at the end of their first licensing cycle.
It’s a hard
business, far harder than it looks on HGTV or at a Sunday open house. The average income for a Realtor in 2014 was
$45,800 but the median was $38,747, which means 50% of licensed agents earned less
than this, before expenses. Most
serious agents are working 60 or more hours a week.
It’s a
business that features huge momentum swings and surprising twists. There are big victories and demoralizing setbacks. There is competition everywhere you
look and never-ending pressure to perform.
It’s a stage
that few can master, which is why NAR reports that the top 10% of agents do
approximately 80% of the business. (Your
goal, obviously, is to do whatever it takes to firmly entrench yourself in that top 10%!)
A few years
ago, I made the easiest $12,000 of my life.
I was holding an expensive horse property open on a Saturday
afternoon. A young couple showed up, new
to the area but in love with the idea of owning some land with a view of the
Rocky Mountains.
But because
an elderly parent was coming with them, they had to have a main floor master, which
my property did not have. But… because I
had been tracking the inventory around my listing… I knew that there was a new
ranch home that had come on the market around the corner just one day
earlier. It had many of the same features…
almost a half-acre of land, mountain views, zoned for horses… and so I pulled the
blinds, shut down my open house for 20 minutes and took them to what turned out
be the home of their dreams.
Less than 24
hours later we were under contract, and 21 days later we closed. Like that, I had a $12,000 commission check.
That is a
home run, and it makes for a great story.
But for every home run, there is a strike out. Or three.
Or an occasional fastball off your helmet.
A few weeks
ago, I lost three listing clients in the same week. One was an older couple looking to downsize
out of a half-million dollar home they had owned for 30 years. The second was a long-time landlord renovating
a rental property. The third was a past
client looking to sell and move up. Total
value for the three homes was roughly $1.4 million. All three sellers were loyal and firmly
committed to me.
I had
invested significant time and money into each.
I had coordinated with vendors to repaint and replace carpet. I had brought my stager into one and spent
significant time and money coming up with a staging plan for the other. I had scheduled photographers and built my
schedule around our targeted launch dates.
And then,
with three phone calls two days apart, all three sellers froze up.
One was dealing with job uncertainty, one lost her nerve over finding a suitable
replacement home, and one decided to refinance, pull cash out and hold on to
the house.
The world
doesn’t care about your sob stories, and you can’t dwell on what goes
wrong. All you can do is pick yourself
up, immediately, and get on to another productive task.
But defeat
is hard to process and it can hang on you like a millstone, if you let it. It’s been said that if you can’t handle
failure, you won’t know success.
Paper cuts
are part of the business, as are sleepless nights and occasional wipeouts. So are triumphant paydays and the periodic
serendipity of being in the right place at the right time.
The only
things you can control are your preparation, your actions and your responses. Focus on doing the things you can control well,
and the impact of random flameouts is minimized.
But it’s
easier said than done. It takes courage
to step up to the plate and swing hard.
It takes courage to compete and risk failure. It takes courage to get out of the car and
walk up to the front door of a house you have never seen at 7 o’clock at night,
not knowing for sure who or what stands on the other side.
Master your
fear and you will master your future.
You can think about the home runs or think about the strikeouts. I can tell you what the home run hitters
think about, and it isn’t walking back to the dugout with the bat still perched
on their shoulder.
