5 Steps to Becoming a Real Estate Agent and Starting a Successful Career

While you will require a license to perform transactions as a real estate agent, becoming one and creating a successful firm entails many components, such as knowing how to generate leads, create business plans, and manage marketing activities. To keep ahead of the competition, you must continue to learn about the property market and industry trends. Read on as we walk you through the steps of becoming a real estate agent, as well as providing ideas and useful articles to help you start and grow your real estate career.

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1. Consider What It Means to be a Real Estate Agent

Before you embark on a career as a real estate agent, you need to consider whether it will be the best career choice for you. Real estate requires you to adapt to flexible work hours, have top-notch organizational and communication skills, and be interested in the housing market’s statistics and trends.

When considering a real estate career, think about how much money you will earn and how much you will invest back into your business. You will spend money to get your license, create and distribute marketing materials, and generate leads, so it’s best to have a cushion of cash when you start your career. In addition, you’ll need to put money aside to invest back into your business.

As far as the money you’ll earn, a real estate agent’s salary is not necessarily consistent, especially when you first enter the industry. Since your salary is based 100% on commission at the majority of brokerage firms, you may have months where you earn more money than others. You will also be responsible for your own health insurance and taxes.

Did you know? All Realtors are real estate agents, but not all real estate agents are Realtors. To become a Realtor, you must be a member of the National Association of Realtors (NAR).  

2. Go Through the Licensing Process

The next step on how to become a real estate agent is getting your license. You must possess a real estate license to legally provide real estate services to buyers and sellers. Every state differs in their requirements to be a real estate agent, including the number of prelicensing hours, legal qualifications, exam structure, and application process.

Here are the basic steps and links to articles that can tell you more about the licensing process:

1. Review the Legal Requirements for Your State

2. Complete Real Estate Prelicensing Coursework

3. Pass Your Real Estate Licensing Exam

4. Find a Sponsoring Brokerage

5. Submit Your Real Estate Application

3. Organize & Set Up Real Estate Business Tools

While you can add “licensed real estate agent” to your resume after earning your license, you must do much more to be considered a successful real estate agent. Daily activities include communicating with clients, conducting transactions, generating leads, organizing your schedule, planning for your business, and creating marketing materials. Your real estate broker should help you set up tools and systems, but there are also many resources available to assist you with becoming a real estate professional and furthering your career.

Business Plans

Creating business plans is part of being a small business owner. As independent contractors, real estate agents own their business and are their own bosses. To succeed, you must have a business plan to set the foundational goals, create income goals, organize finances, and strategize to build your real estate business. In addition, your business plan should include the following:

• Mission statement
• SWOT analysis to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
• Specific and measurable goals
• Marketing strategies
• Lead generation strategies
• Income goal
• Time to revisit your plan

If you have not started thinking about any plans, it’s time to get moving. Visit our articles and download the free templates to begin strategizing plans to create a successful real estate business:

Lead Generation

Generating leads is a quintessential step to become a real estate agent and build a profitable business. Agents can purchase leads, or they can be generated organically through friends and family, also known as your sphere of influence (SOI), social media, or word of mouth. It’s important to devise a plan for how you will consistently gather new leads and nurture past clients to keep them coming back and referring you to their SOI.

You can  work with lead generation companies like Placester, BoldLeads, and Zillow Premier Agent to supplement your generation efforts. These companies enable agents and brokers to build real estate websites, post listings, optimize social media posts, establish email automation, and advertise.

BoldLeads, in particular, is an excellent option for agents who wish to purchase exclusive buyer and seller leads. Choose your target farm area by ZIP code to start getting leads. Then, engage your leads using websites and landing pages, automated email campaigns, pay-per-click advertising on Google and Facebook, and nurture funnels. The BoldLeads customer relationship manager (CRM) also assists with organizing and prioritizing which leads are most likely to convert.

Client Management

Another important tool to have when you’re learning how to become a real estate agent is a client management system. When you’re first starting out as a real estate agent, you may feel like a spreadsheet will suffice to organize your contacts and follow-ups. But as you continue to gain leads, have current clients, and nurture past clients, a spreadsheet will be more difficult to manage and may cause clients to fall through the cracks.

Luckily, there are tools available, known as client relationship management (CRM) software, to efficiently manage all of your clients in one place. The main function of CRMs is to organize your client contacts and help you maintain consistent communication with them via email, text, and phone calls.  

Marketing

After you’ve developed your real estate business and marketing plans, you need to follow through by creating marketing materials. Marketing materials establish your brand and help you target an intended audience to generate leads. Real estate branding items like a logo, headshot, and slogan should be among the first things you create and distribute as you become a real estate agent.

Additional marketing efforts can include printed materials like business cards or direct mail or an online presence using a website or social media. It is best to do a combination of print and online marketing to give your real estate business as much exposure as possible.

Here are some of the most fruitful marketing materials for real estate agents:

• Business cards
• Social media
• Website and landing pages
• Advertisements
• Open house signs

4. Get to Know Your Market

Part of the process of becoming a real estate agent is learning about the real estate market. Good agents provide clients with general information regarding the national housing market. However, successful agents have expertise in both the national market and their target market area, so they can provide clients with insightful information to guide them in their transactions.

To learn about the housing market, read real estate publications regularly and compare current statistics to trends from the past. This will provide you with a better understanding of how real estate trends change over time and give you the ability to predict the housing market in the future.

5. Embark on a Successful Real Estate Career, but Keep Learning

Once you have planned and compiled all the systems you need to be successful, implement these tools to embark on a successful real estate career. The key is to be consistent and continually improve on these tools by adding new methods of lead generation and marketing. Revisit your plans and tactics to determine the return on investment and lead conversion rates to change or add to the current strategies you are using.

Bottom Line

Getting your real estate license is only one step toward becoming a real estate agent. While you do need a license to complete transactions, lead generation, marketing, business plans, and market knowledge are essential components of truly becoming a real estate professional. Include the above tips in your strategy to not only become a real estate agent, but, more so, a successful agent.

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