Beginner in Real Estate

[Joseph Shavatt]

Hello everyone, I am working on getting my RE license in the state of Maryland in the next few months. I would like to hear some potential advice that would allow me to excel in a professional agency and find a way to be top agent. Is there any advice you have to begin building a network? Local mastermind groups in the MD/VA area, or any group think meetings that will allow me to get acquainted with to start the journey? Thanks and looking forward to hearing back from you all!

[Ryan Leonard]

Hi Joseph - that's a great question. I think one of the best pieces of advice for a new agent is to understand that you're up against the odds. 90% of agents (give or take) stop selling real estate in the first few years. I don't mean this to discourage you, but to encourage you and put you in a state of mind that will best prepare you. In order to have success and build the business you want to have, I think it would be beneficial to have an action-based approach and not a result-based approach. By this, I mean to identify a few actions you can do every day/week/month that will inevitably bring you success and then do those actions without fail. Watch other successful agents and absorb a lot of information and use this to determine what your "actions" are. If you do the right actions, results are inevitable. There are a lot of people who fail in real estate, but there are a lot of people who don't go in with reasonable expectations and discipline. 

The last thing I would recommend is to set up your real estate career in a way that puts the least amount of stress on it. What I mean by this is to avoid putting yourself in a position where you need to depend on your real estate sales for living expenses right away. Seeing the results of your actions in real estate normally takes at least 90 days, so don't expect to depend on your commission for living expenses in the near future. I'd recommend having at least 6 months of living expenses accounted for and saved up. That gives you enough time to get acclimated and see the results of your actions but is not such a long timeline where there's no urgency to succeed. 

Hope this helped and good luck!