6 Common Mistakes to Avoid as a New Real Estate Agent

As a new real estate agent, you’re absorbing as much training, information, and observations as you can. Your skills in sales, time management, handling personalities, and growing a business need to be sharp to help you build a real estate career that lasts.

Still, you’re learning the ropes, and mistakes are a natural part of the learning process. What if you could learn from common errors new agents make to help prevent them from happening to you?

What Not to Do as a New Real Estate Agent

Here are 6 of the most common mistakes new agents often make — so you can prevent them from impacting you in the first place.

#1. Not Having a Follow-Up Plan

When it comes to following up with your leads — regardless of where you sourced them — you need to have a solid follow-up plan in place.

It’s not enough to take a “hope for the best approach”; you need to be strategic, methodical, and consistent with your outreach efforts when following up with leads and clients.

Your follow-up plan should consist of email, text, and phone call touchpoints, as well as scripts for each one. You should also anticipate overcoming any objections leads may come back with, which can help shorten potential back-and-forth.

The goal? Ensuring your leads know you’re available to help them, keeping you top-of-mind, and staying in front of leads to drive them to take the next action to get in touch and work with you.

#2. Following Up with Leads Once

Similarly to having a solid follow-up plan, you should never follow up with your leads just once. It’s not uncommon for new agents to try once and then move onto the next lead in their queue.

But giving up too soon means you’re wasting a huge amount of opportunity, so don’t give up. Lead follow-up needs to be a steady drumbeat: don’t let them wonder when they’ll hear from you next.

#3. Taking “No” For an Answer

As you follow up with leads, you may find they push back or decline your efforts. Objections are only natural in any type of sales, regardless of industry. As a new agent, it can be easy to get discouraged by a “no”. Instead of taking “no” as a final answer, reframe it as an opportunity.

Take “no” as a chance to dig deeper, ask more meaningful questions, and remain persistent. After all, you’re the best real estate expert to help and make things happen for the lead or client in question. Stay the course.

#4. Not Having a Lead Nurture Program

Failing to have a lead nurture program is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a new agent.

Without having a program in place, lead nurturing becomes a cumbersome, manual, and easily-forgotten process. As a result, leads can quickly forget about you and follow-up with an agent who’s consistent in their follow-up.

Take advantage of your CRM. Keep your client database clean and broken out by client types, lead status, and other key characteristics. Then, create a lead nurture program accordingly. Use email templates and set up autoresponders and key reminders to ensure your leads have a smooth, seamless nurturing experience.

You’ll stay top-of-mind and have better odds of converting them.

#5. Not Being an Active Listener

While you are the expert on all things real estate, you also need to focus on becoming an expert on exactly what it is your client wants, needs, and their motivations.

Don’t just rattle off your experience, specialties, and latest win — take the time to really listen to what your client needs. Then, ask questions to dig deeper and gain a stronger understanding of their motivations and position. Demonstrate active listening by repeating their answers to them, rephrased. Don’t walk away from the conversation until you’re crystal clear on what your client’s goals are.

Then, blow them away with your skills.

#6. Being Impatient

It’s natural to get discouraged when clients, deals, or lead gen efforts don’t move as quickly as you’d like, and that’s okay.

But a common mistake new real estate agents make as a result of this discouragement? Being impatient and letting impatience affect every other part of their business, leading them to making rash decisions, or giving up too soon.

Lead generation, nurturing, follow-up, and conversion takes time. It’s the nature of the business, as well as nearly any sort of sales environment. This is where opportunity lies to tighten up each of these processes and your skills in these areas.

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