For the 361st episode of Mail Right Show, Jonathan Denwood and Adam Brown talk about why most real estate agents fail and quit the real estate business. This episode also briefly discusses what to do and what not to do to help real estate agents make changes and redirect the path to success. Adam Brown is Mail Right’s co-founder and owns a marketing agency familiar with SEO, video, and website. Meanwhile, Jonathan Denwood is the founder and CEO of Mail Right, a platform that combines a variety of digital tools into one convenient, user-friendly package.
Invisible Agents
The number one thing to be successful in real estate is that you can’t be an invisible agent. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with part-time real estate agents. Many part-time real estate agents out there are outgoing and have good local connections, and by utilizing their families, friends, and local community connections, they can make a reasonably good living in real estate without too much effort in a normal market.
Having a local network, you can make between 60 and 100,000 dollars without exerting too much effort. Many real estate agents don’t get there because they are invisible agents with no community network, few friends, few connections, or attempts to build them.
No Strategy When It Comes To Lead Generation
Many agents in the industry don’t have strategy systems and digital strategy, which is essential to get better results much quicker, especially if you’re going to push it further, are new to the area, or are a young agent. When agents say their business is struggling, it might be because they don’t have a website or a CRM and are not doing any outreach like drip email campaigns and social media ads.
Some agents, when trying to break out from the casual way or casual mindset of generating leads— family or friends send them possible leads— plus, haven’t got the coaching or the discipline to utilize what I call the Buffini method, they get problems. Some agents not only rely on their social connections in their town or city area but instead are more methodological, but it’s also very linked with the Buffini way. Buffini method is trying to keep in contact and build a friendship in a social community of about 300 people by sending out a paper newsletter and using the CRM to know when people have their birthdays. The method is more disciplined, more methodical, and takes a long time. A better example is a mixture of social agents who have digital marketing awareness because they are going to get better results and build a real business. Yet, there’s no need to employ a load of other people.
Moreover, you will also need a CRM (customer-relationship management) to increase the number of people you’re contacting. And this is all about conversation; if you have fewer conversations per day per week, there is no chance that they will turn into presentations, and you’ve got to have at least two presentations per month. If you’re the first agent with a presentation, you’ve got between 60 and 80 chances, proven by statistics of turning that presentation into a commission check.
Fear of Mistakes and the Desire to Look Good
Professionalism matters in the real estate industry and is a two-edged soul. The good side about that is everybody’s interested in the property, looking at housing, and looking at what the neighbor got for their house, so there’s much interest. The bad side is the idea that you’ve got to be a top look to be successful.
Everybody wants to hide their mistake and not make mistakes. However, to be an effective real estate agent, you must accept that you will make mistakes, but you need to have mentorship for the experience. If you have agent mentorship and have been part of a good brokerage with resources, you can approach for advice to help you be a much more effective agent. Also, as the saying says, “Failure is not fatal,” so you know it’s okay to fail now, but that failures will make us learn things; we don’t usually learn that much from our successes.
A Wrong or No Role Model
The real estate industry is brutal; it is all about processes that work and then rinse and use again, rinse, use the game; it’s about the cycle. There’s too much emphasis on the here in the real estate industry. If you can make a fantastic career, it’d be fabulous for you and your family, but you’ve got to be a bit more realistic and understand what you’re in.
Monday-Friday, 9-5 mentality
Regarding real estate in general, if you want a Monday-Friday, 9-5 mentality, you need to find a different industry because people will not find out about you.
If you’re a stately shy agent and you’ve got to buy a sub-agent and have a small team or have a bigger team, and you can back off a bit, then everybody’s happy because you’ve got all the processes worked out, you’ve got the personal branding recognition, that makes it worthwhile. But for someone starting or not developing their brand and having no processes that allow them to do that, real estate is not the industry for that kind of attitude, and they likely will fail. How many people can really go to an open house on a Thursday or even a Friday? So you got to put in those hours with digital marketing. Moreover, it would be best to stop the idea that you can build a real estate business in 2022 and 2023 by ringing people up. Use social media to develop relationships, then, when you see them in person, make that connection, and when they already know you, take advantage of that.