4 Skills You Should Bring from Your Previous Career

As a real estate agent, you really cannot do without expertise – no argument about that. You need all the knowledge and education you can gather to succeed in the industry. From understanding market trends to estimating property value, your real estate know-how influences your overall productivity as an agent.

However, the fact that you’re dealing with people (including yourself) requires that you run your real estate business with some handy soft skills. Without these skills, you’ll probably never make it beyond ‘average’ as a real estate agent.

Negotiation

If you don’t negotiate as a real estate agent, what else will you be doing on your job? In addition to understanding a property’s conditions and market realities, you need to determine the best value of a deal for sellers. You also need to rightly advise your buyer clients on the best deals for their money.

If you’ve ever worked as an event planner, sales representative, recruitment specialist, or purchasing agent, you’re at a better advantage when it comes to negotiations.

Active Listening

As you already know by now, listening is something you may never take a break from as a real estate agent. Clients will always have a thing or two to say to you. Your broker, even if on a few occasions, will also want to have a word or two with you. And your ability to listen actively to these people will determine how phenomenal your real estate services will.

Active listening is a skill that will undoubtedly help you win sales faster. When you can listen to and understand your clients, you’ll better grasp the kind of property they need. Instead of wasting their time (and yours) showing them properties that do not specifically meet their needs, you’ll be quick to arrive at the property of their dreams and have them coming for more or making referrals.

If you’ve once worked as a nurse, mediator, social worker, or physician, you may want to make a healthy import of active listening skills to your real estate business.

Tactfulness

If you’ve previously worked as a customer service rep, a mediator, or lawyer, you’ll understand how deliberate you need to be in dealing with people. While working on these jobs, you must have understood how to navigate working relationships that eventually turn sour. You’d also be well-equipped to take the right actions to correct the issue.

As a real estate agent, you will not always have happy and polite clients. Transactions will not always be rosy. Some may end up nasty and unpleasant. At points like this, you need to know how and when to close or continue the deal, without losing your clients to your competitors. The skill of tactfulness you must have honed in your previous jobs will become handy in dealing with such negative situations in your real estate career.

Financial Planning

Every real estate agent needs to understand the importance of creating and maintaining a modest budget. Not only does this help you minimize expenses and increase profiting, but it will also place you in the right position to help your clients in the same way. And for sure, every reasonable client will be reluctant to detach from an agent who helps them make the most of their resources.

If you have occupied the position of an accountant, attorney, financial planner, or analyst at any time, you must have honed your financial planning skill to a considerable degree. More than you realize, you need to apply this skill in your day-to-day transactions as an agent.

In Conclusion

If you must stand out from the millions of real estate agents in the world, these skills (and many more) must be fine-tuned to your career. If you’ve worked in positioned that helped you develop any of these skills, channeling them to your real estate services is a guaranteed way to scale up your sales figures and be the talk of the town.

On the other hand, if you’ve not had a platform to hone any relevant skill in the past, my book – the StandOut Agent – will help you get started on building and utilizing relevant soft skills in the real estate industry.

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