At the Florida Realtors Convention, I ran into a former prelicensing student of mine. He has been in the industry for about five years. We were discussing the fact that our local association recently raised its dues. This student said to me, “I wish they would double our association dues so we could get rid of some of the part-timers.”
I pushed back. I said, “I personally don’t think you should have to pay anything to practice your chosen profession. If the only way you can eliminate the competition is to charge more money, you need to step up your game. Didn’t you start off as a part-time agent?” He acknowledged that he did.
I talk to many agents, online and in personal conversations, that believe the best way to elevate the profession is to make it harder to get into the profession. Basically, they are saying, “It would be so much easier if we could just keep everyone else out so I don’t have to work harder to do a better job.”
When Steve Martin was asked how to succeed in the comedy business, he always said, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” He said that people got frustrated with that answer because they wanted to know the secret shortcut. But there isn’t a secret shortcut. You slog through the half-empty night club gigs, and eventually you become a headliner.
So many agents blame their difficulty in this industry on the low barriers to entry, the large number of part-timers, their broker doesn’t provide enough support, or anything else. The real truth is that they can get more business if they do a better job.
Eliminating competition is not what makes agents better. Increasing competition is what makes us better. If a city has one agent for the entire city, how likely is it that they will be mediocre? That agent will make a good living because they have no competition, but they won’t be very good. In a city with 10 agents, some agents will do quite well. Others will go out of business. For the customers, however, the service will be much better. That is magnified when you have thousands of agents in a city, which is what most cities have.
At that same convention, I heard a speaker talk about ways to get more business. I hope my former student was in the audience at that presentation. The speaker offered several ideas that he had done in his own career. It was clear that, as a working agent, he strived to be so good they couldn’t ignore him. He offered a few ideas that I will definitely be implementing in my own business.
I’d like to think that I am already “so good they can’t ignore me.” Perhaps in some ways I am. But that doesn’t mean I can’t get better. There are much better ways of improving than eliminating the competition. If I eliminate the competition, I want it to be because I put them out of business, not that I increased the barriers to be in business.
Please note that Karen Climer has no affiliation with Climer School of Real Estate. Her father, Ron Climer, sold Climer School of Real Estate in 2014. It has since been involved in several mergers and acquisitions and is owned by a large investment company. Karen owns Demetree School of Real Estate in Orlando, Florida.
