The 3 Critical Habits of High Performing Real Estate Agents

You can tell he just shows up, right? He's not partying for two months after he wins the Super Bowl. He's training the next day. He's still doing his TB12 method. He's still taking care of his physical body, he's still doing his mental work, right? He's still meeting with his 12 different coaches because he's looking toward the next Super Bowl. You know, we want to celebrate our successes and all that, but the point is, is that in real estate, we need to do the real work and this comes down to routines.

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you. The good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results.

You just gotta do the work. What is up, real estate business builders? Welcome back to another edition of the podcast. Today we're going to dive into the three undeniable, irrefutable, critical habits of high performing real estate agents. Guys, I wish it were different than these three, but these are the three that proved out for me when I got into the business. Every agent that even came onto my team and performed at a real high level, I'll get into some of that and, you know, 10 plus years into real estate, B school and helping other agents grow their sales, grow their income and grow their lifestyles, you know, all without the grind. These three are the three. So like I said, I wish they were different, but they're not different. These are the three. Let me start with a little bit of a backdrop here. So as I'm recording this, we are in the midst of a little bit of a different flavor in terms of what's going on in the market, but very similar to essentially an income compression in real estate. So there's just less commission checks available for the number of agents that are out there. This is a typical shift. This is not anything that's abnormal. This is the normal. Every market has cycles and seasons and this is just one of the seasons. What is different about this season is that there seems to be more fear, uncertainty and doubt. Well, I don't know if there's more because I, I just checked out of it back in the day, you know, when I Got into real estate. It was the start of the great Recession. Unbeknownst to me, three months after, you know, March 2007, I left my corporate job. March 5, 2007, to be exact. And in June 2007, looking back, I saw, you know, looking back in, like, late 2008, I saw inventory, June 2007 go straight through the roof, you know. You know, all the way through, like, 2009, we had over 20 months of inventory. So it was a different market because there was lots of inventory, but there was no buyers. There was just less transactions happening to the point where we went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents in my market. So the backdrop to this episode is that there are agents that are going to enter into real estate during these shifty, interesting, whatever you want to call this market, uncertain times. And they're gonna not know any better. And they're going to do a version of what I did back in the day. They're going to come out of the gate and sell, like, 40 homes their first year and then go on to do whatever. Right? It's gonna happen. And I think part of it is that they just don't know any better. They didn't go through the easy years, you know, 21 and 22. First half of 22, there were so many transactions flowing, and it was, you know, it was easy to be in real estate. And they say, what a rising tide, you know, floats all ships or something like that. Well, now that the water. The tide has gone out, you can really see who was, you know, swimming without shorts. I know I botched that whole analogy or that expression, but you get the point, right? So now that there's not a crazy amount of business to be had and, you know, everyone is swimming in commission checks, now it really comes down to, are you willing to do these three habits that I'm going to go through? And so the backdrop is that this will always be these disciplines, these habits will always be the things that win, no matter what. And the other thing that I've noticed about this this season is that. And this is true of any market. And I'll liken this to. I'll tell a story about, you know, being invested in bitcoin. And, you know, bitcoin has, like, wild highs and wild lows. And, you know, when we're coming out of. In. In this market, real estate's a market, bitcoin's market, we're coming out of the bitcoin market has been a season. I think we're in, like, phase one of the bull market now. So it's coming back and all of it. But it was hard to stay in the market when nobody was a fan of bitcoin. And I'm not talking like back in 2017 or 13 like the OGs of Bitcoin, but we do these weekly mindset calls and we do production masterminds and lead conversion clinics and everyone's like, you know, what's the litigation that just came down, you know, sort of picking on the buy side commissions, you know, the co op splits and all of that. And you know, big class action lawsuit. There are agents that think that they're going to be extinct, that they might as well just opt out of the industry now because of what's going on. And I think it's like, man, what an awesome thing that we now have to prove our value on the buy side. Which I've been doing since I got into the