What services do you provide to your clients? Professional photography? A home staging consultation? A weekly report/update?
These are all important, but there’s something more fundamental that is harder to define.
It’s your ability to stitch together a deal and make it stick.
This sounds obvious, but in fact, it requires a spicy recipe of tenacity, experience and skill. To achieve consistent success, you need the best of all three ingredients.
Honestly, when was the last time you did a deal where everything just came together easily, with zero problems from start to finish? Sure, it happens once in a blue moon, but typically, we’re working through small problems (and big ones) starting at the negotiation stage, getting conditions removed, and right up to the possession date. Even after closing sometimes.
If you’re a great agent, your clients are sheltered from many of your struggles. This is one of the big reasons the public doesn’t understand how much work goes into completing a real estate transaction. They see about five per cent of what we do.
And let’s be honest. Sometimes, it’s our own clients who are the biggest roadblock to success. Often, we need to draw on all our experience, skill and tenacity just to keep them on track. How many deals have you seen blown up over a buyer or seller making an irrational, emotional decision?
You need to be the voice of reason, the psychologist and the fixer.
And don’t forget to check your own emotions at the door! Oh, I know. Sometimes you want to tell Agent Jerk-Face to take a flying leap and stuff his offer where the sun don’t shine.
But you’re a professional, right?
During my full-time career, I prided myself on navigating (almost) every offer through to a firm sale, even when the other agent couldn’t put together a deal to save their life. Sometimes I had to sacrifice my own ego and make an incompetent agent look good. I would stand on my head to stitch together a deal for my clients, whatever it took.
Let’s take a look at the three crucial ingredients you need to keep more deals together.
Tenacity:
You’ve got a problem; you find a solution. Tenacity is an absolute must-have trait even to consider being a Realtor. Unfortunately, I see way too many agents give up way too quickly. “Oh well, nothing we can do!”
Ugh.
Experience:
They say nothing beats experience. I agree. And I disagree. There’s no doubt that you accumulate wisdom over time, usually by doing a lot of things wrong. On the other hand, you can avoid many hard lessons by learning from others. It’s not the experience itself that matters; it’s what you learned from those experiences.
This brings us to the last and most crucial ingredient in the Recipe for Keeping Deals Together.
Skills:
Every great agent has an extensive toolbox full of skills and they know how to use them.
Some agents think they have everything they need in their tiny toolbox. But, unfortunately, if they can’t fix the problem with their crescent wrench, screwdriver and hammer, the problem doesn’t get fixed. “Oh well! Nothing we can do!”
They’re dead wrong, of course. A great agent with a bigger toolbox could have fixed the problem, just as a skilled mechanic can fix a problem on my car that I can’t fix.
Tenacity and experience are essential. But improving your skills is where you will make the quickest and most dramatic improvement in generating more deals and keeping more of them together.
Some ingredients are more important than others.
After Ted Greenhough’s first year as a Realtor, he earned between $590,000-$865,000 every year for 12 consecutive years, all as an individual agent, without ever once making a cold call, reciting a canned script or doing any other “salesy” stuff. Now he runs Agent Skills, an online learning program for agents across North America.
