DANGER Report: Greatest Threat to the Real Estate Industry

Kevin Ray Ward (yes Masters Real Estate Success) reviews the National Association of Realtors' DANGER Report (by the Swaypole/Swainpole Group) and highlights its top finding: the biggest threat to real estate is "masses of marginal agents"—a large number of part-time, untrained, unethical or incompetent agents undermining the industry's reputation. Ward contrasts low licensing training hours (examples: average ~70 hours; some states as low as 13) with the high responsibility of handling large financial/life transitions, criticizes common unethical/bait-and-switch scripts taught in some coaching programs, and urges agents to "go pro" by committing to mastery, ethical practice, and intense, deliberate training to raise industry standards.
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Hey there, it's Kevin Ward with yes Masters Real Estate Success training helping you get more yeses and more successes in your business and in your life. And today I want to talk to you in this video about a danger and it is specifically about the Danger report that was published recently by the national association of Realtors. It was actually created by the Swainpole Group that was commissioned by the national association of Realtors to say what are the greatest threats to our industry? What are the biggest threats that are coming around to the real estate industry? And the Swaying Pole group does they do massively in depth studies research and just the research behind this is insane. And I've got here the report. The report is actually, this is just a few pages of the report. The report was actually 164 pages long. In fact, I was surprised when I heard that the national association of Realtors actually published this to the public because it is not pretty, it is not a, does not, it does not portray real estate agents in the best of light, but it is the truth and it does give us some stuff that we can really learn from. And so in today's video I want to talk about what were the key findings in the Danger report? What is it that is our greatest threat to us as real estate agents in the real estate industry? And more importantly, what can we do about it? And so it just turns out that they studied a whole lot of things. I'm not going to go through the whole report or even a majority of the report. There's just one thing I want to talk about today and that is the number one danger that they found to real estate agents in the nation. What is the number one threat to our industry? And this is it right here. The number one danger, the number one threat are the masses of marginal agents that destroy our reputation. In fact, the title is Masses of marginal agents destroy reputation. This is what it says, the real estate. Now this is not. This is the national association of Realtors commissioned this and this was their findings. The real estate industry is saddled with a large number of part time, untrained, unethical and or incompetent agents. This knowledge gap threatens the credibility of the entire industry. Now if you've been following my training or you're in one of my coaching programs or been to my event, unfortunately I have been talking about this for the last several years about the bar in our industry is too low and it's time for us to raise the bar. Well, now we have it in black and white. It's actually in purple and white, but it's in black and white in writing saying, this is the number one threat to us. We are our own worst enemy. Now, I read through this, and I've read through most of the report, and I wanted to share with you today what I think it really is telling us and what the call to action has got to be for us. Because, number one, whatever's happening in the industry or whatever's happening across the board does not have to and should not define you as an individual real estate agent because you're a professional. You are an independent contractor, most likely. And your success or failure doesn't depend on what everybody else in the industry is doing. It depends on what you do with your business and what you do with your own, with yourself and how you treat your business. How you approach the business is going to determine how much success you have or how little success you have. And we're talking about a huge opportunity if we approach this right now. There's a lot of things that could happen potentially out of this one at some point. There's there and there's already calls for this is there's a call to raise the bar to get into real estate. One of the things they talk about is that, for example, it says just to become a cosmetologist requires an average of 372 hours. 372 hours of training to become, to get your cosmetology license, to do makeup. Right. But to become a licensed real estate agent requires only an average of 70 hours. And there are some states, the lowest state requirement is only 13 hours of training to get your real estate license. So let me get this straight. You're going to get trained for 13 hours or 70 hours or 100 hours if you're on the high end, and then you're going to have a license to help people handle 500,000, $200,000 $1.5 million assets. That involves not just a financial transaction, it also involves them moving. It involves a whole life transition for people and you're going to get a license to do that. So to facilitate that, to be an agent of that transaction with only 13 to 70 to 100 hours of training. I listen to that. I'm like, whoa, that's scary. However, I want to also say this. One of the things I love about the real estate industry is the ease of entry, because it's a great opportunity. If you show up and treat this like a business and if you show up like a professional and understand I've got to learn, I've Got to get training, I've got to get coached. I've got to get educated. I've got to learn and grow and become a master in this business. So as I look at the report, I think there are two things that come out of it that I think you as a, as an agent have it where there's a great opportunity. Number one is there is too many. There are too many amateurs. There are just too many amateurs. Now, in my opinion, in real estate, one amateur is too many. But you get what I'm saying, that most real estate agents approach the business as if. As the way an amateur would approach it. For example, if you were going to play golf, if you're going to make money as a professional golfer, could you be successful on the PGA or LPGA Tour with the level of practice, with the level of training, with the level of coaching that you have had in real estate? In other words, if you showed up at your game, if you showed up with your golf game the way you show up with your real estate game, would you be able to make it? Would you be able to survive in real estate? Take it even further, a step further than that. If you wanted to learn to play the piano and you were in third grade, if you practiced your piano lessons the same amount that you practice your skills of selling real estate, your scripts, your conversations, your listing presentation, if you practiced as much on your piano piece to play at a recital