industry. So the fear, uncertainty and doubt that is going on right now in real estate, only the true professionals will prevail. The amateurs that are in real estate that don't have ironclad mindset and aren't employing these habits will get out of the business. I am hoping you're not one of them. So that is my prayer, that's my wish. So let's get into it. Number one habit of high performing agents is that agents that perform in any market at the highest level are doing the real work. So that's number one is do the real work. And this involves routines. There's a really good book by Steven Pressfield called Turning Pro where essentially the book, it's an easy. Listen it's about two hours. I highly recommend it is that the pro shows up. No matter what the pro shows up, whether they won the super bowl or they were last 31st or 30, I don't know how many teams there are in NFL. The pro is you know, doing the activities that they know will lead to, to the result or the outcome that they want. Right. So whatever you think about Tom Brady, right, He, he's a pro. There are stories he did. There was a series on Facebook. It was like some, a short 12 to 15 minute, like six. What was it? Tom versus time or something like that where like he is just pro level, you know, like he's watching film, you know, he's disengaged from his family which I, I don't recommend. If you're in real estate you got to keep, keep tight with the things that that matter. But you can tell he just shows up, right? He's not, you know, partying for two months after he wins the Super Bowl. He's training the next day. He's still, you know, doing his TB12 method. He's still taking care of his physical body. He's still doing his mental work. Right. He's still meeting with his 12 different coaches because he's looking toward the next Super Bowl. Now there, there, there are, you know, we want to celebrate our, our successes and all that. But the point is, is that in real estate we need to do the real work. And this comes down to routines with PhD, pig headed discipline. No matter what, non negotiable. You've got to structure your day in a way that's going to allow you to win and focus on the activities that make you money. We call these dollar productive activities. DPAs. There's only a few DPAs, right? It is new business development which is lead generation and lead follow up. There is meeting, you know, with buyers and sellers for the first time, signing them as loyal clients and then getting them under contract. Building systems is another one. But most of your time you should be obsessed and blocking your time to do those things. Those three things, lead generation, lead follow up and meeting, signing new buyers and new sellers, that was my obsession back in the day. The reason I was able to sell my personal production my first four years was 27 transactions in my first 10 months. 44, 54 and 66. So just at about four years I haven't totaled, totaled those up. But it allowed me to build out systems where I can leverage way beyond that, bring a team in. I had 10 producing agents that sold 453 homes. I worked 40 days that year about five years after I got into the business. So I was willing to do the real work, build the systems. And then I just surrounded myself with other people that were willing to do the real work. And I made it easier because I had no guess words and you know, a lot of systems were sort of built out for them. So that's number one is do the real work. Number two is you have to prioritize. There's a saying in a Christian business owners group I belong to called C12. Priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talking about. And there's a good. It's called the Eisenhower matrix is the time management tool. But there's a quote and I pulled it up here, let me pull it up here. It's Dwight Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower. Urgent versus important. So it is. So I have two kinds of problems. The urgent and the important. The urgent, let Me pull it up here. It's the urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. So as you look at your time invested in your business and it's this matrix of, there's this really good app I've started to use, Tick tick T I C K T I C K that has an Eisenhower matrix. And you put your activities into this matrix of urgent and important. So that going back to that, to that quote, think about all the things that you spend time on all day long that are urgent but not really important and think of like if you want to build and scale a business, all the things that are critically important like building systems and you know, building sales processes and marketing legion levers and you know, all of the things you could be spending your time on that are really critically important if you want to be financially independent and not give away your life in the process. In real estate, important things, but they're not urgent. Like it's the, the buyer that's, you know, texting you at Friday, been a Friday night about a property that just hit the market that they want to see on Saturday morning. And it's like, man, that, that really isn't important when it comes to the long term vision I have for my business. But it's, it's urgent because I need that check, right? It's like a seller that interrupts your day because you had a showing at 12pm and at 12:11 they left the home and they're texting you for the feedback, right? It's urgent because they're a client of yours. But it's not really important when you're trying to sell 2, 3, 4, 5 homes per month and take home 30 to 40 grand free and clear every month, right? So it's this balance of, you know, the urgent versus the important and priorities are the things you actually do and everything else is just talk. That's number two. Number three is a habit of high performing agents across the board is that they take care of themselves. This is physically, emotionally and spiritually. So these, again, it comes down to routines. Are you getting your workouts in? Are you hydrating? