The Biggest Problem in the Real Estate Industry Today - Kevin Ward

Hi there, it's Kevin Ward, and I'm actually here at this fabulous hotel in Albany, New York. It's a little country inn. It's really nice, and this is a courtyard. And I'm going to be talking tomorrow to a bunch of agents at an awards banquet, and I'm going to talk about what is the biggest problem in the real estate industry today. If you could. If you could just nail it down to one problem, one issue, one thing that's going on in the real estate industry that is the biggest problem around, what would it be? And I think the answer is something that I discovered when I first started real estate, and it actually started way before that. It actually started when I was 11 years old and I decided I wanted to play the piano. We had gone to a fancy restaurant, at least for us. For me, it was fancy. We never. My parents never took us out to eat. We went to this one nice restaurant where they had live music. And there was this guy playing the piano that night. It was a big upright. It wasn't a grand piano, it was an upright grand, I guess you'd call it. And he was just playing away, and it was all. I don't know what kind of music it was, but it was cool. My dad was all into it and liking it, and I decided at 11 years old that my. My calling was to play the piano. And so I told my parents, this is what I'm going to do. And we found out that the guy that had been playing at the piano and the guy looked just like Don Knotts, if you remember the deputy Barney Fife from back in Mayberry days, he looked just like that. We found out that he actually lived in our town, which was about 30 miles away, and he actually taught piano lessons. And so my parents agreed to let me take piano lessons, learn to play the piano. In fact, they went and actually we actually bought a brand new piano. And that was a huge investment for my parents, but their son wanted to play the piano, and so they said, we're going to support him, and here we go. So we did. And then I showed up for piano lessons that first day, and man, it was so excited. And I remember the first lesson, it was the Red River Valley was the first song that I started learning. And I was so excited, and I'm like playing. And of course I realized real quick that his fingers could just fly and dance on the piano and mine couldn't. And so I'm like, okay, it's going to take some work. And so he told my mom that I needed to practice 30 minutes a day. 30 minutes a day. Now I'm a little boy, we live out in the country. I love playing outside. I love doing stuff. Sitting in front of a piano and practicing scales and practicing one little song. 30 minutes a day drove me nuts. And so that began what I affectionately refer to as the piano practice wars with my mom. Because I didn't want to practice at all. I mean, so finally we compromised. We negotiated it down to 15 minutes a day. And I still, I just fought it and I fought it and I wouldn't do it. And finally after a month or so, our, the, the next, the a recital was coming up and the piano teacher said he wasn't gonna let me play in the recital. And I'm like, why not? I'm crying. And he told my mom, he said, because he won't practice and he's just gonna embarrass himself, he's gonna embarrass me and he's gonna embarrass my parents. And so he wouldn't let me play. And I don't know, a few weeks later I just quit and I decided piano was not for me. Fast forward 25, 20 years later and I got my real estate license and I showed up for, at my first day of work. And my trainer Dan Galt said, all right, if you want to be good at real estate, you need to practice your scripts and you need role play. And we have role play every morning at 8:00 clock or 8:30. And I showed up for role play and nobody else showed up. And this was like, this was a big, big office, over 120 agents. It was the number one Century 21 office in the world. Century 21, Mike Bowman and great company. But I showed up for role play. Nobody wanted to roleplay. And then every day I would come and I would come in every single morning to practice my scripts and a role play. And every once in a while somebody else would show up. And most of the time it was just me. And it dawned on me that I was in an industry of amateurs, that everybody wants to make money, everybody wants to do good, everybody wants to get listings, everybody wants to, you know, be successful, but nobody wants to practice. Nobody wants to do what is required to excel at anything where your performance matters. Now the if you're going to be a professional pianist, you are going to get paid based on how well you perform, right? That's how you're going to get paid if you're going to be a professional athlete or a professional actor. You're going to get paid based on how well you perform. And so people in the performing arts, people in sports, where you get paid for your performance, they spend most of their lives, most of their career is not actually performing. It's preparing to perform its training. But not in real estate. In real estate, we don't want to practice, right? I mean, how much time does the average real estate agent spend actually practicing the skill of talking to a seller? We want a listing appointment. You get a listing appointment, you go sit down with the seller, and you are now auditioning for a $10,000 or $15,000, $20,000 paycheck. And how much time does the average agent spend on a daily basis preparing and, and practicing. Actually practicing what they're gonna say and how are they gonna lead a seller to make a good decision, a decision to hire them to help them sell their house. How much time does the average agent spend practicing that role playing, practicing the conversations, practicing the scripts so that it. Practicing it to a point it doesn't even sound like a script. And most agents don't wanna spend any time practicing it. We may get ready. We get ready for the listing appointment, we do our CMA, we get our PowerPoint or our keynote or presentation, whatever it is, and then we, we go through it maybe once. But most agents don't even a single time, role play, actually practice as if they're doing a live presentation. And then they go in there and they wing it, and they get stumped by objections and they look confident, they look incompetent, and they stumble on what they're going to say. And the reason agents don't hire us is not because they don't like us. It's because they don't feel safe. The reason they challenge you on your, what your marketing plan of what are you going to do and what are you going to do different? It's because they don't feel safe that you know what you're doing. The reason they throw objections at us as real estate agents is because they don't feel confident that we are going to take good care of them, that they're going to be in good hands. And that's what happens. And I thought to myself, you know, when I was 11 years old, I was expected to practice every day more than the average real estate agent is expected to practice. I was expected to practice more at 11 years old to do a recital than a professional real estate agent is expected to practice a day, to go audition for 10,000, 7,000, 20,000, $30,000 commission. Checks. What's up with that? And if you remember a couple of years ago, the national association of Realtors, you may have remembered this, you may not have heard about it. The national association of Realtors commissioned the Swainpole Group, who is a research firm that does real estate research, to assess and identify what are the greatest dangers, the greatest threats to our industry, to the real estate industry. And they interviewed thousands of people. They spent. They interviewed over a thousand people, if I remember correctly. They spent thousands of hours in assessing, compiling, researching, studying, interviewing. And they put it all together and they identified the greatest threats to the real estate industry. Number one. The number one clear and present danger. In fact, it was actually called the Danger Report. The number one threat to our industry is the number of incompetent, unprofessional, unethical real estate agents in the industry. What is the our biggest problem? It's us. And it's not that we're the problem. It's the way we approach the business. It's the failure of the lack of a commitment to prepare, to train, to be competent and even better, to be the best. We got to raise the bar. The national association of Realtors is not going to do it. Your company is not going to do it. You got to do it. But here's what happens if you do it. Because 99% of real estate agents are never going to do this work, of actually practicing, of role playing every day, of becoming elite when it comes to the skill of communicating and leading people to decisions. How to lead a seller to a decision, how to lead a buyer to a decision, how you do that, if you're willing to prepare, you're willing to do what 99% of agents not willing to do. It doesn't take long. And when I say long, I'm talking about it may take two or three years of actual work, of doing this work every day to be so much more powerful and effective than other real estate agents that sellers can't tell you no, because you stand so far, head and shoulders apart from all of the amateurs in the industry. GoPro, be the best. It'll make all the difference for your clients and it'll make all the difference for you. If you liked the video, give it a thumbs up. Share this I think this is one of the most important messages that is needed in our industry today. I hope you agree. If you like it and agree, please help me get the word out. Go pro. Be the best at your job.