Being a real estate agent requires many skills. It is not easy to keep current clients happy, find the perfect home for new clients, and try to expand your customer base at the same time. It is also difficult to be in such a competitive environment – let’s face it, you don’t get paid unless you sell. Even the best marketing coaches struggle with professional burnout. How can you become one of the best real estate agents and not deal with burnout?
Real Estate Agent Burnout: Don’t Be Afraid to Talk About It
No one likes to admit that they don’t have it all together – but burnout is a very real problem for real estate agents. In fact, up to 7 out of 10 agents frequently face professional burnout. Here are some potential causes:
- Not being able to turn off work: When you work from your cell phone it can be difficult to turn off the obsessive checking of email. Buying or selling a home is a stressful time and clients have concerns and questions at all hours of the day.
- Lack of control: Real estate is a very unpredictable profession. From shaky economies to real estate booms, it can be difficult to not know when your next sale will come.
- Work overload: Ever hear the saying “make hay while the sun shines”? The same is true for real estate agents – when the real estate market is booming, you get no off time. That can make a work-life balance difficult.
- Lack of community: Although the daily work of a real estate agent obviously involves working with clients, it can be difficult since these connections are not long-term.
Learn From the Best Marketing Coaches at Parkbench
Parkbench is a relationship and referral-based marketing platform that gives real estate professionals the tools to leverage connections into clients. Parkbench’s client success team coaches agents to help convert on average at a rate 10 to 20 times better than with cold internet leads. As some of the best marketing real estate coaches in the business, the team knows how to create a predictable routine:
- Be Proactive
A highly effective agent knows that they can’t be passive – you can’t just sit around and wait for clients to come to you. By putting yourself out there, you will be seen as having initiative and energy.
Not only is this important while searching for referrals, but you will still need to be proactive with leads. It is up to you to handle issues before they become deal breakers.
Pro Tips
- Think about the questions your buyers might have.
- Create an FAQ list to help you answer them.
- Prepare for home inspection problems before they happen.
- Put People First
An effective agent puts relationships before sales. It can be difficult to change your
mindset about sales, especially in uber-competitive brokerage firms. However, in order
to have solid relationships with clients, they need to know that they come first.
Pro Tips:
- Schedule meetings ahead of time – and stick to those appointments.
- Ask questions and listen.
- Try to understand your clients. Everyone is in a different situation when they sell their homes – are they looking for the quickest sale or the highest price? Be open to where they are at.
- Put your relationships before your commission.
- Network to build solid relationships with the people in your community. You can even position yourself as an effective local leader. Some platforms help you form connections with local businesses in your area and then leverage those connections to make sales. (Parkbench is one such platform that focuses on helping real estate professionals.)
- Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Things
It is easy to just keep doing what feels comfortable. But as a real estate agent, you have to change up how you do things to keep up with the changing times. Technology alone has changed real estate drastically in the last 10 years.
Pro Tips:
- Know your demographic enough to know what works for them. Pushing an Instagram marketing campaign will not pay off if your key demographic is a crowd of 55-year-olds and older.
- Get to know your community enough to know the needs of the people around you. You can’t truly work at solving problems until you understand them.
- Embrace technology. That concept can sometimes make agents shudder. However, there are some pretty awesome apps and software that can make your life so much easier. Take the time to understand the goals of the tech to make it work for you.
Find Out More Tips From the Best Marketing Coaches
Learn about how to put people first and keep making those community connections: