Wake Up Unemployed: How To Succeed in Real Estate

Every agent wants to succeed in real estate—no one joins just to drop out. So why do so many realtors fail in their first two years? What can be done to keep you in the industry and boost your success?

The sad truth is that most agents fail at real estate because they first fail to treat their new career like a real job—they just don’t put in the kind of work (or the quality of work) that nets them real success. What real estate appears to be to an outsider looking in—freedom to choose your own schedule or be your own boss—ends up falling short of the reality: real estate is hard work. Still, it can be very lucrative hard work for those willing to approach it correctly.

Every day you wake up as a real estate agent, you wake up unemployed. This means that you have to have the mindset of finding new business and spending your time focused on making a profit every day—in other words: do your habits generate income? If you’re spending your valuable time doing things that don’t translate into actual money, you don’t have a job—you have a hobby.

Want to Succeed in Real Estate? Approach Every Day Like You Don’t Have A Job

I could go on and on about why real estate agents fail, but it’s more important to focus on how you can succeed. If you wake up each day hungry for new leads, new clients, and new deals and recognize that you’ll get nothing at the end of the day if you don’t generate the income yourself, you’re more likely to get to work.

If you spend a week generating no income for yourself, you might as well have been on vacation—you’d have enjoyed it more. For that matter, working a minimum-wage job would have netted you more money than you got “being a real estate agent.” It’s no wonder so many fail out of the industry inside their first two years.

You can be better than that. You can generate income. Identify the sources of income inside your business, identify the activities and habits that make those things happen, and then go after those activities until you make money. It sounds simplistic—but most agents just don’t do the things that make them money. Why not? Because income-generating activities are uncomfortable, hard, or both.

Master Your Mindset and You’ll Master Making Money

There’s no room in your head for a laid back approach to this business. Find a sustainable way of working hard to keep yourself from burning out, but work hard. If you’ve chosen to be a real estate agent for your career, you have to start treating it like a real job: clock your hours, calculate how much money your activities have made you in the past month, and hold yourself accountable to grow your income and business.

If you approach each day as though you were out of work and your efforts were all that stood between you and your bills, how would you perform differently? Get hungry. Change your mindset and change your relationship with money—your activities have to start generating money every day.If your work doesn’t make you money, it’s a hobby. One way I’ve found to increase my success is to track my daily habits with a habit tracker. Check out Workman’s Daily Success Habits Tracker here for free. It’ll help keep you accountable and generate income instead of doing work that looks good but earns you nothing.

Up Next: Stop Trading Your Personal Life for Success in Real Estate