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New Agents – Listen Up!

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Tags: becoming a real estate agent, becoming an agent, Career in Real Estate, listening, New agent, sales skills

One of the things that makes me the most nervous when I am chatting with new or prospective Real estate agents, is if they talk without listening.  If you are going to build your career in real estate, one of the key skills that you need to develop is… Listening.

Listening is a skill that has long been overlooked in Real Estate Sales, and it is one of the reasons that many REALTORs don’t succeed.  Our job as Real Estate Agent’s is to critically analyse the task that our buyers and sellers give us, and help these folks achieve their objectives.  When they succeed at their goals, we succeed at ours.

Too many REALTORs make the mistake of trying to find solutions for clients before they truly understand what the objectives are.  Listening with the intent to solve is great, but you need to complete the listening before you can solve.  In fact, a great strategy to make sure you are listening is to repeat back items that you are hearing – and also see if you can distill a few key objectives out while repeating.

For real estate agents – we get a few key opportunities to put our listening skills on display – here are some of the best:

1. Listing and Buyer appointments – An obvious time to be listening, but it is important that you come prepared with effective questions to allow you opportunities to listen to the true objectives of your clients in these meetings.
2. Showing Houses – While showing houses, it is important that you not only listen to the comments and questions that your clients are directing to you, but also to each other.  Clues regarding their objectives are all around you in this situation.
3. Writing Offers – Although clients will have a wide range of experience with the offer process, they will still be offering cues as to what the most important elements of the deal will be.  Listening to their cues will be the key to helping them achieve their goals!

Some REALTORs will argue that they are “Problem Solvers”.  My argument would be that the best agents are “Problem Avoiders”, as they listen to their clients closely at every opportunity to ensure that problems don’t arise!

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