A Rewarding Real Estate Career for You
Real estate careers can be very lucrative and very rewarding on the personal level. A real estate career must be undertaken only if it is something that you are sure you are going to love. The number of hours that you will have to work could exceed 100 per week. However, if you love what you do, a real estate career won't seem like work most of the time. Furthermore, remember that those hours are all your own. If you decide one afternoon that you'd like to go take a three-hour lunch with a friend of yours, you can do that. You choose what day or days of the week to give yourself off. If you have children, you can always be there for their school functions or sporting events. So the fact that you will often work a 16-hour day (which you must be prepared to do if you want success), and may not get home until after midnight sometimes, gets offset by the fact that you are in control of your own destiny and in command of your own time and personal life.
Real estate careers mean not punching a clock or working hard just to make someone else a lot of money while you collect a relative pittance by contrast. A real estate career means that you can have all the freedom you want, but with great freedom comes great responsibility. You must be willing to spend a huge amount of time of time marketing, getting to know your clients, getting to know your builders and what they are building, and showing homes. Your real estate career must be what defines who you are professionally. This career is nothing for part-timers nor for those who just want a 40 hour per week job with weekends off. A real estate career is just that: a career. It's not a job. You must treat it like it's your very own business that you founded yourself, even though you'll probably be working through an established real estate agency.
Being in a real estate sales career means that in between clients, you are unemployed. That's the way you need to think of it. Every time a deal closes and you get paid, you must go out and get more business. You have to put the pressure on yourself to keep finding new business or your big commission that you just made won't last very long, and soon enough it will all be spent away and you'll be broke. A successful real estate sales career therefore demands that you have tremendous personal initiative.
Success in a real estate sales career also means that you must make money through your knowledge. As with all sales careers, you will make money with your mouth and your showmanship skills. A sales career of any kind is not about physical or manual labor. It's about using your head to gain all of the knowledge that you need about what you are selling and about using great communication skills. When you are showing a home to someone, you have to know everything about it. What kind of floors are these? What kind of wood was used in the cabinetry? Does it have central air? What kind of windows are in the place? What's the heating system like? If you are going to sell a home that is being built, you have to work very closely with your builders to know everything that's going into the home, so that the buyers know how much they want to spend or can afford to spend.
By being knowledgeable of what your builders are doing and by ensuring them that you'll give them plenty of work throughout the year, you can get your clients more house and better quality materials at the best possible prices. When builders don't need to hire seasonally and don't have to make up for lack of work with higher pricing on the few jobs they get, they can keep their own costs down for each job and pass those savings on to the buyers of the homes. It's up to you in your real estate career to work these deals out, to develop a loyal relationship with a builder to correctly inform buyers of what is going to be going into the house in terms of features and quality of materials.
Real estate sales careers are for those people who have personal initiative and great drive but who also love to help other people. The name of the game is not fooling people but helping them get into the best possible house in line with what they desire and can afford. If you do this, you will make a big pile of money. Your work will be valued and there will be no reason for you to have to cut your commissions up front in order to close a deal. You should never have to entice buyers with discounts off of your commissions if you are doing quality work for them.
Through personal drive, personal initiative to gain the right knowledge, and a burning desire to help other people, you can make a real estate career into a great way of life. You can make very large amounts of money, set all of your own hours, and always have time for your family while doing something you love to do.