Pros and cons of working as a realtor: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask

How to become a realtor: where to start?

Before choosing any direction of work, you need to clearly understand where the profession will lead you, what it represents, what pros and cons it promises. So, you are a real estate agent. Where to start your work?

First of all, let’s define what such a vacancy is and what manipulations you will have to do. In general terms, an agent can be called an intermediary who facilitates transactions for the sale, exchange, or rental of apartments, dachas, warehouses (that is, real estate). He selects suitable options, brings people together, prepares legal documents, provides advice, and checks the compliance of transactions with the law.

Professional competencies of a realtor

Many people dream of being employed without a boss, without certain requirements and instructions. But not everyone is ready to use freedom effectively. The profession of a realtor is associated with intermediary services regarding real estate transactions. He is an intermediary between the seller and the buyer. A high level of self-organization and independence is the starting point from which success in the profession begins. How to work as a realtor for beginners? Beginners will not be told secrets or instructed. You will have to come to all the subtleties with your own mind. There is a lot of monotony and routine in the work of a real estate seller. Sometimes you have to do it against your wishes. These include phone calls, creating a client base and sales objects, showings, and negotiations. The number of successful transactions depends on quality work. There is no unified system for training realtors. Agencies themselves determine the program and include in it: types of houses, conditions for processing and conducting transactions and other professional issues.

Professional education

Where can you get specialized knowledge about what being a realtor entails? Where to start education in this field? It should be noted that there are no higher educational institutions that train such personnel. In its pure form, this profession is not represented in our country in any institute or university. At the same time, of course, a higher education is something that any real realtor should have. Where to begin? There are several options:

• Property management. This area is more technical and relates to renting or buying and selling very indirectly.
• Law faculties. Deep knowledge in the field of civil law will help a real estate agent carry out any, even the most controversial and complex transaction within the framework of the law.

Beginning realtor: getting started

Specialization It is best for a beginning realtor to start by deciding on the direction of professional specialization. And you can only understand what you like by trying yourself in real work.

It is important to stay with a real estate agency for at least 2 weeks so that you realize what you like

Specialties:

• Residential and commercial real estate rental broker;
• Agent for the secondary real estate market;
• Specialist in new buildings;
• Country real estate agent;
• Commercial real estate specialist;
• Luxury real estate agent
• Etc.

Find out about interview questions at a real estate agency

How to work as a novice realtor?

First of all, no one will allow you to see the client alone, and any smart real estate agency will provide a mentor in the person of an experienced agent who will carefully check your upcoming actions.

You shouldn't have any fear that it won't work out or you'll make a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, especially beginners, but not everyone corrects themselves and moves on.

Only those who do nothing make no mistakes

In addition to working with a mentor, a novice realtor studies independently and searches for clients. We have already discussed where and how to look for a client.

Find out which professional qualities of a realtor are the most in demand!

Requirements for a beginning realtor:

• High stress resistance and positive thinking;
• A vigorous and strong body that can easily tolerate long working hours and exhausting mediation activities;
• Communication skills, philanthropy, networking skills;
• Accurate adherence to scheduled appointments, punctuality in all areas of activity.

A new real estate agent must understand that he is no longer an employee, but a person working for himself!

This important understanding will give you the key to success! When starting to work as a realtor, you must decide on :

• A goal that you will achieve after working for a year or two or three in this field. If there are no goals, there will be no results;
• To whom and how do you sell your services? Who is your client, how to identify him among the masses of those who you meet in the real estate business;
• Budget, namely expenses not only for utilities in your apartment, but also mobile communications, transport, advertising of your services, etc. Provide for the possibility of not receiving commissions in the current month and the procedure for action in this case;
• Marketing channels for promoting your services and real estate;
• As a team, namely to establish connections with appraisers, credit consultants of popular banks in your city, lawyers, notaries, etc. If you have a team of specialists and connections with them, transactions will be much easier and more reliable;
• Tools: a presentable car, laptop or tablet, unlimited telephone tariff, access to the database of buyers or sellers.

