What a fantastic year of learning I’ve had in 2023.
Becoming a licensed real estate agent was hard, becoming an actual real estate agent has proven a bit more elusive so far.
Here some things I didn’t know, and perhaps many outside the industry may not know: I did not know that a real estate agent is an independent contractor that works under the umbrella of the brokerage. Not an employee that gets handed deals to fill out the paperwork on.
When I learned this, I thought it meant that people would call the brokerage looking for a realtor, and the brokerage would dole out the clients to the various realtors. Similarly to how the host would seat our sections when I was waiting tables, keeping everything nice and fairly balanced, making sure no one is slammed while another is standing around.
This is of course complete malarky, and as a real estate agent its up to me to find buyers and sellers and to court them and win their confidence through advertising, cold calls, email and snail mail campaigns, showing other agents’ open houses and trying to get visitors to let me represent them in a deal. And blogs. 😉
I have done as much of that all as I can over this last year, while working my corporate IT job to pay the bills. Now I find myself, a year in, looking at the much lighter version of my bank account, for all the investments I’ve made into real estate, wondering when I’m going to get that first deal. The ‘as much as I can’ was obviously not enough to get me where I wanted to be.
My response to this? Quit my day job, of course. I need to get all the time I can doing the training courses and the networking and the phone calls and appointments and everything else I can do during the week that my day job has prevented me from doing.
