Recession and The Real Estate Business
Market changes are making new demands on real estate agents. Six months ago, anyone could have sold any house for any price, and buyers were lining up to make offers. Now, though, with the recession, market trends changing, and clients made uneasy by inflation, rising interest rates, and fears of a recession, real estate agents have a few more challenges.
Why Is Coaching and Training Important for A Real Estate Agent?
Coaching and consistent training can help real estate agents meet the challenges that come with market trend changes. Through training, new real estate agents can learn tips and tricks that will help them establish a solid business early on, and experienced agents can strengthen existing skills and learn new ones while opening themselves to fresh perspectives that may help them expand their business.
Training can help real estate agents create and cultivate farm areas or spheres of influence that will consistently yield leads. It can help them stay not just current but ahead of the curve with technology and marketing trends. It can keep them up to date on legislative changes that affect their profession. And, of course, solid, consistent training will allow them to anticipate and navigate trends and changes in the market.
For new real estate agents in particular, training is essential. While an agent may have excelled in the courses to get their license, they may not necessarily have sales or marketing experience or the communication skills so essential to working with clients. Training can help provide those skills. It can help them learn negotiating techniques, how to handle difficult clients, and how to navigate complicated deals.
Even for experienced real estate agents, brokers and team leaders, training is an indispensable tool for progressing from where you are to where you want to be. How do you grow your client list? How do you attract luxury listings and attract top producing agents? What tools and habits do you need to shift from a focus on buyers to one on sellers, or vice versa? How do you market new builds to clients when supply issues can impact how soon the new build can be finished?
What the heck is TikTok and do you really need to be on it?
Knowledge is power. It is also a vehicle to success. Real estate is a competitive business; think about how many agents and brokerages there are in your area. When it comes to choosing an agent, clients thinking of buying or selling a home have a wealth of choices before them. Continuous training can help an agent stand out from the pack. The more knowledge you have of the market, of available technology, of available lenders and their programs, of the community, the more marketable you are. No one knows everything, but those willing to know more are actively positioning themselves for success.
Knowledge builds credibility, and credibility builds trust. In a business built on relationships and reputation, a trusted agent is a successful agent.
In conjunction with consistent training, a good coach can help agents grow their success. We all know, or think we know, what our strengths and weaknesses are, but an outside perspective can unlock fresh insights that can help an agent break through self-imposed limitations to find new success.
Everyone falls into a rut; everyone is prey to bad habits. “We’ve always done it this way” is a phrase, or an excuse, familiar to us all. But a good coach can help an agent discover that “we’ve always done it this way” because it was familiar, comfortable, safe. And limiting. A good coach can help that agent discover new and better ways of doing things, ways that will lift the agent out of the rut and to new levels of success.
A good coach can also provide accountability, motivation, and focus. It’s not enough to know what you should do; everyone needs someone to make sure they do it. We get complacent, we hit plateaus tell ourselves we’ve gone as high as we can go. Coaching can break us out of that, can help us define or redefine career goals and set new strategies that will lift us over the plateau and into new heights. When we’ve told ourselves everything we want to hear, a good coach will tell us what we need to hear.
Real estate agents may be independent operators, but that doesn’t mean they’re in business alone. Training provides them the opportunity to learn with and from others. The best training is reciprocal, allowing agents with different strengths and talents to trade expertise. An agent who is great with technology but weaker in communication skills can learn from an agent who excels in a social setting but perhaps needs a bit of tutoring on the latest apps.
In the same vein, coaching allows agents to turn outward and look beyond themselves for inspiration and motivation. Another person is another resource, someone whose perceptions come from a different place than the agent’s own. A diversity in opinions, perspectives, and experiences can lead to unexpected insights that may yield equally unexpected successes.
In the end, good coaching and consistent training can be an agent’s most important tools. No one person knows everything; no one person has all the answers. But what we don’t know, someone else does. And someone else needs what we know. Training gives agents the tools to expand not just their knowledge but their horizons. And the avenues for training are limitless. Team training, books, videos, podcasts, seminars, and webinars – all are wonderful resources that can help an agent grow their knowledge, their business, and their success.
Good coaching can help agents learn to recognize and break through the bad habits and self-imposed limitations that keep them from advancing to the next level. New agents can look to more experienced ones for guidance and mentorship, and experienced agents can look for brand new insights from those they are guiding. In the end, everyone benefits.
Resources are out there. An agent has only to look beyond themselves to find them. And they have only to want to succeed enough to try them. Not every one will work, but each one can be a learning experience to one open to personal and professional growth.
The only failure lies in not trying.
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