12 Personality Traits Of Successful Real Estate Agents
The real estate industry, although lucrative and providing high income opportunities, is also filled with high levels of competition. If you are a real estate agent, or you wish to become a real estate agent, then you must be aware of the personality traits that differentiate highly successful real estate agents from the average ones.
We went to our team of real estate experts and asked them what in their opinion and experience are the must-have qualities of a real estate agent? We wanted their help to put together a list of traits that will assist a real estate agent to develop skill in each relevant area.
Must Have Real Estate Agent Qualities
The following are the personality traits that young professionals must develop from the start. Each skill on this list will help build a strong foundation for your real estate career.
1. Excellent Communication Skills
Strong communication skills is the corner stone of your career as a real estate agent. Your job requires you to constantly communicate with your clients — the home buyers and sellers, the lenders, the homes inspectors, fellow realtors, and other professionals from this industry. The better you are able to communicate, the easier it will be for you to achieve your targets.
You need to excel in communication in two major ways. We will discuss them separately as they are crucial and a good command over one does not necessarily mean a strong grip over the other. You will mainly contact your leads and clients either in-person or through email/ text messages.
A. Spoken Communication
When it comes to spoken communication skills, you need to make a strong impact both over a phone call and when you meet them in person. For phone calls, our experts have suggested keeping a script ready. In fact, prepare a few different ones according to the client categories.
For example, you could have a script for when you call a lead for the first time or for when you have signed them on as clients. This will help you communicate more effectively and consume less tine. You can have similar scripts or presentation ready when you meet the clients in-person.
B. Written Communication
Similarly, it will not be possible to talk to each client. Therefore, you need a good system of written communication. Whether it is creating emails for prospecting a lead, giving updates to current clients or emailing old clients to keep the channels of communication, you need to have strong skills, when t comes to crafting real estate emails.
2. Sense Of Honesty And Integrity
In an industry where people invite you into their homes and share their financial details with you, it is expected that you will be honest and trustworthy. However, over here, our experts are talking about honesty and a sense of integrity more specifically in the real estate industry. What are the aspects of that, you might wonder.
A successful real estate agent is the one who is able to win the trust of his clients with his integrity, build long term relationships with them, and is able to confidently request them for referrals. And for this you need to show that you care for your clients. Although this is your profession, you are not merely focusing on the money that you will earn from a particular deal, but genuinely want to guide them through the property market.
3. Listening To Your Clients
Now, although we have covered the communication aspect earlier, we need to look at this personality trait separately. A good real estate agent always listens carefully to what his clients convey. Remember, you are an expert, but they are not. So sometimes, while trying to tell you their property requirements, they may not be able to express themselves clearly or quickly.
You must try to get the buyers/sellers to open up. Always focus on listening actively. Give your clients adequate time to finish asking their questions and sharing their doubts and concerns. Do not be in a hurry to answer their queries. Let them finish talking before you respond.
4. Self Motivation
The key point you should keep in mind is that as a real estate agent, you are your own boss. Whether you are a new agent working for a broker or an independent realtor, you are no longer an employee. This means that no matter what the situation, you must find the strength and motivation to move ahead all on your own. From finding and converting new leads to closing a difficult property deal, at all junctions you must pull yourself up and keep up your spirits.
5. Knowledge Of Local Property Market
It is integral that to become a real estate agent, you must have a thorough knowledge of the properties in your local real estate market. Carry out an in-depth research of the various locations in your city where you wish to represent homeowners. Get to know all the essential aspects of each major neighborhood. Basically, if your new client asks you a question about a particular aspect, you should be able to provide the answer to that.
6. Passion And High Energy
To become a successful real estate agent you must develop your people skills, after all this is a people oriented career path. If you have a high energy level and can convey your passion for this vocation through your words and actions, you are bound to win more clients. Not all real estate agents have a natural people pleasing personality.
A Successful Real Estate Agent Develops These Qualities
Once you have developed the basic characteristics, then you need to know the about the following qualities. It is time to develop and hone this next set of skills.
7. Negotiation Skills
As a real estate agent, you are constantly going to be involved in various negotiations. Therefore, it is highly important that you learn the art of negotiation. You should be able to do it without offending the other person, and also ensure that the outcome of your negotiation is something that you and the other party can find acceptable.
