5 STEPS TO DEVELOPING A POWERFUL MINDSET FOR REAL ESTATE SUCCESS
Introduction:
The most important real estate you will ever deal with is the space between your ears.
Your mindset can be your greatest ally and asset; it can also be your downfall. Technology might be able to virtually stage an empty room, but only you can furnish yourself with the proper state of mind.
Fortunately, there is more advice than ever before as to how to do this. Gone are the days when cultivating personal growth was considered ‘New Age’ or ‘alternative' in the real estate business.
Some of the biggest names in real estate have developed mindset theories: Barbara Corcoran, Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet’s business partner) have both released books on cultivating a mindset necessary for real estate success.
Carol Dweck and Marianne Williamson are not real estate agents but both have published books that have attained biblical status amongst real estate agents.
The internet is loaded with testimonials from agents across the globe who credit Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and Williamson’s Manifesting Abundance with giving them the fresh perspective and mental advantage required to become successful real estate agents.
There is a great deal of common ground between the most popular and proven mindset theories. We've poured through them and identified five steps to change your mind for the better.
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| Our Image Enhancement edit is much more than an apt metaphor for how the right mindset can dispel the clouds hanging over your real estate career. Agents who develop a mindset for service are more likely to turn the Before image into the After for their clients. It's a fast, efficient, and inexpensive means of transforming marketing materials from drab to fab. |
1) Set Self-pity Aside
Barbara Corcoran, of Shark Tank fame, might be the most well-known real estate professional in America. With a net worth of over $100 million, she is certainly among the wealthiest.
Before becoming a real estate agent, Barbara worked a string of 20 dead-end jobs by the time she turned 23.
This early start seemed to indicate Barbara was destined for failure. She saw it as a blessing that taught her how to overcome the fear of rejection.
Asked for the one mental habit that separates her (and other successful people) from the rest of the pack, Barbara did not have to think for long: Don't waste time feeling sorry for yourself!
"The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend time feeling sorry for themselves," Corcoran told inc.com. "When they take a hit, they don't take long to get back up."
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| In this image from her Facebook page, Barbara Corcoran poses with her latest book that talks about how a winning mindset can make business miracles happen. |
2) Develop An Attitude Of Abundance
Depending on which theory you subscribe to, an ‘Abundance Mindset’ is also known as a ‘Growth Mindset’ – some refer to it as a free will versus determinism, others refer to it as an unlimited versus a fixed outlook.
Whatever you want to call it, the Attitude of Abundance is the belief that there is plenty to go around. Rather than seeing a scarcity of listings and leads that must be snapped up before the others get to them, the agent with an Attitude of Abundance believes there is more than enough business out there for everyone.
This allows them to stay focused upon the things they need to do to deliver excellence, rather than wasting energy devising ways to undercut their competitors.
The concentration upon quality, rather than the frantic quest for quantity can be a nice point of difference in a field where many see their farm areas as a finite universe, with only a fixed number of listings to go around.
Such an overly-competitive, even desperate mindset is probably the most common in the real estate business. But it is unhealthy in the long run and can lead an agent down the path to burnout.
It is a time-honored truth in any business, that if you do a good job over an extended period, the business will come your way.
3) Focus On Service, Not On Yourself
This might be the most instrumental and least-natural aspect of cultivating a growth mindset for real estate agents.
Almost no one gets into real estate because of humanitarian concerns. It’s a capitalist industry that offers an extremely lucrative upside to those who get things right.
Ironically, perhaps the best way to get it right is to focus on helping others, rather than on your commissions or sales targets.
Supposing you hope to win a listing from a developer. Before meeting with them, forget about how much you stand to make if your pitch is successful and they assign you to be the seller’s agent.
Put everything you have into a listing presentation that shows how you will do more than anyone else to sell the parcels in this project.
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| Don’t wait until you’ve been awarded a developer’s project. Go into your pitch meeting with a Development Site Plan as part of your proposal. The developer will immediately be impressed by your diligence and your commitment to serve. |
For a small upfront outlay, you can go into your meeting with a customized Development Site Plan, as well as some Aerial Edits of the site that show you how you can make this project pop compared to others on the market.
If you don’t win the listing, you are out a few bucks. But with an abundance mindset in place you know that opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one on the way. And the effort you put into your presentation is bound to impress developers in the long run.
Understanding this, you’ll catalyze a powerful new momentum in your real estate career.
Like Jackson, the agent Inman featured, put it:
“I’ve really grown in my awareness that I’m here to be of service to people. I’m getting that opportunity — I’m getting more of those opportunities because I’m able to help so many more people now.”
4) Do The Things You Had Avoided Doing Before
When you anchor your attention upon serving others, you’ll find that it becomes easy to do the things you did not like doing before.
In real estate, this almost unanimously means cold calling.
In Jackson’s case, his switch to selflessness unexpectedly opened up the brave new world of cold-calling.
When he put his ego aside and focused exclusively on how he could help the person at the other end of the line, his distaste for cold calling vanished. It seemed to work like magic.
“I never had someone screaming at me or hanging up on me, or any of those things that I was afraid would happen. In fact, the opposite happened; I was having great conversations, and I was feeling in tune with what I was doing.”
5) The Buffett Formula: ‘Go To Bed Smarter Than When You Woke Up’
This is a direct quote from Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger. Between the two of them, they credit constant learning as a cornerstone to their runaway success as investors.
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| Warren Buffett’s billionaire business partner Chalie Munger credits his success with going to bed smarter every night than he was when he woke in the morning. |
If you take Munger’s quote literally and apply it to every day of your life – especially in the field of real estate, you are bound to experience a supernova in what you know about the world.
Soon, as you reflect at the end of every day over what you learned over the past 24 hours, you will find how much you love learning.
That knowledge that will accrue naturally because of this process will make you a much more effective agent.
Service Plus Learning: Your One-two Punch For Success
Consider this scenario that demonstrates just how well a mindset of service combined with the practice of ongoing learning works together:
Did you know that NAR’s Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report has just listed millennials as composing 43% of property buyers in 2022? In 2021 they only made up 37% of this list.
Now, among all buyers, Millennials (born 1981 – 1996) report the strongest preference for Virtual Tours when looking for property.
However, in 2021, a study we conducted found that only 6% of US listings contained a Virtual Tour.
As a real estate agent focused upon service, once you learned this information, it would be easy to recognize that a great way to serve your clients in the upcoming year would be to provide Virtual Tours with all your listings.
After all, why not connect the seller you represent to the country's biggest real estate buying demographic?
The agent who was uninterested in service, might not make this connection.
The agent who was uninterested in constant learning, would never even have come across the information necessary to discover this little-known marketing advantage.
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