I’m sure you don’t need to be told about the importance of training as an agent. 

Our industry is moving fast, and it doesn’t take long to get left behind. Consumers are becoming more and more educated every year, moved along at an incredible pace by technology and the availability of data, so being an ‘ordinary’ agent will not suffice in the future.

I know that at the moment in the vast majority of markets around Australia and NZ a lot of agents are finding it so easy that training seems futile. But let me assure you that red-hot markets like these never last, and if you are not always working to improve your business you will eventually be found out. The old Warren Buffet quote “only when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked” certainly applies here.

We have agents all around the country and are hearing that many local markets are starting to normalise, with some of the frantic pace we have seen in the last 6 to 9 months coming off the boil (other markets are not there just yet). That means that you as an agent need to be thinking about going back to the fundamentals of how to process your stock and how to secure the stock in the first place.

This is particularly relevant for any newer agents to the industry. In most markets around Australia, if you are less than 5 years into your career as an agent you have never seen a tough market and you don’t truly know what it takes to be a successful agent in those conditions. At the moment it may seem easy, but rest assured it seldom remains this way for a prolonged period. 

At Real For Agents we encourage all of our agents to engage in regular training sessions which we facilitate. We recently had the pleasure of inviting Pancho Mehotra from Frontier Performance to run an internal session for our agents and, for me, this training highlighted the following:

1. It’s important to seek training from a variety of sources - The feedback I received from our agents was excellent in that Pancho delivered content which many of them have never heard before. Many of them had become cynical about training as they felt they had heard the same things over and over for many years, so new content was refreshing and engaging for them.
2. Trainers from outside the industry are great – With a psychology/sales background and experience outside the real estate industry, Pancho came from a space where he could introduce things to us which we may have otherwise missed in our real estate bubble. This reminded me of a session we held some years back delivered by Wayne Bennett. Obviously as a Rugby League coach he had little understanding of being a real estate agent, nonetheless he could translate everything he has learned in professional sports to our team and created some excellent lessons which they could implement. Both professionally and in life in general this is worth noting. 
3. Psychology is a very important factor agents often forget – Pancho’s session focused on the psychology of people and how important it is to understand that as an agent. After all, we are in a pure people business and without the skill to be able to read and communicate with people we will never achieve our full potential. 
4. Invest in yourself – Good agents get this: they invest in marketing themselves and they invest in improving themselves. This could be through training/coaching, exercising, self-improvement and a whole variety of things. I have clearly seen over the years a correlation between those who are willing to invest in themselves and an ability to achieve goals.