So, you’ve gone through all the training, passed your real estate exam, and now you’re ready to select a great real estate company to partner up with. This is no doubt an emotional time for you. All your patience and persistence has finally paid off and you’re likely excited as heck to start your new career and make some money. This excitement may lead to bad judgement calls when trying to select a great real estate company to work with. So, let’s take a step back. In this article, I’m going to explain what you should look for when applying to a real estate company as well as how to increase your chances of being happily welcomed by the company you deem is best.
Don’t Have Your Your Real Estate License Yet?
If you still have not obtained your real estate license, there are some real estate companies that will offer to put you through their own real estate license training program. Most states require a minimum number of classroom hours and these hours will help to prepare you for the real estate license exam. Some of these real estate companies offer free training programs while others will charge you, usually at a discounted rate, to attend their courses. Just be cautious of “guru’s” and “free seminars” that only try to bait you into expensive add-ons. Here’s a video that explains what I’m talking about:
While lots of good local real estate training schools probably exist in your area, most new real estate professionals like to get their real estate license online. Here are a few online real estate training courses I can recommend:
Best Online Real Estate Schools For 2022
Selecting A Company For Mutual Benefits
You aren’t a slave to any real estate company, and no real estate company deserves to be taken advantage of by their agents or anyone else working for them. Establishing a good relationship with a real estate company means having an understanding that you will mutually benefit each other. For example, the real estate company you want to partner with may offer perks that will help you make money, but you also need to bring your own skills to the company so that you can also help THEM profit. It’s a give and take relationship and really, it’s a business contract you are forming. Don’t just accept the first offer that comes along. Make sure you find a great company you believe can offer you the assistance you need while you can also help that very company become more successful.
Find A Company With A Great Reputation
When you work for any particular real estate company, your potential clients will already have formed an opinion about you before they ever meet you. Some real estate companies have a great reputation and so people will expect you to be the best of the best. Other real estate companies have a poor reputation and so people will be untrusting of you even before they have a phone call with you. A company can give a negative or positive first impression, so if you can find a real estate company that is involved in the community and is well liked by most people in the area, that would be a great head start for you.
How Important Is Customer Service?
Real estate is all about customer service, and you only get paid for positive results. If serving others and providing great service to others is not something that is important to you, than you are in for a world of trouble in this industry. Finding a company who places customer service as a top priority is crucial. When you are looking into any real estate company, find out how they treat their customers before, during, and after any services provided. If the company you decide to work with does not share your passion for great customer service, and doesn’t provide the tools and resources to ensure customer satisfaction is a priority, you should think twice before signing up with them.
Go With A Strong Listing Company
When you’re new to the industry, having a strong listing companies can really help get your career started as it just about ensures you will have the opportunity to work with lots of buyers. As a new agent, you’ll mostly be working buyers first. The more buyers you meet, the better, because developing a relationship with them will be a very important part of future growth. If those buyers have a superb buying experience with you, they will likely refer you to friends and family, which is just about the best referral business you can hope for. Those buyers will often come back to you even years later when they need to buy or sell again. Relationship building is absolutely key as a new real estate professional.
So, what is a listing, anyway? Essentially, a listing is a contract with a seller to exclusively represent him or her in selling a home. These listings often receive a very high number of phone calls and responses from advertisements for a home in the listings. That means, you won’t have to spend as much time trying to drum up your own business as you’ll start receiving warm leads calling YOU.
Listing agents are some of the most successful agents out there, so if you can get in with a real estate company that does well with listings, you’ll get off to a good start.
Researching And Narrowing Down Potential Companies
So, to recap, here is what you want to look for in a real estate company:
- Great reputation
- Customer service is a high priority
- Strong listing company
Once you’ve found some companies that meet all of this criteria, you should start doing some deeper research. Here are the areas I recommend you look into while researching real estate companies:
What Is Their Market Share? You know the saying, “numbers don’t lie?” That applies here. Every real estate company claims they are the best, but what do the numbers say? Find out how many homes they list, how many sell, how many fail to sell, how many sales are made, etc. Once you gather data for all the companies you’re interested in, you’ll be able to see who is the most successful.
Check With Third Party Sources. You’ll want to make sure you get information from third parties. One place I recommend is the local board of realtors. This is a great place to get market share information and even a good place to snoop around about a company’s overall reputation.
Check The Number Of Agents. Be extra careful analyzing data for agencies that have a very high number of agents working for them. While companies with lots of agents may have a very high market share, that market share may be diluted among the large workforce, meaning not a whole lot of agents are handling a larger volume of sales. This can lead to a rather dismal learning environment.
Observations From The Field. What areas and what types of properties do you wish to sell? Take a drive around the areas you want to represent and pay close attention to properties for sale that you yourself would want to sell. Do you notice any sort of theme? See the same faces or same company names on the signs? That could be telling you something.
Try To Find A Company That Advertises Frequently. When you are a brand new agent, you likely don’t have much of a client base yet, if any at all. Companies that do a lot of advertising often are able to solicit net business through phone calls, website contact forms, and other methods of lead collection. This will vastly help you get started in the industry. There are many real estate companies that do not advertise at all and this this type of company may make it more difficult for new realtors to drum up new business.
This is all research you should do before you ever sit down to talk with anyone. Be prepared and have your concerns ready to be answered. Many brokers and company managers focus quite a bit on recruiting new agents, and they will attempt to “sell” you on why their company is the best to work for. Don’t allow your emotions and excitement to cloud your judgement. Do your research and be ready to see through the sales pitch.
Killing The Interview
When you sit down to actually have an interview, it’s important to be prepared. For starters, you should have a great cover letter and resume. There are many services that exist which can help you prepare a resume that truly stands out among the rest.
You should be well groomed and well dressed, know some of the basic facts about the company you want to work with (when they were founded, what their mission statement is, what properties they specialize in, etc.), and you should have some of your own questions and concerns ready to be asked. It’s also a good idea to have some prepared answers ready for some of the more frequent or tougher questions such as “what is your greatest weakness” or “why do you want to get into real estate?”
An interview is usually a first impression and like it or not, human nature is to make a lot of assumptions about people during our first impressions. So, for your first impression, you want to look and act the part of a successful person.
Ranking Your Choices Of Real Estate Companies
If everything goes well, you should hopefully have at least a few real estate companies to choose from. It’s important to put yourself into a position where YOU get to decide which company you work with, not the other way around. Only you can decide what is the most important for you, but a good rule of thumb is create a list of about 5 to 10 things that are most important to you in a real estate company. Then, rank each of those individual items for each company you are considering. Whichever scores the highest may deserve an even closer look.
A Few Last Considerations
If you’re still having trouble deciding, a few other things you may want to look into are things such as ongoing training, mentoring, or coaching programs that can help you grow your career at an even faster rate. Are you interested in tuition reimbursement, insurance plans, retirement plans, etc.? These are all considerations you should also take into effect.
Hopefully you found some of these tips helpful and best of luck to you as you get your career started!