You will need to negotiate with your clients and other real estate professionals. Some common aspects where you will need to negotiate strongly are as follows:
- Negotiate your commission.
- Negotiate the listing price.
- Negotiation for the selling price.
8. Strong Work Ethic
A real estate agent needs to have a great work ethic from the beginning. In order to achieve success in his career. It is hard to define work ethic as a single trait, honestly, it is an amalgamation of various other smaller traits which you make you better at your job.
For instance, a real estate agent should work hard equally for all his clients. People will notice this attention to detail. You need to manage your time efficiently. You will be juggling multiple responsibilities and clients simultaneously as a small business owner. So if you are proactive, do not procrastinate, give your best to each client, then you will not find it difficult to achieve success.
9. Understanding Technology
Knowledge of technology has become a must for today's real estate agents. It is no longer enough for them to know how to use a computer or browse the internet. Today, all the young millennial agents are expected to have a thorough understanding of the various tools and be able to use them to improve their real estate business. A few of the common ways in which technology impacts the real estate business is as follows:
A. OnlineReal Estate Leads Generation
Finding leads is integral to the real estate business. One way in which technological has made it easier is through the online leads generation platforms. One of the most popular online seller lead generation platform, Dorrmat provides a constant supply of quality seller leads. Dorrmat has managed to blend in their years of real estate experience with the latest online tools to bring together real estate agents and homeowners.
B. Real Estate Industry Tools
A real estate agent needs to understand and utilize a large variety of virtual tools to enhance his business. All agents use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to track and provide better service to their clients. They also utilize cloud services to share documents, the latest video tools to conduct online house tours, and services like DocuSign for obtaining digital signatures from their clients.
C. Personal Real Estate Website
Part of being tech-savvy helps you utilize your real estate website better. A real estate agent not only needs, but is also expected to, have a personal website. Having tech knowledge would help you in maximizing the benefits you get from your real estate agent website.
You could sign up for local SEO services so that your website shows up higher in the Google search rankings. It would help you boost your business as your clients will be able to easily reach you. You can even showcase your local market understanding by putting up posts about different local neighborhoods and properties.
10. Real Estate Market Understanding
A core component of your job as a real estate agent is to always keep learning about the process. each transaction ids unique and there bound to be multiple details that you need to keep track of. Having a god understanding of the national real estate conditions will enhance your ability to offer each client better guidance.
For instance, if you are planning to list a house, but you identify that in a short time, the market is going to experience a dip in the business, then you can advice your client properly. If waiting does not matter to them, then you can postpone the listing be a few months. In This way you are able to sell the house at the right price as you waited to list it at the right time.
11. Social Media Skills
The social media platforms have become an essential component of a real estate agent's marketing efforts. Yet, it is a trait to utilize these platforms correctly. It is not simply about creating a business account and putting up posts about your business at regular intervals.
It takes a lot of time and focus on details to build your reputation as a real estate agent online. You need to build a network of dedicated followers, put up a relevant and interesting posts about the real estate market in your area, build a buzz around any open house event that you are going to organize, and many more.
A real estate agent should try to ensure that each post of his reaches maximum number of people and gets shared by them to more of their friends and family.
12. Understand Your Competition And Widen Your Network
For a real estate agent, it is integral to both have an understanding of the competition and to build and widen their network. Now, there is a reason why we have included this as part of the personality traits you need to be a successful real estate agents.
A. Knowing The Competition
Most individuals find it difficult to view their business competition through a perspective of neutrality. As a real estate agent, you need to keep learning and monitoring your fellow real estate agents and realtors. In order to gain success you need to find how you can offer better service than them to the clients.
B. Sphere Of Influence
A lot of time also has to be invested in building and expanding your social and professional network. You need to talk to the fellow real estate professionals in your city and engage with them. Through this professional circle you will be able to get to now the latest news about the real estate industry, the changes, and also be in a position to get referrals.
Summary
Those who wish to become successful real estate agents should ideally focus on developing these qualities. Now some of these personality traits, you may already have, so focus on the areas that you may be lacking in. All these characteristics are the kind that can be developed through patience and consistent efforts.
You can successfully build your real estate career if you develop these traits. Your ability to offer better service to your clients and carry out more successful transactions will get a boost through these. Some skills are for enhancing your technical understanding while others are for making you a more emotional and better real estate agent. Each skill will contribute to your professional growth and help you gain success.
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