In conclusion, I will say that choosing an agency in which a newcomer will begin a real estate career is an important and fundamental step that influences the future in the chosen profession.

Need to know: how realtors work with new buildings

Good to know: popular realtor terms and their definitions

Agent portrait: personal qualities

What should a beginning realtor look like? Where to start working on yourself to master such a profession? It should be noted that real estate professionals are people of a special kind; it is almost impossible to artificially cultivate the necessary personal qualities in oneself. So, a realtor must have:

• Love of life and cheerfulness. Remember, you will have to work a lot, travel often, and irregular working hours may become routine.
• Physical strength and good health. Numerous shows and travel are impossible due to frequent illnesses.
• Resistant to stress. By the way, any work with people implies the need to have this quality.
• Sociability. If you don't like and don't know how to communicate with people, this kind of work is definitely not for you.

What does it take to become a realtor?

There are no schools or universities that teach real estate business. You can become a professional in this field by going through your own difficult path or absorbing the experience of others. Today there are a lot of commercial courses. Some of them provide basic knowledge (for example, how to obtain information from the Unified State Register), which will be useful in future activities, others are simply a screen for pumping out money, promising employment as a real estate agent after graduation.

Where to begin?

If you decide to become a realtor, be prepared to learn from your mistakes. Remember that a real estate agent is a profession like any other. She is no different from a doctor, a teacher, an accountant. As in any field, professionalism, result orientation, and consistency are valued here.

Advice : a beginner needs to learn that this position has nothing to do with hired labor. If you want to become a realtor for a side hustle or to make “quick money,” you are doomed to fail. Get ready for a long journey of developing and implementing your plans, do not forget about the difficulties and pitfalls.

What a novice realtor needs to consider:

1. Prepare to work in a highly competitive industry. Each experienced agent has his own client base, and is ready to compete for new clients.
2. To become a realtor, you need to be a businessman. You don’t need to take out a loan to develop a small business from scratch; you need to think like an entrepreneur. These directions have a lot in common. There is no boss here who will control all actions. Like a businessman, a realtor will have to work hard, look for clients on his own, and motivate them to conclude a deal.
3. Becoming a realtor means communicating with people who are not always pleasant, very demanding, distrustful, sometimes even rude and harsh. Your task is to achieve results by conquering your emotions. You need to work with all potential clients, even if they are capricious, nervous, annoying, etc.
4. Plan your every day, hour, minute. If you don't have a clear plan of action, it only means that you're not part of someone else's plans.

Study of the legislative framework

Experienced players in the real estate market argue that every professional should know the basic aspects of the current legislative framework. It includes:

• Housing Code;
• Family code;
• Tax code;
• Civil Code.

This step is important, but optional. You can study regulatory legislation with your first work experience or while performing your duties (in a long line at the housing office or BTI, when renting apartments by the day). You will have to look at the editions of the codes periodically. Therefore, it is better to have both printed sources and by-laws in electronic form at hand. The purchase and sale of real estate is regulated by a large number of laws. Beginners are often surprised at how far removed from real estate standards they have to delve into. Working with the board of trustees when selling an apartment on the secondary market, agreements with suspensive conditions, donations of land between close relatives, issues of redevelopment confirmation, IP seal and other nuances have many legislative subtleties that are impossible to learn in the first months of work.

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What qualities does a realtor need to have?

The work of a realtor is unpredictable and difficult. True professionals in their field constantly work on themselves, improving their skills. At the same time, to become a realtor, you must have the following personal qualities:

• Communication skills, politeness. The main task when negotiating is to inspire trust; this is the only way to conclude a deal.
• Insight, patience. Often clients make so many demands that some of them contradict each other. It is very difficult to choose the best option for such people.
• Stress resistance. In everyday work, conflict situations cannot be avoided. The client may not come to show the property, and the deal may fall through at the most crucial moment. When communicating with people, you cannot avoid negative reactions or rudeness.
• Organized. Many real estate agents have flexible work schedules. Therefore, it is important to plan your working day, spend time rationally and effectively.
• Creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, sense of humor. Acting skills and a good joke can win you over and speed up the process of making a deal.
• Mobility. The real estate market is changing, to become a professional realtor from scratch, you need to monitor various changes in time and quickly make management decisions.

