SKILL

A Top-Producing Agent's Guide to Earning Unlimited Income

David M Greene

• Publisher: BiggerPockets
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781947200081
• eBook ISBN: 9781947200531
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

Take your real estate agent business to the next level with more leads, more clients, and the skills you need to turn it all into wealth.

Nobody gets their real estate license to be mediocre—so what do you do if your business has stagnated? If 80 percent of sales go through the top 20 percent of real estate agents, making it into that top tier is what matters most in the competitive landscape of real estate sales. Once you beat your competition, you can run a thriving, fun, and lucrative business with more leads and clients than you know what to do with.

The first book in the series, SOLD, showed you how to become a real estate agent. In SKILL, you'll step up your game with the same framework that top-producing Realtor David Greene shares with his very own award-winning team. Real estate sales were designed to be done in high-volume with high-fun—and this book will give you the process, knowledge, and scripts you need to dominate your local market and earn a fantastic living.

In this book, you'll learn how to:

• Develop the winning traits that make clients want to work with you
• Build momentum that makes it easy to close a high volume of deals
• Master the sales funnel approach to bring clarity into the chaos of multiple clients
• Execute systematic listing and buyer's presentations to ensure more leads become clients
• Work with real estate investors to gain repeat clients and increase your reputation in your local real estate market
• Hire support to help you increase your productivity and decrease the emotional toll the business takes on you
• Strategically raise your standards to reverse engineer the success of other top-producers
• Master negotiation tactics, social media management, lead generation strategies, and everything else you need to build a thriving business!

CHAPTER ONETOP-PRODUCER TRAITS

“If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to become a person of quality yourself.”

—JIM ROHN

What Is a Top Producer?

Top producers are the agents who stand apart from their peers in their market. They close more deals, make more money, and help more people than the other agents in their office. They have a reputation for selling a large number of homes. Top producers not only generate leads, but they also have more leads come to them. When a top producer speaks about real estate, they speak with the authority and confidence that comes with knowing their craft. They dominate their market.

Their reputation doesn’t stop with the local community. Other agents know about them too. When you start working at a brokerage, it doesn’t take long before you know who is selling homes, what their specialty is, and how they are leveraging their talents, skills, and resources to outperform the competition. People talk about top producers. They want to be like them, they want their approval, and they want their results.

There’s a common maxim in real estate sales: “Eighty percent of the business goes through the top 20 percent of the agents.” If you’re going to work in this business, you want to be in the top 20 percent. If you’re not, you’ll find yourself fighting for 20 percent of the business with the other 80 percent of Realtors.

This book is for those who don’t want to just call themselves a Realtor—they want to become a top producer and experience everything this profession has to offer. Odds are, you didn’t invest all your time and energy into becoming a licensed agent just to be mediocre. Getting to the top 20 percent is the key to the Realtor good life.

Reverse Engineering Success

A common mistake newbies make is to ask, “What do I do first?” and then work forward from there. These newbies learn from their mistakes, just like everybody else. But their path is dictated by trial and error. They take the wrong step, they learn their lesson, and they take the right step next. Rinse and repeat. Progress can be made like this, but it’s not ideal. Rather than figure out the path to success by potluck, it makes much more sense to start with the end in mind and work backward. By doing this, you reduce the number of missteps to your desired result. The more direct your path, the faster you’ll reach your destination (that is, top-producer status).

Being a top producer in real estate sales is more about who you are than what you do. When you follow top producers, you start to notice many of them have similar character traits. For instance, they have more disciplined work schedules. They use leverage to get ahead. And they insist on high standards in anything they do. If you want to be a top producer, start by valuing what they value. Doing so early in your career will help you develop the habits you’ll need to support a big business later on.

Another wrong question new agents often ask is, “How do I get leads?” Although this appears to be a practical place to start, it assumes you’ll know what to do with a lead when you get one. The truth is, if the agent knew how to close a lead with a high level of skill, the confidence they would exude would bring leads to them. Instead, I recommend you ask a different question: “Who would I need to be in order to draw a large number of leads?”

Think about how the top producers in an office act, talk, and carry themselves. How do they dress? In which direction do they steer conversations? How do they make you feel after speaking with them? These are the traits you want to emulate. When you come across this same way, clients will find their way to you. If you still want to find leads, you can do so knowing you can close the deal and your efforts weren’t in vain.

Understanding who you need to become to get the results you want starts early in the process. This book offers helpful information, but nothing I write could possibly bring the same understanding as watching a top producer in action. The body language, facial expressions, and confidence with which they carry themselves is really what you’re after. No text by itself can explain how that works.

The traits used by top producers are not easy to come by. If they were, there would be no top producers—everyone would be getting the same amount of business! Top producers are where they are because they are better than their competitors. Building up these characteristics in yourself won’t come easily, and it often won’t feel natural. If you find that to be the case, that’s okay. The more difficult the transition is for you, the more valuable it will be when you get it down. It is no different than anything else you have learned in life. As a child, it was challenging to learn how to walk and speak. As an adult, it is hard learning a new exercise like yoga or developing a new skill like cooking. Everything is difficult in the beginning and becomes easier with repetition.

Top-Producer Qualities

In my time working in the real estate sales space, I’ve found top producers to have certain traits in common. Here’s how you can channel and improve on those qualities.

Be More Direct

Those you communicate with perceive directness as a hallmark of confidence and skill. When someone is unsure of the direction they should take or how to communicate an issue, it’s usually because of inexperience. Clients understand that the less experience their agent has, the less likely they will do their job well. Avoid looking insecure and inexperienced. Instead, act confident in front of clients. Direct communication is an easy way to accomplish this.

