The Truth About Being A Successful Real Estate Agent

Are you selling a ton of homes and you have no time freedom whatsoever? You know, are you traditionally successful, a busy real estate agent, yet you have nothing to show for it financially? Traditional success in real estate, in my opinion, is not worth having. You know, when I think about what's possible in this business, what I was able to achieve, what our members are able to achieve, and I don't say that to sort of leave you feeling bad about where you might be in your journey. Just to let you know that there's a different way of looking at the business and just changing the game that you're playing. If you're at the point in your journey where, man, your time is not your own, maybe you have money to show for it, maybe not. And you're super stressed all the time. Stick around. I want to show you how I can give you back 20% of your working hours in our Time Freedom Challenge. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. It's always appreciated. Subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on so you'll be the first to know about new videos when they hit. There are some shocking statistics about real estate agents. If you go to Google and type in NAR income survey, it'll bring up the national association of Realtors survey of real estate agents and their income. The average median income gross income so pre expenses for a real estate agent is $42,000. A 16 year veteran earns $72,000 and agents that are two years in the business earn less than $10,000. I think it's like $9,300 a year. Which explains why the failure rate of real estate agents is so high. Because agents aren't really trained how to make money when they get their real estate license. So my focus of today's video is really to help you unpack how to build your business a little differently. How to think of business differently. I got into real estate in 2007. I only had 10 months in the business in 2007, yet I sold 27 homes. So I figured out something that most agents didn't figure out. I figured out how to generate a lot of leads. It was all buyer leads at the time and essentially I had generate a lead. I would call the lead or text or email with the lead and then I would set up a consultation. I would get them to commit to do business with me, show them homes, get them to the closing table and repeat that process. The challenge though, in selling 27 homes in 10 months, I was the top producing agent in my small office at the time and I was miserable every weekend, every evening I was working. I didn't have any freedom whatsoever. Fast forward to 2008. I got a little bit smarter. I was thinking to myself like I am doing so much administrative work. There's marketing coordination, listing coordination, closing coordination. If I could just hire an administrator. And at the time I was looking for a licensed real estate agent basically to be my right hand person. I'm like, business would be so much easier if I can find someone to come alongside me. And that's what I did. I hired a part time administrator in 2008. I went from 27 homes in 10 months to 44 homes. My first full year in real estate. I was like 99.5% of agents. I sold more than them in my market and I was at that time generating almost a half a million dollars of gross commission income. And again, I delegated those administrative tasks. Yet I wasn't achieving the freedom that I wanted for my business at that point. I was two years into my marriage and we had our first son anders in November 2007. So he was, I just turned one years old and I was working seven days a week. And I knew that if something didn't change, I wouldn't be in real estate very long. And so my challenge wasn't like most two year agents, they were getting out of the business because there was no income. My challenge was the money was decent and time wasn't my own. And I wasn't willing to sacrifice my role as a husband or, or my role as a dad for my real estate business. There were other things in my life that were way more important than real estate. So that next year, 2009, late in the year I had to figure out a way to get buyers off my plate or at least showings. Like most of my evening and weekend hours were spent in the car hoping and hauling buyers around looking at properties. And so I realized if I can get that off my plate and I could probably grab 20 hours back of my time. So my first buyer agent was hired late 2009. That year I did 58 transactions. I think my first buyer agent, Chris, did three or four of those transactions, still had that administrator. So we went from 44 transactions to 58 transactions, a little bit better with my time. When my first buyer agent came on, it was really that year, 2010, we went from 58 transactions in 2009 to 118 transactions in 2010. And most of that year I was able to leverage showings off of my plate. I probably went from 70 hours in 2009 to 50 hours in 2010. And I was focusing mainly on listings. On my team. I still had buyer clients. I just leveraged my showings on basically an hourly basis to make my buyer agents. And they handled the showings of my buyer clients. Fast forward to 2011. We went from 118 transactions in 2010 to 178 transactions in 2011. The only thing I did differently was I think I cut a weaker agent or two and I added two or three more agents and hired a second administrator. So not a very complicated transition. And again, I bought back time. I stepped more out of the business, more out of the day to day, more out of the grind. At that point I was giving up listings. So I was done with buyers. Sort of leveraged that off my plate. And now I hired a listing partner, My first listing partner, then my second listing partner. That year we did 178 transactions. The next year, 2012, we did 248. And I only did one transaction in January of that year. At the time, it was my highest price closing. I think it was 1.2 million. I was the seventh agent in on that one. And so a guy over five years, he has seven agents. And I was finally the agent to tell him the truth about the value of his property and he was ready to move on. I'll always remember my last closing, you know, when I think about the journey, and that was pretty much the Journey 2007. Solo agent. Didn't know anything about anything. I really didn't employ any different tactic from 2009 to 2012 where we went from 58 to 248 transactions. The only thing different, I hired a few more agents and I hired a second administrator. And I was just really clear about the parts of the business that I was going to delegate out of my world so that I could elevate in the business. So it's this shift from agent to more of a manager coach to true business owner. You know, if you're at the point in your journey where you really can't navigate this the right way, the inspiration is that it's not only that I did it, our members are doing it consistently. You know, I think about a client of mine, Andy Mulholland in Rochester, Minnesota. When I met Andy, he was like up to his eyeballs in production, full on seven days a week, every evening. He was just losing his mind. And he was willing to sort of trust the process that we put in place. This is probably, I was only a Couple years into real estate B school yet I had figured out something that he hadn't figured out. This concept of leverage and the fact that you're not that important. Right. There are so many parts of your business that you don't have to be the one to do, you know? Andy now was able to exit his real estate business. He lives off the grid like in a beautiful part of Minnesota and he just enjoys this lifestyle that wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for these principles of leverage where bring in administrative support once you build a system and then identify the pieces of the business that you can hire someone who's better at that piece of the business that is okay making the money that that position commands. You know, a buyer agent on our team, typically they'll make about 40 bucks an hour. I know the industry doesn't talk about, you know, buyer agents or being a real estate in terms of dollar per hour. But I know as a buyer agent, if you're willing to put in 60 hour work weeks on my team, 60 times 50 is 3,000 times 40. You'll make 120 grand. That is like two or three times more than the average agent in my market. So not only have I figured out a way to build a business that gives me a little bit of freedom, that same business is allowing licensed real estate agents to come in and they can have time freedom. So if you're at the point in your journey where your time isn't your own and you don't have a roadmap in terms of next steps, join me for thetimefreedomchallenge.com go to thetimefreedomchallenge.com I'm gonna spend time with you, just coaching you and training you and giving you like tactical tools and systems that you could use today and forever to organize your time, to make better choices with your time, to delegate the things that aren't dollar productive and get them off of your plate. If you like this video, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel, turn notifications on so you're the first to know about new videos when they drop. As always, thank you for joining me. I am obsessed with helping you build systems that allow you to have more time and money, freedom, and most importantly, freedom from stress so you can show up in your life in the things that are more important than just selling houses. We'll see you on the next video.