7 Timeless Skills for Any Real Estate Market

Regardless of how your market is performing, you’ll succeed in real estate if you can master these essential skills.

By Kelle Sparta

The real estate profession changes every day, but the qualities you find in top-performing practitioners do not. The details may shift as technology rolls forward, yet the underlying skills are always the same. If you can master these, you’ll be successful in any market.

Skill 1: Meeting New People

The simple fact is that if you never meet anyone new, you will never have anyone new to sell to. Whether you encounter them for the first time in person, online, or over the phone doesn’t matter. Get one-on-one with them in a conversation about their needs, and you’ve at least started down the path to success.

Skill 2: Making Personal Connections

You don’t have to be the best at everything to succeed in this business. You just have to be competent and likable. People buy from people they like. Develop the ability to connect with your clients and make them trust you, and 90% of your sales process is done. Want a quick way to engender trust? Tell the client something that it’s not in your best interest to tell them. Show them that honesty is more important than anything to you.

Now, this doesn’t mean to tell them that you got sued last week — that will make people nervous. But it could mean mentioning that the houses in another neighborhood have the same amount of space and are less expensive. They know that you get paid more if you sell them a higher-priced house. Showing them something in their best interest instead of yours makes you trustworthy.

Skill 3: Following Up on Every Lead

Follow-up is a big area where agents fail. If you aren’t going to take every lead you get and work it to death, then you’ll never be a top performer. Working every lead until it either closes or is clearly not a lead anymore is critical to building the solid pipeline that’s required to keep your business continually producing. This means that you need a system to make sure nothing gets dropped or forgotten. Throw away your Post-it notes; they should never be used as a place to write down a lead. All leads need to be kept in one place, and all of

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