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating lean proteins and veggies versus crap carbs and caffeinating? There's four things in your physical body that you have to tend to emotionally. Are you starting your day in gratitude or you're ending your day with a practice of documenting all the amazing things that happened Spiritually, what does your faith walk look like? I've gotten into this great habit with, with my wife. We start the day, every day. I read a devotional, a devotion out of it. Paul Tripp, new Morning Mercies. There's a Bible suggested Bible reading. I read that to my wife. We do a meditation together on the abide app I B I D E and then she prays. She's an awesome prayer warrior. So that may not look the same for you. Maybe you don't. We don't share the same faith. But there has to be some routine that starts your day off on the right foot where I could, anything could happen in my day. And as long as I start it where spiritually and emotionally and physically like I'm firing on those cylinders, I have no doubt. No matter what happens in the market, you know, because I'm in a different part of the market now. But my businesses suffer when real estate suffers, right. So when agents are hurting financially that I could throw my hands up and say, you know, agents aren't going to invest in themselves during these sideways times. But I'm, I'm not wired that way at all. I'm, I'm all about taking care of myself so I can show up the best possible way for my family, for, you know, my wife, my kids, and then also my clients. Right? So that's number three. Are you taking care of yourself? A bonus one and this is a habit. If you want to sell an unreasonable amount of real estate and not work evenings and weekends and have a crazy amount of money coming in the habit of thinking like a business owner. That's my bonus. I'll probably do a whole episode on that. But the bonus here is, are you thinking about your business like a system of systems so that one day you won't have to be the person doing all this stuff. 80% of what a real estate agent has to do, soup to nuts. From a generated lead on the front end to a happy client and a past client, you know, program on the, on the, on the other end. The whole pipeline of a business, 80% of what an agent does is administrative in nature. And the only way to get out of doing admin work is to build a system and to backfill with an automation or a delegation. You know, you can hire a VA at $4 an hour in a super talented, you know, virtual assistant that's a full on team member at $4 an hour, which is $8,000 a year to leverage all the button clicking in your business, all the social media, all of the stuff that you need to do on a regular basis, you can hire someone to do it at for less than one closing. Right. Full time. I'm. I'm in the process of hiring a guy that was the CEO. He's been a CEO and a COO before and he's $4 an hour. Right. He's gonna have a massive impact in our business. Because I think about my business like a system of systems. I'm going to scale my coaching business in a time where many of these smaller coaches are going out of business and just saying, man, this is not the right time. Agents don't have money right now and they're getting caught up in the FUD cycle, the fear, uncertainty and doubt cycle. So that's what I've got. Three plus a bonus. I hope you crush it. My prayers are that you absolutely dominate. You take your unfair share of the real estate market. No matter what's going on in your on on in your market. I know that you could separate yourselves from the pack and you can absolutely crush it. The only thing I have to offer you and you guys know that if you ever want to talk about or even look at what it might look like to work together. I don't even know if that sentence made sense there. Um, go to Rebs Growth Assessment. Com r e b s Growth assessment dot com. There's a seven minute video on that page that details what I call the million dollar agent method. It comes with a absolute guarantee in a 90 day period. Period. If you don't generate an additional outside of what you're already doing with my lead gen systems, my lead conversion systems, my sales frameworks installed in your business, you'll generate at least an additional $40,000 of gross commission income. If you don't, I'll give you a full refund for your investment. So go to Rebs Growth Assessment. Watch that seven minute video. If you're like, man, this sounds interesting. I think I can do this book in a call and we'll have a conversation about it. We'll talk to you soon. Be good. Much love, much respect.