Fresh Eyes, Strong Muscles, Thick Skin, Wise Feet: Encouragement for a Real Estate Agent

Fresh Eyes – When you become a real estate agent, you enter into an entirely new sales category.  We’re salespeople in one sense, but not salespeople at all in another.   We spend our days spamming our friends, family and the general public looking for our next buyer or seller client.  In some ways, we’re worse than a multi-level marketing rep!  Once we land our client, the sales hat comes off, and the professional duty hat goes on.  

Strong Muscles – Similar to your first leg day at the gym that left you wobbly and sore for days, your first transactions can leave you wondering if you made a mistake getting into real estate.  Rest assured, when your legs recover, you’ll inevitably want to smash them again for ‘the pump.’  Like a runner gets a high and a bodybuilder is never big enough, real estate becomes an obsession of its own!  There’s a lot of different muscle groups in real estate.  

Thick Skin – Real estate can be a messy business.  Sure we help people’s dreams come true with their first home purchase or their sale/purchase upgrade.  However, oftentimes we’re putting out fires and dealing with people’s nightmares.  When we list homes, we come across those who have lost their jobs and are undergoing bankruptcies.  Death, divorce, POA’s, executors and tenants are all categories that can present emotional and challenging scenarios.  Like yielding a hammer for the first time, the blisters it causes are painful and unsightly.  If you have never seen or experienced a blister, you may think you have some disease that you’ll never recover from.  Rest assured, you will, and your new skin will be thicker and stronger. 

Wise Feet – Like a child in a candy store, new Realtors view every opportunity to work with a new buyer or seller client as just that, an opportunity.  As an adult, the candy store represents upset stomachs, sore teeth and diabetes.  There is nothing good about candy except the initial sugar rush it gives you.  Besides that, it is more or less toxic poison.  Some people and scenarios are similar. There isn’t a lot of poison in the forests, but mature Realtors know how to identify it and avoid it.  Some who stumble on it can get a nasty rash and even succumb to their injuries. 

—Mike Seiler