To become a realtor, you need to have professional skills and abilities. A highly qualified real estate agent must be a lawyer. Many agencies have on their staff specialists with a legal education, but often clients want to get answers to their questions not in the office, but when viewing the property. Therefore, although it is not necessary to have a legal education, an experienced realtor must understand the regulations and navigate the legal intricacies.

To become an agent, you need to be an economist - understand the formation of supply and demand in the real estate market, and be able to predict price changes. When working in the primary market, with developers, it is necessary to comprehensively evaluate the proposal - location of the property, quality of construction, price, prospects.

A future realtor needs knowledge of psychology - the ability to sell is closely intertwined with knowledge of the human psyche. It is important to understand personality types, determine the primary needs of potential clients, their priorities, and be able to negotiate and persuade.

Becoming a realtor means being a marketer. Such a specialist must segment the real estate market, select profitable niches and directions, and order competent advertising for each selected audience.

Advice : if you want to become a realtor, but do not have the above professional skills, feel free to choose this niche. Skills and knowledge will come over time through work. The main thing is that as you gain experience, you spare no time and money for further improvement.

What should you learn?

However, personal qualities alone are not enough. In what directions should a realtor develop? Where to start your professional journey? The following tips will help you succeed:

• listen to the opinions of professionals, adopt their techniques;
• regularly study data from newspapers, magazines and books;
• Use your free time rationally, engage in self-education;
• be punctual and do not forget about your appointments;
• try to make as many useful contacts as possible; profitable connections will never be superfluous;
• take care of your reputation; no client or agent will work with realtors who cheat;
• show restraint, sometimes excessive haste can lead to serious mistakes and failure of the deal;
• tune in to the positive, it’s not for nothing that they say that thoughts can be material.

About other people's mistakes

Where to start for a new real estate agent? In addition to general recommendations on what you should know and do, you should also consider the most common mistakes. This information will help prevent them in the future.

• Do not impose your services on everyone who wants to listen to you; it is likely that there is no need for them, and the person just wants to communicate; unnecessary conversations will only take up your working time.
• Don’t take failure too harshly; remember that refusal or failure of a deal happens quite often, and in most cases it is not the specialist’s fault. Take this as a valuable experience and don’t despair, the negative attitude may carry over to future meetings.
• Lack of sales skills and lack of understanding of the need for these skills. Professional courses or communication with experts in their field will help any beginner fill this gap.
• Lack of desire for development. Remember that to achieve high results, each person must develop and try to overcome his own ceiling, do not consider yourself smarter than everyone else.
• Obtaining exclusively theoretical knowledge. Please note that working in real estate involves, first of all, live communication with people, which is why to achieve what you want, it is not enough to have an extensive theoretical base. It is extremely important to be able to use existing knowledge in practice and adapt it to a specific situation.
• Lack of understanding of the importance of developments. A work-in-progress, or script, is an approximate script for conducting a conversation, roughly speaking, a template. Having thought through several standard templates, it will be easier for you to navigate, making only minor changes as you communicate with the client.

If you can anticipate all these mistakes, you will turn out to be an excellent specialist.

Let's start working on the phone

Most often, a realtor's work begins with a telephone conversation . It's important to know how to have conversations.

All subsequent work of a realtor is associated with telephone calls - the realtor receives calls constantly.

Respect the client . Even if you are tired of some client or incident, do not be rude to clients.

Remember that you yourself chose this job - and you shouldn’t spoil the mood for yourself or others. Even if you can’t answer the call, write an SMS saying that you can’t talk.

The realtor does half the work via telephone. Treat negotiations responsibly and follow certain rules during pronunciation.

Rules for a telephone conversation with a client:

1. every time .
2. If a person calls you, ask who it is and the purpose of his call.
3. Ask if the person is comfortable speaking.
4. The voice should be confident and firm . It is not allowed to be rude to a person; all his requests are assessed carefully.
5. Place a pen and notepad in front of you to write down the client's wishes.
6. Create a quiet atmosphere.
7. Type of communication - business . This is your client, and therefore you should not joke with him or talk about extraneous topics.