Beating around the bush, failing to answer a question clearly, or fumbling over words all portray a lack of experience that induces hesitation in your clients. Speaking directly to a situation and letting your clients know what comes next before they even ask works wonders in earning their confidence. To establish yourself as a confident leader who’s in control, end every conversation by sharing next steps you’ll be taking.

Directness in communication also saves you time, which is why top producers develop this trait. It’s a requirement when you’re operating at a high level with a lot of clients. You need to get things done faster! When you speak clearly and get your point across quickly, your clients tend to mirror this trait and will give you the information you need faster as well. Directness is more efficient and more effective, and portrays more confidence, and those three are important in this job. Start practicing being more direct in both your decision-making and communication style.

Ways to Be More Direct

• Set the boundaries of the conversation from the get-go.
  • Example: “Hey, I have five minutes, and I need to ask you something. Here are our options…What information do you need in order to know which direction you’d like to take?”
• When providing options, paint a picture of how those scenarios will likely turn out. This makes it easier—and therefore faster—for your clients to make their decisions.
  • Example: “If we ask for a credit of $5,000, the sellers will likely put their house back on the market and find another buyer. That means we’ll be out looking at properties again this weekend, and there isn’t anything else on the market with a pool. Or we could ask for a credit of $1,500. I think I can get them to give it to us. That should be enough to fix the major problems but not the cosmetic ones.”
• Help clients see the value in eliminating options. Many clients make the mistake of trying not to miss out on a great opportunity. This fear of missing out creates a scenario in which the client is overloaded with options and can’t decide at all.
  • Example: “There are twenty-five houses in town that fit your budget. Ten are in the wrong school district, five need significant work you don’t have the money for, and four of them have lots that are too small for you. That leaves us with six houses I’d like to show you. Let’s focus on making sure we don’t miss out on the best one of these six!”

Improve Your Skills

It should come as no surprise that top-producing agents are highly skillful in their craft. Top agents are known for something special that makes them better than their competitors, and they often brand themselves this way. Sometimes they sell homes faster, or they earn more money for their clients, or their customer service is superior. Top producers simply do certain things better than agents who perform at a mediocre level.

Luckily for you, there are many skills an agent needs, so there are many ways you can be better than your competition!

Skillful communication is a key skill to develop. Your ability to convey information in a way that keeps your client excited and feeling positive will affect how many houses you sell. Strong communicators highlight the best aspects of the deal for the client, provide possible solutions to problems, are easy to understand, and sound confident in the information they are providing.

Market knowledge is also a skill that requires a high level of mastery. Top agents know how fast houses sell, how much they sell for, and which parts of town are most desirable. This carries over into design as well. You want to help your sellers prepare their homes to be appealing to as many buyers as possible. You also want to know how to help buyers estimate what it will cost to fix up a property to the way they say they would like it. Knowledge of home values, rehab prices, and design styles will set you apart from less experienced agents.

Another beneficial skill is negotiation. Negotiation is an important part of an agent’s job, especially with those who are primarily concerned with the financial components of a transaction. Sharing how you handle offers on a client’s listing or what you do to eliminate leverage in transactions (when you represent the seller) will showcase your skills as a listing agent. This will work when representing buyers too. Share how you get sellers to cover closing costs or how you get your offers accepted over others in a hot market. Buyer clients will take note of this and be impressed by your negotiation skills when you bring this up in conversation.

Negotiation is not limited primarily to the other agents. More often than not, you will find yourself negotiating with your own clients. Your ability to convince your sellers to give a little in closing costs can make the difference between a house selling in the first two weeks on the market versus six months down the road. Your ability to negotiate your buyers into shortening their inspection period by a week can be the difference in them getting their ideal house or something less than their ideal. Strong negotiators highlight the benefits of the solution they are presenting while helping the other person feel they are getting what they want. If you want to sell a lot of homes, learn how to negotiate with your clients!

Ways to Improve Your Skills

• Improve your communication skills by learning how to get directly to your point.
• Learn how to negotiate so everyone feels like they’re getting something of value.
• Start every day with research. See which homes hit the market that morning, look at the listing prices, and note when a listing is posted noticeably lower or higher than a comparable property. Casually mention this information when speaking with clients during lead generation time.
  • Example: “Yes, I get a fair commission of 6 percent, but you get the best Realtor available in this entire market.”

Build Your Charisma

Top-producing agents inspire others. This results in loyal clients returning to you time and time again for their real estate needs as well as referring others your way for the same reason. When you have an army of fans supporting your business, it’s hard to fail. You may have this trait naturally. If not, you’ll need to cultivate it.

Keep in mind not everyone’s charisma is the same. Some people have a gregarious charm that inspires others through fun and goodwill. Others draw people to them through their genuineness or authenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Top-Producer Traits
• Chapter Two. Funnel Progression (Tool One): Finding People
• Chapter Three. Funnel Progression (Tool Two): Converting Clients
• Chapter Four. Funnel Progression (Tool Three): The Psychology Needed To Get In Contract
• Chapter Five. Funnel Progression (Tool Four): The Knowledge To Close The Deal
• Chapter Six. Common Problems With Each Tool
• Chapter Seven. Strategic Planning
• Chapter Eight. Social Media
• Chapter Nine. Finding Help
• Chapter Ten. Listing Like A Pro
• Chapter Eleven. The Buy/Sell Combo
• Chapter Twelve. Negotiation Strategies
• Chapter Thirteen. Understanding Financing
• Chapter Fourteen. Working With Investors
• Chapter Fifteen. Momentum
• Conclusion