With a positive employment outlook and the ever-present need for housing, a dedicated person can turn a real estate career into a fulfilling lifelong passion. Unfortunately, you can’t just jump straight into this industry and expect quick returns. It takes a lot of preparation, financial security, and hard work to start along this career path. So, whether you find yourself considering this profession for the first time, or you already earned your license and now seek employment, this article explains what you should do before starting a real estate career.
Related: Why Should I Become a Touring Agent?
How to Prepare for Your New Real Estate Career
1. Find a Mentor
Establishing yourself in this industry is hard, especially if you try to go it alone. With so much to learn, you’ll save yourself years of trial and error if someone with experience shows you the ropes. You’ll need to master fair housing laws, etiquette, local knowledge, bookkeeping, marketing, and more. Seeking out well-rounded, esteemed mentors and building a relationship with them will help you gain knowledge and connections. Plus, they can provide constructive feedback.
2. Save Up at Least a Few Month’s-Worth of Living Expenses
As great as it would be to jump right into this profession, in order to give yourself a realistic shot at success, you need to prepare financially. It takes an average of 1-2 years to start making money in traditional real estate careers. Unless you know of a way around that reality, you should expect at least a year to pass before you see a profit. Saving up a few month’s-worth of living expenses will reduce the financial strain and give you the best chance of success.
3. Start Networking
You’ll need a significant network of contacts to start a real estate career. In order to get referrals, advice, and connections, plan to network as soon as possible. Join clubs, join a brokerage, go to meetups, join social media groups, and create marketing accounts on multiple online platforms. The more people you contact, the higher your chances of connecting with the right person at the right time.
4. Pick a CRM & Get Organized
As you network, you will acquire hundreds of names, business cards, and contacts to keep track of (yes, hundreds). We recommend using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software to keep track of leads, set reminders, store notes, and track deals. Do your research and find a CRM with real estate ready workflows.
5. Plan Your Lead Source
Even for networking pros, a steady stream of leads is critical to your stability and growth. You can generate leads in multiple ways, such as buying warm leads, cold-calling or messaging people, creating ads yourself, or hiring an advertising agency.
Once you know where you will get leads, do some quick math to see how many you’ll need in order to produce one sale. You can do that by figuring out your conversion rates. Here’s an example (your numbers might vary):
| 100 leads→ | 25 responses→ | 10 intro calls→ | 3 clients→ | 1 sale |
In this example, reaching out to one hundred leads results in an average of twenty-five responses. Out of those twenty-five people who responded to you, about ten will actually show up for an introductory phone call. Then, three of those ten people you talked to on the phone will decide to work with you. About one third of your clients will actually result in a sale due to unexpected life events, changes of plans, and any number of unforeseen circumstances.
Based on these numbers, you’ll need one hundred leads in order to get one sale. If the average real estate lead costs $55, you would need to spend at least $5,500 on leads before you could expect to get one sale.
Want to Complete These Five Steps Fast?
AptAmigo created the only business model that gives employees instant, turnkey access to the resources needed to complete all five of these steps. After studying the flaws of the real estate industry and identifying what causes people to fail, we built the best place to start and build a career in real estate. AptAmigo agents get instant access to the following:
- Experienced mentors
- Immediate payout (first check within 1-2 months or less)
- Pre-established network of colleagues and clients
- Custom CRM
- Warm leads as you build your client base
Our model consists of separate teams that work together like an assembly line; each team works on one part of the apartment-finding process so that no single person does all of the work. Our teams rely on each other to accomplish our central goal: make apartment finding easy, stress-free, and fun. When you work with us, we provide you with all of the above resources right off the bat. You don’t need to wait years to become successful – you can work at AptAmigo instead!
Learn about Apartment Locator Salaries.
AptAmigo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and does not discriminate based on race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, genetic information, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law, in connection with any aspect of employment at AptAmigo.
