by Sean Hess (Sean@StAugTeam.com), Broker and Manager for St. Augustine Team Realty (www.StAugustineTeamRealty.com). Join us on Facebook.
Should I go to real estate school now?
Go to real estate school? Do you feel lucky?
Gosh, tough question. One best answered by Dirty Harry I think, “Do you feel lucky…well do you, punk?”
In my market, as in a lot of markets I suppose, there are too many Realtors for the amount of listings and sales available…at least insofar as that means everyone makes a decent living. This means the competition for new business is fierce everyday, all week long. New agents push out the agents that lose the will to fight for the business, or never had the will to begin with.
“Fighting” in a Realtor’s world means prospecting. That means most of our day revolves around the sole purpose of finding new business from customers both new and old.
In the meantime there’s the actual work of real estate that requires you be proficient at contracts, deadlines and all the sorts of diplomatic work that it takes to put a deal together and hold it together until the end. And in the end, if you are successful, you go right back to the ranks of the “unemployed,” looking for a new deal to build.
If real estate were easy you could just go online and buy a house. And you could, too…if it weren’t for the people that buy and sell the houses complicating things.
A home sale is often the biggest money transaction in a person’s life and some buyers and sellers (and agents occasionally) think this is their one shot in life to act like Donald Trump. They are illogical, they do things out of spite, they do not honor promises, they yell and scream…you name it. But thank God they do, because this is why we need Realtors. To calm inflated egos, to get the customers to do what’s best for the sale, to take care of the issues when promises are not kept…this is why we have jobs.
By now one last thing should be apparent…you need to have an incredible amount of energy to do this.
So if you feel like you’ve got the people skills to work a deal through, and the energy level to work through egos day after day, and the tenacity to prospect morning noon and night I invite you to join the business.
