I Want YOU…to Sell Real Estate

In an industry as vibrant and multifaceted as real estate, growth is essential for brokerages; after all, without a stable, growing assortment of talented professionals, stagnancy is alarmingly easy, and in a market as competitive as Atlanta’s, brokerages rely on dynamic agents to stay relevant.

When it comes to recruiting new agents for his office, Murray says he looks for two skills – self-motivation, and the ability to handle rejection; and both skills, he adds, are inherently unteachable.

“Everything else I can teach them,” he says. “If you’re a salesperson, you’ve got to be able to take rejection and bounce back. You can’t let it beat you up. You’ve got to be motivated. When you’re a 1099 employee – and 99 percent of real estate agents are – you need to be the one that drags you out of bed every morning; you need to be the one that motivates you to work. I can teach an agent about inspections, I can teach them about pricing, I can teach them about negotiation, but I can’t teach those two skill sets. You’ve got to have them.”

Jones also emphasizes that her agents be able to handle rejection.

“You have to be able to handle rejection,” she says. “You have to know that they are not rejecting you personally; they’re rejecting your service, and you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go to the next opportunity … Many years ago, I had a wonderful trainer in a class, and she kept saying, ‘If you cannot say NEXT in this business, then you need to learn how to say Burger King.’ You have to be able to move on; you can’t just put it all into one transaction.”

Self-movitation is also an invaluable quality for Jones, and like rejection, it’s something that she cannot teach; you either have it, or you don’t.

“If they’re monotone and don’t seem to be real excited, then they’re not going to be a good fit for our office, because the consumer will pick up on their lack of interest,” Jones says. “You can’t really teach that interest. That’s something I’ve learned. You can’t make someone be enthusiastic, when they choose not to be.”

Rawlings has come to similar conclusions, based on the agents that he has recruited and trained.

“I do not think that you can instill passion in someone; they must innately have passion,” he explains. “We can teach them our tools and systems, which will set them up for success. There’s nothing I can do, though, that will motivate them to do it. There’s no secret sauce that’s going to make it happen.”