In order for the conversation to lead to a good result, it is better to first write it down on a piece of paper and rehearse it several times.

Beginning realtors often make the following mistakes:

• is unclear .
• They choose the wrong time to call.
• They do not prepare for the conversation and therefore do not impress the potential client.

About financial understanding

When answering the question of where to start for a novice realtor, it is necessary to note the fact that a large number of young people consider such a profession to be quite easy and bring in easy money. Please note that this is absolutely not true. Real estate mediation is hard and painstaking work, requiring endurance and complete dedication. Your earnings will be piecework, it will depend entirely on the deals concluded, that is, on the efforts you put in. If you are unable to work and lack knowledge, such work is the easiest path to bankruptcy.

First direction

Where to start for a new realtor? Probably even a non-specialist knows that there are two basic areas in real estate: buying and selling and renting. The last direction is simpler and easier to master. Having got a job on real estate transactions, beginners will be able to gain basic experience in a short time:

• A large number of transactions will allow you to communicate with different clients (practice communication over the phone and in person, studying typical situations, gaining communication skills).
• Basics of drafting legal documents and contracts (from the simplest to the more complex).
• An opportunity to learn the nuances and pitfalls of working in real estate.

Why do 80% of newbies leave the business in their first year as a realtor?

The usual Pareto principle.
The statistics are quite sad (albeit approximate), but it is true. Working as a realtor is not for everyone. Many people leave this business in the first year. This happens for various reasons, but the main one is the lack of quality training and experience in sales, as well as business instability:

— No training: Most real estate agencies do not train realtors at all. I'm not even talking about quality. This is due to the fears of management and colleagues of “raising a competitor.”

Accordingly, the work of most new realtors turns into a constant “poke method” and intuitive decisions. This leads to the next reason why most realtors leave in the first year of work - lack of sales experience.

— No sales experience: most novice realtors think that working as a realtor consists of only advantages and is very simple: submit an ad, make a showing, receive a commission. But this simplicity is very superficial...

There is a lot of “behind the scenes” work, the “underwater part of the iceberg”, so to speak. This is what you need to study and implement, make mistakes and correct mistakes, often do a lot of routine work, introduce new products and constantly be on the move, study sales from books and trainings, follow the laws and “waves” in the real estate market.

— Business instability: in the real estate market, instability is a constant thing. The political situation, new laws, exchange rates, seasonality - these are several factors that affect real estate prices. Accordingly, the work of a realtor is sometimes empty, sometimes thick.

By the way, I described these and some other factors influencing real estate prices in the book “How to Find and Buy Real Estate Cheaply”

Therefore, some newcomers, having found themselves in a wave of sales, think that it will always be like this and do not save for a future mini-crisis in sales. And mini-crises in a country with a declining economy are commonplace and they can drag on for 1-4 months a year.

The causes of mini-crises can be very different, but they are mainly associated with the “crowd mentality”. I have noticed more than once that many buyers think the same way and begin to act almost all over the city at once (call, look at real estate, or “lie on the bottom”).

Beginner realtors who started their work during a mini-crisis do not understand why they are not getting deals.

By the time the “wave of sales” rises, their motivation decreases to zero, and they do not have enough experience to conduct full-fledged transactions.

Immediate start of activity

What does the direct work of a realtor look like? Where to start developing a base? There are many options for finding clients. In a large company, ready-made contacts are issued to an old-timer or a newcomer. But what about those who want to work only for themselves from the very beginning? If you don’t have professional connections, you can cold call purchasing databases or get information from advertisements on the Internet, newspapers, magazines, or even at bus stops.

In addition, it would be a good idea to prepare your own business cards with contact information and distribute them among your friends.

Now you know where to start as a new realtor, be confident and smart. Remember that to achieve the best results you need to combine theoretical knowledge with regular practice, be able to plan your time, see the end goal and not be discouraged in case of failure.