The demand for Realtors is high and so are the chances of maximizing your success in a real estate career — if you can take the right steps.
Being a top producer isn’t as simple as getting your real estate license and landing a job with a top brokerage. As newbies and veterans alike will tell you, understanding how to be successful in real estate can be tricky.
Finding real estate success means not only developing the right know-how, but also the right skills, desire, follow-through and more.
Here’s what to know about your prospects for real estate success, plus our best tips on how to be a successful real estate agent in 2024 and beyond.
How to Be Successful in Real Estate in 2024 and Beyond
Anyone paying attention to real estate knows that 2024 has been a year for the record books. Low inventory and pent-up demand helped stoke a buying and selling frenzy in the summer.
Yet these market fundamentals are part of a longer term trend, meaning the opportunity for real estate success is there for those who can make the most of it.
Between now and 2030, the real estate industry is expected to grow by 4%.
According to the BLS, that means about 47,500 new real estate brokers and agents are expected to be needed each of the next 10 years to fill the shoes of those exiting out of the profession and meet increasing demand.
So whether you’re just starting your career as new real estate agent or you’re a veteran agent eyeing your future, there’s plenty of opportunity for success — if you take the right steps.
Speaking of the steps to becoming a successful real estate agent, here are 7 tips for new agents to get the ball rolling, plus 7 tips from industry veterans that will help you achieve long-term success.
7 Tips for New Real Estate Agents
When it comes to tips for new real estate agents, there’s no shortage of advice. There are many aspects to being an agent, which leaves lots of areas you could focus on.
For agents focused on success and the future, these seven steps are some of the most important you can take.
1. Do a Self-Assessment
One of the best new Realtor tips for early in your career is to do an honest self-assessment of who you are, where you’re starting out and where you’d like to go.
List your strengths and weaknesses as an agent, think about what advantages make you unique, and identify career goals you want to achieve and the milestones needed to get there.
2. Create a Business Plan
A self-assessment naturally leads to creating a business plan to help you reach your goals. Business plans can be updated each year, to help push you toward achieving greater success.
A good plan will include definite goals and marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing plans to achieve them. Your plan should also factor in ways to measure and fine-tune your results.
3. Put in the Hours
New agents generally start at square one, meaning there’s nowhere to go but up. But it can be a long climb through a very competitive business.
Put in the hours early on, doing whatever you’re asked to do and then some, so that you can learn and get to know as many different aspects of the business as possible.
4. Get Comfortable with Tech
Real estate technology is only going to become more important as the decade wears on. Tech tools for research, marketing, sales and closings are already standard and more will follow.
Embrace technological advances as they come and look for ways to leverage new technologies that benefit buyers and sellers to make you stand out from the competition.
5. Grow Your Sphere of Influence
One of the best real estate agent tips for beginners is that the best source of leads, referrals and future business are the people you already know on a personal level.
Start with your existing sphere of influence and add to it. Let people know you’re a licensed agent who’s ready to help and be sure to share your success stories as your career progresses.
6. Build a Strong Brand
Branding plays a major role in success as a modern real estate agent. A good reputation, an appealing image and a well-defined niche help set you apart in a competitive market.
Building a strong brand helps people know more about who you are and how you can help them. A great brand is memorable, causing people to seek you out for help with a sale.
7. Seek out a Mentor
No one is an island and everyone can benefit from having a great mentor. Mentorships are also a great opportunity for veteran agents, who may benefit from extra help and referrals.
A mentor is someone who can offer advice on how to do things, be a sounding board for new ideas and push you to do more to improve and reach levels of success you thought you couldn’t.
7 Veteran Real Estate Agent Tips
Let’s say you done all the basics. Now it’s time to take things to the next level and learn how to be a successful Realtor over the next few years. For you, these are the steps to focus on.
1. Become Knowledgeable
For Brian E. Adams of Hooquest, it’s your knowledge of your market, your profession and your industry that help make you competent real estate expert.
The trust of your buyers and sellers often hinges on how fluent you are in the specifics of market trends, contracts, loans, strategies, processes and more. So seize opportunities to attend events and trainings, read books and listen to real estate podcasts to continue to learn.
2. Follow the Three Fs
Million Dollar Listing star Ryan Serhant has a lot of great advice for Realtors, but one of the key fundamentals to success is his “Three Fs” strategy — follow up, follow-through, and follow back.
These are three simple activities you can turn into habits with any contact, prospect or client. Follow-up is about staying top of mind in your sphere of influence, follow-through means doing what you say you will, and follow back is about staying in touch after the sale. Simple and effective.
3. Narrow Down Your Niche
For Christopher Linsell at The Close, narrowing down your niche is about specializing your marketing message to a particular audience as a way to stand out as the local expert.
With geographic targeting, you can choose anything from zip codes to subdivisions, waterfronts, city boroughs or school districts. Then find out what makes that area special to the people who want to live there and speak to those deeper desires.
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4. Focus on Accountability
To real estate coach and consultant Kathleen Black, becoming a top 1% producer agent is not about the metrics, it’s about the mindset you take.
Accountability groups, coaches and even self-tracking software is meant to be a help, not a hindrance. The idea is that if you can begin to trust your ability to perform, capability expands and so does your capacity for success.
5. Learn to Delegate
As a top real estate brand strategist at Inman, Laura Monroe knows how difficult it can be to silence the control freak in yourself and delegate, but it’s important to know when to ask for help.
The most successful agents spend their income-producing time wisely. So it’s smart to find a teammate or hire an assistant who can help with listings, marketing, lead generation, client relations, transactions or other tasks as needed.
6. Automate All You Can
For Diane Hartley of the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing, an important realization was that time is money, especially in terms of the real estate business.
Automating simple and repetitive tasks, like email, social media and outreach, frees up more time so that you can worry about important tasks that require more skill, like creating meaningful connections.
7. Keep a To-Do List
After productivity expert Ivy Lee taught famed industrialist Charles Schwab her simple to-do list method, he sent her a check for $25,000 as thanks for boosting his company’s productivity.
Breaking your work down into daily tasks and using a to-do list or digital task tracker can really help you stay focused and get more done. Nearly every successful real estate agent keeps a to-do list and so should you.
More Steps to Becoming a Successful Real Estate Agent
The secret of how to be a successful real estate agent in 2024 lies in all the little steps you take along the way.
When you’re first starting out, follow the real estate agent tips for beginners to make sure you’ve got your basics covered. Then seek out real estate success tips from experts with decades in the field so that you can learn from their experience and build on your own past successes.
Another little step that can help boost your real estate success is getting organized with a tool like Folio. Most Realtor inboxes are a mess, which can slow you down and increase the chance of errors.
With Folio, managing your transaction communications is a breeze thanks to AI-powered algorithms. As an email add-on, Folio works with your existing Gmail or Outlook email to help you stay on top of deadlines, meetings, documents and updates.
Folio is great for new agents and pros alike, helping you save time and get more done with no extra work.
Click here to try Folio today.
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