Your First Year in Real Estate

Author: Zeller, Dirk
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year Published: 2001
Rating:
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In Your First Year In Real Estate, author Dirk Zeller, CEO of Real Estate Champions offers a game plan for new agents to navigate the pitfalls of the real estate business.

When the book was published back in 2001, there were 730,000 Realtors. (Today, there are almost 1.5 million and at least 2 million licensed real estate agents.) The median income was $43,500 for all Realtors while the median income for brokers or broker associates was $63,100.

Zeller starts with the basics - selecting the right company, time management and organization, building relationships with managers and coworkers, sales skills (meaning learning how to cold call), doing listing appointments and setting goals.

Zeller takes an extremely pessimistic view of building client relationships. He says there are 4 types of clients: terrific clients who respect who you are and what you do, no clue clients who refuse to face the fact that their homes are worth less than they think, information only clients who want to use you for your expertise but won’t buy, and the distrust everyone clients who believe everyone is out to get them. By breaking prospects into these categories, Zeller completely ignores the stages of the buying process.

Zeller also mentions that agents have 3 strikes against them.

1. Clients make unreasonable requests - like asking them to show “listings at any time of day or night, even if they have no serious intentions of buying”
2. 24 hour access - agents make themselves available 24/7 so clients believe
3. Haphazard work habits - agents must treat their careers with respect rather than showing up when they feel like it

I’d say these “strikes” are really symptoms of two deeper problems:

1. Real estate agents have a poor understanding of how to run a successful business. They worry about being all things to everyone while they struggle to scrape together enough money to pay the bills each month. They get so consumed with the day-to-day activities that things like paperwork get pushed off until later. And rarely do they spend time strategically thinking about and planning how to grow their business.
2. Real estate agents are horrible at managing client expectations. If they’d stop treating clients as the enemy and start working with clients to educate them and form partnerships based on the clients’ specific problems, these issues wouldn’t be so prominent.

Zeller also focuses on cold calling as the primary activity of prospecting. While he admits that few people like to make cold calls, he’s a big proponent of using scripts and maintaining momentum. To him, prospecting = sales, so you need to sell, sell, sell. This is one of the biggest problems I have with books on real estate marketing - and sales in general. Sales isn’t about pitching to prospects. It isn’t about reading from a script. It’s about genuinely listening to prospects’ concerns and tailoring your offerings to their needs. If you can’t do that - if you offer a one size fits all solution - you’ll never differentiate yourself from other agents.

Also, prospects and clients know when you’re using a sales script - your voice completely changes and you’re focused on what you’ll say next rather than what your prospect’s concerns. Many new sales models - like Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling - have been proven to be more effective than simply memorizing scripts, yet virtually all real estate books continue to fuel the myths that in order to sell, you need to follow the scripts.

In another example, Zeller observes that “FSBOs can be uncomfortable for real estate agents to work with. They can often be extremely rude and inconsiderate.” No kidding. From the FSBO’s perspective, it’s pretty obvious that you are trying to sell them something - the negative belief that they’ll never sell their home themselves. Do you react kindly to the credit card telemarketer who interrupts your dinner? Now, imagine if they tried telling you that there was no way you’d be able to pay your bills without it. Wouldn’t that irritate you?

I was also disappointed that the book didn’t go into marketing techniques like choosing a niche market and focusing on how to meaningfully differentiate yourself from your competition.

On a good note, Zeller is quick to dispel the myth that sales volume means an agent is the best of the best. I’ve never understood why agents are so quick to say they sold $15 million last year. You never hear other professionals say that - what doctor says they did $12 million in surgeries last year? It changes the focus from client centric to agent centric, meaning that good professionals sell their services by explaining what benefits and return on investment their clients got from working with them. If a consultant helped a business grow by 50% in 9 months, that’s client-focused. If a consultant brags how much he billed the company to do so, that’s company-focused. With real estate, the grand total of how much you sold doesn’t say anything about the results you’ve gotten for your clients (ie you consistently sell homes at 10% above asking price) or how satisfied they were with working with you.

While this book has some merits - like how agents should choose a firm to work for - it still perpetuates agent-focused selling rather than customer-focus marketing.

The book is laid out in 12 chapters with 2 appendices: state realtor associations and additional reading, and a glossary. It’s a good starting point for new agents, but it probably won’t answer all your questions.