25 Years in Real Estate Doesn't Mean 25 Years of Experience

There's a very confusing topic in real estate that I want to address today, and it's the difference between length of time in business and actual experience. So when you come across somebody that's like, 25 years in the business, or somebody that's like, I've sold 300 homes, there's a huge difference in that. Because just because somebody has been licensed for 25 years doesn't mean they practice for 25 years. But somebody that's done 300 repetitions definitely has more experience, most likely, than somebody that's been in the business 25 years. Because the average real estate agent does about 5 to 6 transactions a year over a 25-year period of time. You do the math, right? Not a lot of experience. The guy with 300 transactions in 3 years has way more experience than the guy that's been in the business 25 years. Now, here's where the kicker comes in. Now, it depends on somebody that's got the reps and the history is really where the gasoline is. And that's me. So I'm Steve D Valentine. I have been doing this for 27 years as of July 2026. In that 27 years, I have been part of no less than 100 transactions per year, some years as many as 2,000 transactions. And then on the other level of it, which is where really the expertise comes in, is that my wife and I have personally owned more than 1,000 homes in the last decade. So we have either bought them, kept them, flipped them, or sold them to partners, or done something creative. We've also gone into new realms of sober living, commercial, VRBO. We've done lease purchases. I mean, the experience is very, very vast along that 27-year road. So when you're starting to think about experience, here's where it matters, and here's where it starts to develop your career in real estate. Your experiences lead to growth, and when you're doing less experiences, you're not growing. So when you're selling a house every 2 months, your growth is really hard because what are you doing in between that 60 days? Are you treating yourself like a client during that 60 days? If you don't have somebody to work with, you do look in the mirror. That's what's important because that is going to create experience. So I'll give you a great example of where you can start. Let's say that you're an agent, you're frustrated, and you're doing 5 to 6 transactions a year. Where do you start? Well, you can go and do all the things that everybody tells you to do, or you can start practicing and you can start realizing that your experience matters. So this is where we get into what's called incentivized collaboration. Your experience level is a little bit short of what mine would be or what somebody else you might know in your market without having to join a team, without having to change brokerages. If you have a client, which is how we work in Phoenix at The Rig, if you have a client that's experiencing a different situation that you haven't experienced yet, then incentivized collaboration is where you strategically grab a partner and go, hey, you know what? I need to learn how to do this. I think there's an opportunity here, but I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it's a cash offer, maybe it's some sort of creative type deal, but you just are not experienced enough yet to see it. That's okay. This is how we learn. But if you're curious and you're sharp, you look and go, hey, I can only go so far by myself, but I can go way further with somebody else. And if I can bring value to somebody's life, then I can learn what they bring to the table while they're doing it. And I get to earn and learn at the same time and share in something that I may or may not have earned. At the end of the day. I love the collaboration in this sense because it takes somebody that has a lack of experience and a lack of education and allows them to experience and educate in the process. You see a lot of coaches, you pay a lot of money upfront for the process and the theory, but they never truly coach you in the game. When was the last time any of the gurus sat at a kitchen table with you? When was the last time your team leader or your broker sat at the table with you? When was the last time any one of them actually sat at a table with anybody? I sat at one 6 times this week because I'm in it, because I love this game, because it's different. Once you're experienced level, you realize that there are options in the real estate business to create solutions, to solve for people's problems, and to remove obstacles in people's life. And the sale of real estate happens when you do that. And you earn an income by impacting people, your experience level then increases greatly because you're no longer working on your— I've been in it for 25 years. Yeah, but in that part-time experience, the market changed 6, 7 different times. We've been consistent for 27 years of a minimum of 100 transactions while buying, selling, investing, and helping families do the same. And what people don't see in this that is a really important factor is that my experiences personally make me a very dangerous person for my clients because I have flipped homes. I do understand buying them. I do understand the negotiation process. And when you do it for yourself more than 1,000 times to create income, you're really good at seeing the blind spots. And so as your experiences grow in your own Your experiences now create wisdom. They now create a way to help your clients see their blind spots, 'cause you're like, oh, I saw this before. It's actually how flagged mechanics— yes, I was a mechanic, believe it or not. Of course you do. I was a mechanic 30 years ago, and, uh, now they call them auto technicians and, um, master mechanics, and they're pretty brilliant dudes 'cause all these things run on computers now. So here's the deal, uh, much respect for that industry. Except for the amount of money we spent on tools. That was an addiction. So automotive industry, it was flagged hours. So if it was 4 hours to do a set of brakes, that's what the client paid 4 hours for. If you did it 100 times in repetitions, you could do it in an hour cuz you created a system and a process. The customer still paid the same, but you made more money doing it. Your experiences allow you to speed that up. And help the process and solve for the client. What's really important about that is to get in a circle where you can experience different things. And it's most important that you start asking questions of where do you want your career to go and how do you want to get there? Do you want to do it through length of time or do you want to do it through experience? And experiences on yourself and learning how to invest and apply those principles to yourself and learn how they work. And then you can apply them to your clients' day-to-day lives. Because investing has to do with experience, which I learned how to raise capital so I could buy rental properties and increase my wealth. And then once I learned to do that, I learned to use the same people that I raised capital with to connect the dots with clients that were having issues or needed to sell their houses. So I borrow money from my community. To buy from my community. And then we create an impact for both because the investor is building wealth and retirement. They're helping us do the same thing and the client is having the easy button. Or we lend money to the clients to do the repairs, buy their house so that they can buy another one. There's a lot of strategic things that we can do through experience. Your goal is to create greater experience because that is truly your value proposition. Your value proposition isn't in your marketing. It isn't in who you think you are identity-wise in the business or how many homes you've sold. It's truly through your experiences and both your life and your business experiences apply to everything and every person that you come encounter with if you let it, because that's where the biggest impact is. Because when you can use your personal story as part of your experience, that's where connection comes in. And that's where trust is built. And so there's some of you out there that hold yourself back from your personal story. And I'm going to tell you, I am an open book with my personal story, from going to rehab a couple of years ago to rebuilding my marriage, to rebuilding my business, to tearing everything down. And look, long before that, I lost everything financially and rebuilt that in 2008. I've lived it all. And all of that matters to my clients because I can understand when they're on the brink of bankruptcy. I can give them advice because of what I've been through. I've owned several flips so I can guide them through the process of what to do to add value, not to add value. We've had to negotiate out of freaking 1,000 solar leases. We understand it because we've seen it. Kind of starts to look like a farmer's commercial. We have seen it all from cows falling in the pool to dead people at houses to houses that have burned to the ground and been rebuilt. It's experience that matters to the clients. And for your journey, your experience matters, which is how fast can you experience the business rather than earn through it? Because the faster you experience it, the more you have the ability to create it. If you want to know more about creating income versus earned income in real estate, watch this last YouTube video and join me on Wednesday mornings at 9 AM. If you're a real estate professional or in the real estate business and you are burnt out, You want something different. You want a place to ideate and figure things out in a hillbilly way, which means simplicity, not overcomplicated. I'm not teaching you to work more. I'm teaching you to work less and use your brain and use your relationship skills to water the seeds and the relationships that are going to make a difference and impact your life in the future. I'm Steve D Valentine. Keep following, subscribe, like, comment below. Let's have a conversation. Follow me on Instagram. And hey, if I can support you anywhere in real estate, links are below.