4 Exact Steps To Make $250,000 as a Real Estate Agent

It's a shocking fact that most real estate agents don't make a six figure income in real estate. So how was I able as a new agent to make over $250,000 in my first 10 months in the business? In today's video, I'm going to cover four things. First of all, I'm going to cover the activities you have to do in order to be a successful real estate. I'm going to cover the disciplines you need to focus on. I'm going to cover the mindsets that you need to focus on and overcome. And I'm also going to talk about the skills you need to develop so that you can become a top producing agent and blow your real estate sales goals out of the water. Before I get into it, make sure you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel so you're first to know about new videos when they hit. So let's get into it. First, let me talk about my first year in real estate. This was March 5, 2007 is when I left my corporate job. So really that first year wasn't even my first full year. It was 10 months and I grossed $254,000 in my real estate business. That was from 27 transactions. I think 25 of them were buyers. And it was a crazy time. I was married in late 2006. We had our first child Anders in November 2007. And so I was a new husband, I was a new dad. I didn't know what I was doing in either of those roles. And here I am, a newly licensed real estate agents agent with no sales experience whatsoever. And I was just hoping that this would work out. And then the great recession hits. So really we saw what was really truly happening in 2008. But when I look back, right hindsight, you know, is, is better than the view I had at the time. But the market turned dramatically in June 2007. So looking back June 2007, this is three months after I got into real estate. The inventory in my market went straight through the roof. So homes just stopped selling. And we didn't really call it the Great Recession. Well, we didn't call it the Great Recession then, but home stopped selling and inventory went up to I think from like three months of inventory, four months of inventory, to over 20 months of inventory in my market. It went from 15,000 agents I think in 2007, and in 2009 or 2010 we were down to 5,000 agents. So here I am. I wasn't like a naturally sort of gifted salesperson. I hadn't built a business before. I didn't really have marketing experience. And I was tasked with, you know, creating a life for my family that they never thought was possible. That was literally in my first vision statement, that was a statement I would say to myself every day, like, lars, why are you doing this? And it's like to create a life for my family that they never thought was possible. And, you know, having the young kids or Anders at the time and, you know, not wanting to really, I didn't want to do some of the things that I saw as a kid. I had a father that owned a business, and he wasn't able to really show up as a dad or a husband. And the stress of it, you know, came out in the form of, you know, drinking and alcoholism and, you know, just stuff that I didn't want to repeat. I didn't want to fall into some of the traps that I saw him fall into. So I was highly, highly motivated. So with that backdrop, I want to go in, I want to get into the four things that I really think you need to focus on if you want to earn more than $250,000 in real estate and just do the math. So whatever that means for you. A normal commission check these days, average price point around the country is 350 to 400,000. So two and a half percent is roughly about $10,000 per commission check. So roughly 25 transactions to get to 250,000. If your goal is 500,000, you can do all of these four tips I'm going to give you, you can use to get to 500 or even a million. You know, just break it down per commission check and just calculate the number of sides and sort of work backwards. So the first thing I would say you need to focus on are what are the activities that you must fit into your calendar and be obsessive about those activities. For me, and my advice to you is new business development that is like the obsession is how many hours a week can you spend? Your talking to would be buyer and seller clients. This is not talking to existing clients or not necessarily following up with prospects that you've already had conversations with, but new conversations with buyers and sellers. And so it begs the fact here, or makes you think of like, how do you generate leads? I'll cover that in another video. But the point is, is that whatever you do to generate new business, you have to focus on it for 12 to 15 plus hours per week. There were some weeks where, you know, I had the additional time and I would double and triple down. And some days I would spend four to five hours on new business development. So that's the core activity that's going to have you making the most amount of money. Second to that is lead follow up. So it's a different time block, at least an hour day where you're following up with prospects or leads that you generated from that new business development time. So they're in your database and you're just reminded to follow up with them. So that's kind of the first thing is the activities that you need to focus on. The second thing, it really are the disciplines. What disciplines must you focus on in order to become not just a top producing agent, but like the 1% of the 1%. So in terms of disciplines, this is some of the stuff you're not going to want to hear. So maybe I don't know when I should have included this, but you're going to have to cut out some things. You can't watch two to three hours of TV a day and still crush it as a husband or a wife and still crush it as a mom or dad and you know, still take care of your physical body and crush it in business. Right. You can't really be caught up in the 24 hour news cycle because that's just going to lead you to a tremendous amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt. The FUD as I call it. You can't, you know, be on social media like just mindlessly scrolling, right? Just on your phone kind of scrolling up. You can't spend time doing those things. So the discipline is to eliminate all the things that aren't going to move you closer to the meaningful goals you have set for your business, for your role as a spouse or a parent. Right? Or your physical body, your spiritual journey. Right? Those are the things that matter and those are the things that you need to focus on. The next thing I want to focus on are what are the skills you must develop in order to become a top producing agent to get to 250 to $500,000 a year in gross commission income and even in this squirrely market. So for me, I was able to get there in that first year and all I focused on was a couple skills and they were both sales related. Well, I would say three. One was the skill of a marketer. So I did figure out how to generate high quality, low cost leads. That's a big part of what we do at real estate B school. We don't spend money on a bunch of lead sources. That's a separate Conversation. I'm going to leave that one to the side. The skill of being able to follow up with a lead that was generated. So someone that asked for information on a listing or a free report or some attraction based marketing system that you have out there that's bringing in leads, you have to call those leads and have a conversation. So the scripts and dialogues in order to motivate those folks to take action and meet with you, that's all