as you did as the average real estate agent does on their listing presentation, can I tell you what would happen? In piano and third grade, your piano teacher would not even let you play in the recital. If you practiced your piano the way the average real estate agent. Now think about it. The way the average real estate agent practices their listing presentation. In other words, how much does the average listing agent practice their listing presentation compared to how the average piano player practices their practices playing the piano? Somebody's getting ready for a recital. I was talking to my wife, who was a concert pianist in college, and she would talk about when they would get ready to perform in a concert, that they would work on one piece for months, working four, playing three to six hours a day, usually three or four or five hours every single day. Practicing, rehearsing, practicing, rehearsing, being trained by their teacher, helping, helping them perfect it and get the sounds right and get the flow right and get the pacing right, getting everything just right to perform. And yet in real estate, how do we show up? Most agents don't practice seriously, intensely with intentionality, practice their listing presentation virtually at all. If you tried to do that in third grade with your piano recital. Your pr, Your piano teacher would not even let you perform. Am I right or am I right? Why would they not let you perform? Because they know you would embarrass yourself and you would embarrass the teacher and you'd probably embarrass your parents too, right? So think about it is if that's the way we put perform at piano or play golf or if you want to do anything else as a, and actually be good at it, if you want to make money at it, how should you show up? Show up like a pro. Stop approaching your real estate business like an amateur and make the commitment to turn pro, that you're going to practice like a pro, you're going to think like a pro, you're going to have the discipline and the work ethic of a professional and treat real estate as a professional. Real estate is full of amateur agents. People ask, can I be a part time agent? The problem, the biggest problem to me with being a part time agent, aside from the fact that it's very, very difficult to make enough money to make it worth your time that you are an amateur, most part time agents and most full time agents ironically show up as an amateur. My challenge to you, and it's what I teach in my with yes Masters real estate success training is to go from mediocrity to mastery, to stop treating real estate like an amateur and start treating it like a professional. Now here's the beauty of it. It's when you start treating your business like a pro, when you commit to, to mastery, you can kill it. Because the bar out there, there's so much mediocrity that when you become a master, it shows up in the way you show up on your prospecting, your lead, follow up, your listing presentations. Literally. I tell my agents that I coach, I say if you'll do what I tell you and you'll make this commitment to mastery and you'll follow the process and you'll follow what I teach you. People will not have the ability to tell you no. They won't want to tell you no. Because it's not about your marketing presentation. It's about you. How you show up. Your presence, not your presentation is what's incredibly powerful. So that's the first thing that really comes out of this to me is that there's too many amateurs in the real estate industry. The second thing that comes out is there simply too much bs. And I've talked about this forever. This is, and it says it's so one, it's the untrained incompetent agents, but the other part of it is the unethical real estate agents. Now here's my biggest beef about unethical agents. Sure, there's always going to be dishonesty, there's going to be dishonest agents, there's going to be dishonest people in virtually any industry. Right. The complaint or the beef that I have with the real estate industry is how much of our training is we actually as agents, you were taught bs. And when you're taught to pretend to talk to a seller and pretend like you have a buyer to talk to a for sale by owner and pretend like you're doing a survey, when I've even heard of, I even heard of one recently from an agent that they went through a coaching program and it's a major coaching program. I was in shock when they were taught that when you talk to a potential seller, you tell them how many listings you have. And the way you count a listing is if you have a lead, a buyer lead or sell seller lead, that's really kind of like a listing. So you can tell them, I have four listings when you actually don't have any listings, but you have four buyer leads or seller leads or something like that. Now my BS alarm is just going like crazy when I hear that. Is that why, why as an industry, could we, as leaders, as brokers, managers and trainers and coaches expect our agents to not to be ethical when a lot of the scripts that you were taught were so full of bs? So my call, my belief, my contention is that you can get yes without the bs. You don't need the bs. You don't need the BS scripts that do the bait and switch. You know, act like you got a buyer and then you show up and you try to get the listing. You can have honest, straightforward conversations with motivated buyers and sellers, totally straightforward, represent their best interest and inspire them to say yes to you without the bs, the shift has got to be in our mind and our heart to say enough, enough mediocrity, enough with amateur being amateur and enough with the bs. It's time to raise the bar in the real estate industry. Now, where does it start? It starts with me and with you making the commitment right now that I'm going to commit to mastery. I'm going to commit to be the best. I'm going to commit to continually learning and, and growing. And as I raise my bar, the other people around me will be forced to raise the bar or else they're never going to be able to compete with me. I love the way Michael Jordan approached the game of basketball. He said there is no competition. I am the competition. In other words, the way he showed up was he didn't have to compete with all the other players. He forced them to compete with him. Now you want to talk about a way to have a great, massively successful real estate business. Commit to mastery. Commit to being the best. Go pro. Be the hero. Be a hero for yourself, for your family, for the people in your office, the people that your clients, your customers, all the people that you get to serve. When you show up as a pro, you change the game. You change your game, you change the winning, the outcome for your whole family. And together we can help change the industry. If you like this video, click the like button or the thumbs up button. Share it, make comments, ask questions. Love to hear your feedback on it. I think we are in danger as a real estate agent, real estate industry, but I think we can fix this and I'm committed to helping you fix it. Hope you're with me. We'll talk soon.
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