We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…
Yesterday, I spent some time with a guy who is thinking about getting into the real estate business as an agent.
I’ve written some about this before, which you can read here and various other places around the blog. But I found myself giving some new advice which I think is worth sharing with you guys, too.
I told him to do the following before committing to a career as an agent:
- Make a list of any / all the rich people you know
- Set up meetings with all of them
- Do not attempt to impress them with your real estate knowledge; you will fail and they will not trust you
- Instead, at each meeting, ask questions to try to ascertain whether your contacts have an appetite for buying real estate and, if so, what kind, how much, and when
- Take copious notes, including getting a good email address
- Pull together all the notes into a spreadsheet or database
Once you have all the information in one place, you can begin to consider the following questions:
- Do I have enough of a network to generate enough dealflow for myself in the beginning of my career so that I don’t starve ?
- Which type of real estate do I want to focus on (if all my potential clients are interested in apartments, it’s pretty dumb to focus on industrial, for example)?
- Which areas do I want to focus on?
If you did what you were supposed to do in the interviews, the answers to these questions should be pretty obvious. Now you can decide whether you want to make real estate a career and, if so, which brokerage you want to work with. And, as you begin to find interesting deals, you know exactly to whom to send them.