Becoming Successful as a Real Estate Agent
Blake Simons, Productivity Coach at Keller Williams Elite Realty, South Asheville
Real estate is an industry that draws many people in, appealing to the entrepreneurial spirit and offering the opportunity to take part in a dynamic field. Unfortunately, many new agents and investors burn out quickly when they discover that the reality isn’t necessarily aligned perfectly with their expectations. Burnout doesn’t have to be inevitable, though, and Blake Simons, a Productivity Coach with Keller Williams Elite Realty, has made a career out of helping new agents navigate the challenges of getting started in the field. He joined us to discuss the skills and supports that new agents can build and utilize to help them be successful from the start.
Simons, who moved to Asheville in childhood and has been here ever since has always had a passion for growth and development. His attraction to real estate grew primarily on the investment side, which he feels offers the opportunity to really see a difference from the start of a project to its conclusion. Similarly, by offering productivity coaching to help newly minted agents grow and develop their skills, he can see real, concrete progress in what he does from day to day.
Productivity coaching, he says, is more or less exactly what it sounds like. “Coaching is what you would expect out of coaching, whether you’re coaching a football team, whether you’re coaching a swim club, or whether you’re coaching somebody in their business,” he says. “You take somebody that has a desire to do something well and you teach them how to do it.”
When people are getting started, Simons says, there are a lot of things that can happen right out of the gate, and a high burnout rate within the first few years. A number of factors contribute to this: number one, according to Simons, is that agents often don’t feel like they’re a part of something. They may feel as if they’re “in it alone,” so to speak, which can make it easy to lose motivation. Simons and his team at Keller Williams work hard to combat that. “We number one believe in our sense of community,” he says, and in helping one another out and holding one another accountable.
Another issue that many new agents run into is not having the right business systems to help them be most successful. Anyone working in the industry, Simons feels, needs to understand what is and isn’t going to help make them successful. “Really what we’re looking at is getting them set up,” he says. “What we first have to show people is how to be a go-getter.” With new agents, that means helping them to establish a system of engagement, then how to grow the group of people with whom they’re engaged in a genuinely valuable way.
This can be a major undertaking, but Simons says that the key is “consistency and accountability.” No one, right out of the gate, is perfectly tenacious and absolutely self-motivated every single day, he says. But by basing his coaching off of personality tests, Simons and his team can work to provide all agents with the same valuable information in different ways that most effectively work for them as individuals.
That, ultimately, is what Simons sees as the most important thing: helping an agent to find their individual methods and motivations to come in, show up, and work hard every single day. Simons and Keller Williams work to provide their agents with enough tools that plugging into them is simple, if the motivation and drive to do so are present.
“Work and preparation will beat luck any day of the week,” Simons says. You will have your lucky moments, but unless you’re on the field playing, so to speak, you’ll never get lucky. Tenacity, then, is what Simons sees as perhaps the most valuable skill in the real estate industry – with the right amount of commitment and the set of tools he and his team provide, any new agent can be successful and fulfilled in their real estate career.
To learn more about productivity coaching with Blake Simons at Keller Williams Elite Realty, South Asheville, visit @KellerWilliamsEliteSouthAsheville on Facebook, or email [email protected].
