> Any recommendations for what to do the first year of business to make sure that there is a second year?

Just do everything it says to do in the Millionaire Real Estate agent book by Gary Keller. If you haven’t bought and read it, do it NOW, and keep reading it over and over again.

Second, get an accountability coach or someone to meet with weekly to hold you accountable to you business plan and activities and goals. It doesn’t have to be a guru, or mega agent, it can be another Newbie even. It just has to be someone (not your husband by the way) to who you commit to meet weekly and report your activities and outcomes to.

All they have to ask you is:

1) What were your goals this week?
2) How did you do?
3) What are your goals next week?

Also, you can download some helpful forms at http://productivitywarrior.com that match the models taught in the MRE book.

Hang in there and good luck.

Steve

Working as a RE investor, you can make as much profit as the market may bear, and Austin is very much a bull market now, along with the rest of Texas. Think of it….if you make a 15-20% profit on the sale of an income property, you are essentially paying YOURSELF a 15-20% commission. If you own rental property, you can make money on the property year after year, and make out big time when you sell and cash out. I don’t thnk I’ve ever heard of a 20% commission
in RE, so I think that in a nutshell is the gist of what I’m saying. You control the situation, and don’t have to deal with the up-and-down emotions of individuals buying homes, which can drive you crazy. I just think investing is the next step from keeping 100% of your commission at a brokerage set up as such, just like that itself is the next step from a 50/50 split with a conventional brokerage…….

Assuming you live in Austin, I’ll mention a few things germane to that as well…..Austin is a very young city, and, while indeed lots of younger folk are not yet in the income rand and/or interested in purchasing property, a fair share are. You want to target the 100,000 or so tech folks that DO have the ability and interest in Austin. They aren’t exactly octogenarians, as you know, are are just slightly older than the mid-20 somethings you mention. Also, you might want to tap into the investors and people relocating into Austin from out of state. Perhaps you can set up an internet presence to attract those folks to your practice. If an out-of-area person pegs you as informed and enthusiastic, He/She is hardly going to hang you for looking young, especially because they are seeing Austin as a younger city anyway. I do notice many of the top agents working the condo market in Austin are early 30′s or so. Perhaps you might want to try that angle.

Austin has PLENTY of opportunities outside of real estate, so don’t feel tied down to the occupation if you feel its not for you. I personally have in mind a tech breakthrough that I hope will take off like wildfire, and there are plenty of opportunites for venture capital here in Austin as well. Anything like that would blow the doors off anything you can possibly hope to achieve in real estate, and is where the real money lies. Investing in real estate will also provide you
with incalculably more money than anything you can make per real estate commissions. There were flippers in Austin over the last couple years that prob made more money from one deal than most people out here make in RE in a year.

All I can say is don’t limit your hopes and dreams to brokering residential real estate. There’s a whole world of money out there in Austin just waiting to be made.

The thing I’ve noticed and I’ve worked hard on over my career is when things are going well I tend to slack off, and then I have to jump start like crazy to ramp up business again. But now I’ve learned that having a blog and using my online marketing efforts have kept my pipeline full and I look and see all the agents who have been successful ignore this vital aspect for realtors. Yes the old tried and true principles still apply of building a trusting relationship and taking care of the client in the transactions, but first you have to find them, and the internet is where they start.

It takes a story like the “bozo realtor” from a few days ago for these people to wake up and realize they should have worked with a pro. By then it’s too late, the deal is often done either way, and there’s one more client that got suckered away by a part-timer.

Real estate seems to be one of the few industries where there is too much competition, and it’s very hard to differentiate yourself. The many people who succeed right away usually have a large sphere of friends and referrals, or a ton of marketing money. It’s a lot tougher for the mid-20′s guy to make it, for example, when most of their friends don’t make enough to buy a house, and older folks mistrust them because they mistake young age for inexperience.

That being said, the individuals who indeed do have the skill set and energy to thrive will never know until they do it full-time, as part-time is not enough of a yardstick of itself. You can say that about any leap into that great unknown of sole proprietorship. One with a love of cooking and something unique to offer will never know if that restaurant is doable until they give it a 24/7 effort. Same with all the rest. RE is a business, and like any business, much time must be spent getting it, and your name, off the ground before any tangible results are seen. However, failure isn’t an option to those with families/mortgages/bills, so I can very much understand someone never getting past the “sticking the toe in the water” stage.

I think it is also a “community college” thing as well, where people take college courses part-time to make themselves feel better, and keep dreams and escape
routes open, just for that sake, but never consummating that. That’s one of the beauties of real estate, that you can make your current job palatable by keeping the RE dream alive, even if its only 2-3 deals per year. Sometimes I think keeping the dream alive is the most important thing. Maybe that person will never go beyond that, and really can’t, but those 2-3 deals make them feel a little better about themselves, give them a modicum of independence lacking from their job, and keep the dream of doing it full-time alive. And, who knows, maybe a few of them will actually do it!