you need to sell them on is a face to face meeting. We don't pop up and show a home. We're convincing someone to have a face to face meeting with us. And so the skill to be able to do that. And then when you get face to face, the skill of being able to present your services in a way where they're going to be motivated to want to work with you exclusively. Right. We're not going to even on the buy side. That's where I spent most of my first two to three years working with buyers. It just worked out that way. I probably would have done it differently if I could go back in time. But you're going to want to focus on the skill of motivating or compelling someone to take action and to meet with you. And we do virtual consultations now and then, giving that consultation either in person or virtually and getting them to sign a buyer loyalty agreement or obviously a listing agreement. So when you think about your skill set right now, are you able to pick up the phone and more often than not compel someone that's that's come into your world via you offering them something so it's not cold calling? I never really focused on that at all. It was all attraction based marketing. But do you have the skills to be able to make motivate someone to take action and meet with you? So the last thing I would have you focus on are your mindsets. This is probably, probably should have covered this one first. I think it's 80% of winning in business. In fact, there's a quote, I'm going to botch the quote a little bit, but from Tony Robbins where he says 80% of success in business is about your psychology, which are mindsets and not the tactics or strategies. So a good example of this is in your physical body. Are there any shortage of information or gurus or coaches out there that you know you can lean into or consume that can tell you how to lose weight? Right. No shortage whatsoever. There's no shortage of tactics or strategies. We all know how to do it. It's eat more good Food, less bad food and move your body every day, right? Physical exercise, weight bearing exercise, aerobic exercise, and drink a lot of water, get a lot of sleep, right? All of that is well and good. But why are we. I think it's like 60 or 70% of Americans are obese, you know, so because it's a mindset. It's the comfort, the psychology, it's whatever's going on in their brain that's, that's helping them not do the things they know they need to do to be fair. Physically fit, same thing goes in business. So where are your mindsets right now? What are you consuming on a regular basis? Are you filling your mind with things that are going to motivate you to do the things you know you need to do to be successful in business? This is a really good example. There's a book by Brian Tracy called Eat that frog in Real Estate. I just covered it. The two biggest frogs are new business development which are calling, you know, would be buyer and seller clients and then lead, follow up and getting those frogs, eating those frogs early in the day. So having discipline and the mindset to be able to double down on the activities that you know you need to do to be successful and having the grit and fortitude to push away the distractions to be able to do that. One other mindset I think that I employed early on in my, in my business growth journey was that of a marketer. I viewed myself as a marketer. I wasn't going to be a cold caller. I didn't, wasn't a natural salesperson. I didn't have thick skin. I think I did call Expires once and I think it was like the first guy that answered was so mean to me. I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna call Expires. I did call Fizzwas for a while, but it's only because I sent them information and it was an easier call. So it didn't feel cold to me. But I generally figured out ways to attract buyers and sellers. To me, it's still the way that we roll in real estate B school. And so the mindset of a marketer and then the other mindset, last mindset, is that of a business owner. So no matter where you are in your journey now, doesn't matter how many homes you're selling, if you can shift your mindset to think like a business owner, you'll view. Okay, how do I set up marketing systems? How do I set up lead conversion systems, sales systems, a buyer consultation framework, you know, text and email sequences. How do I put things into place that give me a 10x20x multiplication of the time I put in to the, to the amount of money that I can get out. Right. You'll think about your business differently now. Looking back on my first year, yes, I made $254,000 in gross commission income. But two things I would have done differently, the brokerage I was at, I think they took about 75 or $80,000 and I think one or two of those 27 deals they generated. So I generated all of the business and they took like $80,000 or something crazy. So that's one thing I probably would have done differently. I would have been in a model like I am now with exp, where it's a capped model and there's like massive benefits. Probably a video for another time. The second thing I would have done differently is I wouldn't have wasted a whole bunch of money. I spent money on everything you could spend money on thinking that there was a holy grail, an easy button. I could just spend money to make more money. And it just wasn't true. I'm not even going to tell you what I netted in my first year because it's, it's embarrassing. I probably will on another video as an example of how not to do, you know, take care of your P and L and how not to make a ton of money on a whole lot of gross commission income. And I figured it out pretty quick. None of the things I wasted money on turned into anything. The core activities of generating leads from a single lead source, a single script, and then time blocking new business development time blocks. That's the whole recipe. It's the same thing, you know, that first full year was 2008 and all of the same disciplines, all the same systems were in place five years later when I had 10 producing agents doing 453 transactions. So I was able to do 44 with a full time administrator and then a team of 10 agents with me completely out of the business, sitting in the owner's seat, going to work one day a week. When I was in town, they did 453 transactions. So it's not a complicated business. You just need to break it down, down. And hopefully this video allowed you to see that you could do it too. One step at a time. I would say though, if you're at the point in your journey where you want to take a look at your business and see if growth is possible, right? This is not for everyone, not every agent is going to get to 500,000 GCI, right. But you can come on for a free business growth assessment. This is just a time where we're going to look at your business. What's working, what's not working? Where do you want to be in the future? Where are you now? What's holding you back? What are the obstacles? What have you tried? You know, we're going to break all of that down in a call. And if you are a good fit for our case study program, we want to take you on as a client and we're going to force you in a good way, hold you accountable to growth and show you step by step how to get there. It's called our Business Foundations Case Study Program. So the first step is to just grab a call. You can click on the link in the description below or you can just go to rebs growth assessment.com that's rebs growth assessment.com we'll see you over there and we'll see you on the next video.