Can A Real Estate Agent Make $1,000,000 A Year?
You can make $1,000,000 selling Real Estate and there’s more than one way to get there.
In this post, I’m going to address grossing $1M doing traditional “retail sales”.
By retail sales I am referring to representing buyers and sellers acquiring homes to live in (or lease) and not doing development or flipping houses or other adjacent business activities. Here’s how you do it:
“Five days a week have 5 Real Estate Interactions”
When I share this with most agents, the usual reaction is “Huh? What are you talking about?” So let me explain and start with what I mean by a “real estate interaction”.
What I am referring to is finding out someone’s plans to buy, sell or invest in Real Estate. But if you do this by just randomly asking people if they want to buy or sell a house, chances are you won’t be too successful. There has to be some kind of exchange of information for this to be meaningful.
For example, someone asks you “how’s the market” and after the usual comments that agents make you pivot to “how high would prices have to go for you to sell?” to which the other person shares their “make me move” price. Now you know something you didn’t know before.
Often you’ll get a number way above where the market is or will be in the next few years. That’s ok. But sometimes you get actionable information like “I’ll sell if I can find…..” or “I’m planning on retiring next year and will be selling”, or “We’re expecting another child and will need more room” etc, etc.
You’ve had an interaction.
Most of the time you won’t get to the point of interacting either because you haven’t asked the right questions, the other person is just not open, or any number of other reasons.
At this point I want to point out that I am not limiting these interactions to just conversations. This can be email or text with a past client or prospect.
I also want to point out that you have to get to the point that you get some information to count the communication as an interaction.
To make this work, you have to:
Be honest with yourself about whether you have had an interaction or not,
Figure out how many dialogs (conversations, texts, emails) you have to initiate each day to have five interactions, and
Have a dozen or more pivots you can use.
On point three I am not referring to scripts because I am, in general, anti script. What I am referring to is developing a specific framework that you can use to steer the communication to uncovering actionable information or alternately that there is no opportunity. And, more often than not there is no opportunity.
The more you do this, the better you will become at it and eventually be able to pull off your pivots without being too “sales-y”. When you start, you might find it really difficult to get to 25 (five interactions five days a week). Start smaller then, like have 1 interaction. Then one, 3 days a week. Work up to 5*5. Some people get up to 30 or more per week.
HERE’S WHY YOU CAN DO THIS
Almost every agent has at some point in their career worked an Open House. What were you doing at that OH? You were trying to interact with strangers and find out if there is an opportunity. And most agents, if they’ve done enough OHs have gotten some business. So the blueprint for making this work is already in your brain.
HERE’S WHY THIS WORKS
Too many agents limit themselves to working at Real Estate as being limited to certain activities like if they are at an Open House, door knocking, doing a listing presentation etc. Don’t limit yourself. It’s actually pretty easy to get people to talk about our industry. Homeowners are always interested in their property values and what’s going on in the market. Renters are similarly interested in how they can become homeowners or if their rent is going up.
HERE’S HOW I GET PEOPLE TO INTERACT WITH ME
I tell them I’m a Real Estate Broker. That’s it. They almost always ask me a question.
Just remember - opportunity is everywhere.