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The Three Personalities of a Successful Real Estate Agent

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Sixty percent of real estate agents get out of the business only two to three years after getting into it. In the most recent Secrets of Top Selling Agents webinar, speaker and nationally certified real estate business coach, Brad Korn, says most agents can avoid becoming one of those statistics by understanding how to turn their job into something they love.

Korn has been a real estate agent for the past 25 years, has sold over 2,200 properties and has two national business coach certifications. Korn has co-authored with best-selling business author, Michael E. Gerber, to produce the book, The E-Myth Real Estate Agent: Why Most Real Estate Businesses Don’t Work and What to do About it, modeled after Gerber’s best selling book, The E-Myth, published in the 1980s. The E-Myth was written to explain why so many small businesses fail, but did not focus on real estate. However, in the webinar, Korn shared how he applied Gerber’s principles to real estate and went from selling three homes a year to selling more than 180.

What Is The E-Myth Real Estate Agent?

Applying the original concepts in the The E-Myth, the reader sees illustrations of why small businesses potentially fail. Gerber explains the three personalities present in all businesses and how businesses can fail by not incorporating all of them. Those personalities are:

  • The Entrepreneur — the Visionary (equity). Sees business as something that focuses solely on the customer experience.
  • The Technician — the Do’er (paycheck). Sees their business as a place in which people work to produce inside results, which in turn produces employee income. They fail to see the big picture of their business and what it produces and why.
  • The Manager — the Enabler (profit driven). Systematizes his/her business and sees business as a goal, something outside themselves, as a business, not an extension of themselves. They can make objective decisions, not emotional ones.

Korn took Gerber’s “personality principles” and adapted them to the real estate industry. Like the original examples, most agents only acknowledge the technician personality in their business and don’t understand that real estate is also about making the customer’s life easier, better and more positive. They don’t run the business like a business, but instead run it as an extension of themselves. Technicians also tend to focus on themselves and what they need to make to ensure their fees are paid, but not on the customer or the customer experience. This drives customers away, especially those who are looking for a strongly positive emotional experience.

The Solution:

“Love what you do and it won’t feel like work. It sounds simple, and almost cliché, but it works,” Korn recommends.

“Get focused on getting out of the technician role and into bringing all three personalities into the business. There are pluses and minuses for each personality, but a successful agent needs to be all three.”

According to Korn, “the technician starts with the present and looks forward to an uncertain future, hoping to keep things as good as they are, but not sure how to do more.” When an agent integrates all three personalities, they can create a well-defined future image of who and where they want to be in one, five or ten years. Then, they need to reverse-engineer that image. An agent should ask, “What do I have to do now to make sure I achieve that vision in the time frame I’ve set for myself?” You can’t create a profitable and happy future if all you’re doing now is worrying about paying your bills and real estate fees.

In addition to this, the technician has a fragmented vision of their world and their business. They put out temporary fires and deal with everything as though only price, not customer satisfaction, mattered most. Their response to any problem is often to lower or change a price, not to deal with the real issue — like timely response to questions or the number of open houses they’ve scheduled. Agents think, “I’ll reduce my commission and make my clients happy,” when what their customers really want is to be heard, for the agent to be more accessible to them, or to get more regular updates and communications from the agent. The technician agent is not tuned in to what their customers want or expect.

The reality is, you must envision your business in its entirety. How does the business look as a whole? How does it operate and act? Does it do what it’s supposed to do? Are you creating a fantastic experience for your client and making your interaction with them meaningful? Once you see your business as a business, not an extension of yourself, you can begin to implement systems to plan for the future.

To learn the rest of Korn’s tips for putting successful real estate systems into practice, watch the full webinar. For more free real estate education including best practices, visit Secrets of Top Selling Agents. Be sure to sign up for the upcoming webinar, “How to Triple Your Business by Using the Power of Three,” featuring Denny Grimes on August 24th at 1:00 PM ET/10:00 AM PT.

For more information, visit connect.homes.com.

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