Thread: to be the top ten%

what is the best way to start in real estate? what do the top 10% do?

You'll get a lot of different answers to this question. There are a lot of ways to market youself. The best place to start is with friends, family, and past acquaintences (spere of influence).

Pick a plan and stick with it. Your sales will come from many different places. Do as much as you can and be consistent.

Everyone you meet could be a buyer or seller.
Keep your ears open... I have met lots of people while out having dinner, shopping at a store, or just hanging out on the beach.
Make sure everyone you meet knows what you do for a living.

I have no idea what the top 10% do and frankly I don't care. Those folks have monster teams of assistants and agents and life's too short (IMHO) to manage all that chaos.

There are many theories on how to be successful and much of it depends on your own personality, interests and skills. Personally, I am not a people-person, but I'm terribly organized and efficient which I was able to capitalize on to sell an average of 60 homes a year... which was plenty for me. Outgoing social butterflies get their business from networking and prospecting (and then hire people like me to manage it for them!).

So tell us more about YOU! How do you envision building your business? How much money do you wanna make? How hard do you wanna work?

Tell me more, Tell me more...

Jennifer

As I just said in another post. There is no secret formula for success.

Make a plan and work your plan. Stay focused.

Some 'top ten' have a team of up to 100 people behind...
It was in the Realtor magazine few years ago...

To start, I would suggest joining a top producing team and see what the team leaders does. Learn from the best and watch what they do. Thats what I did. I took what worked and added my personality and ideas into it and so far I have done pretty well. I have built my own team of 5 agents and I work less than I have ever before. It took me almost 6 years to get where I am at and for 4 1/2 of those years, I worked my butt off.

Get a nice web site and announce your web site to all your friends.

Submit to directories.

You could join the local clubs and community service orgs etc.

Thanks

Buidling a website is very important. Learning how to build links, optimizing it for the search engines and adding fresh content is very time consuming. You might need to hire a professional to do all this especially if you are a new agent and should be concentrating on building your real estate business.

There are so many things for agents to be familiar with it's amazing.

I'm actually on the outside looking in as a computer professional who also is running a side business doing virtual tours and I recently started a web site called www.RealPinions.com. I was repeatedly asked about building websites for agents ("I like your site, do you build web sites for agents also?"). Then I started reading these forums and found more questions (especially repeated questions) and more possible answers.

I decided the industry needed a single place where agents can go to learn what is available to them.

I created www.RealPinions.com which is a great place to learn about vendors that can help set you apart from the pack and also make you more efficient.

It's all free categorized information.

Some of the topics we cover:
All-In-One Management Tools
Automobile Signs
Classifieds/Listing Sites
Comps (Comparables) Identification
Deals for NAR Members
Email Enhancers/Drip Programs
Flyers
Home Buyer Sites
Home Feedback
Home Warranties
Lead Generation Systems and Contact Management
On-Line Posting Services
Phone Solutions
Real Estate Directories
Recipe Cards/Post Cards
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Single Property Websites
Training/Mentoring
Transaction Management
Virtual Assistants
Virtual Tours/Photography
Web Site Vendors
Yard Signs/Flyer Boxes/Flags/Lock Boxes, etc.

Hope this helps,

Kevin