As productive individuals, we all deserve to earn a fair living. Doing so, we expect to expend a reasonable amount of effort. For lasting productivity, we should maintain a relativly low stress level.

Lately, I have been speaking with a lot of agents about the market.

Some are having a tough time right now. Others are having the best years of their careers.

The agents that are continuing to do well seem to be those who are focused on a niche market of some type and are reaching out for more contacts. FHA buyers. Inner city neighborhoods. Short sales. REO’s. Unique home styles. Expired listings. One of our agents tries to go to coffee with 5 people every week.

It’s pretty obvious that those in real estate who display ambition, drive and focus will continue to succeed regardless of the market conditions. Equally apparant is that agents who have only made a living in the past by riding the wave of the real estate boom may be finding it more difficult to hang on now.

Yet for many agents, the question is: What about the rest of us?  Our real estate community has a lot of great brokers who have terrific skills and knowledge, yet find themsleves in a lull and they are looking for ways to get re-ignited and re-engaged now that the tides have turned.

I have been working on several fronts to address those agents within our company, and we have come up with a number of solutions that I am really excited about.

For starters, we have lowered our commission rates this year, and created compensation plans that allow agents an opportunity to put their limited resources to work for themselves in order to increase their own business. The inequity of having producing agents subsidize the non-producers in a company is no longer a tolerable business model.

Also, we have instituted 3 fantastic marketing programs that we are giving away free in our company:

1. Individual Agent Blog sites that are up and running with little or no effort - so agents can tap into the ever increasing potential of social networking.

2. Market Advantage is a free contact management / media program from GMAC that provides easy methods to integrate contacts with e-campaigns, mailings and other marketing processes.

3. Unnlimited Visual Tours that agents can use both for listings and buyers, as well as with campaigns designed and personalized for their sphere of influence.

Most importantly, I have recently hired a business consultant in order to offer every single agent at our company a personal one-on-one coaching program that I administer. With my 23 years of experience, the agents who are taking advantage of this program have found it really effective in helping them focus on areas of strengths that actually translates into sales.

Here is the premise I am focused on with agents in our company right now during this market:

Professional REALTORS should always be able to earn a Fair Living, with Reasonable Effort and Low Amount of Stress. The trick is to discover the methods and untap the necessary activities.

So, if you know anyone thinking of entering the real estate business, or changing firms, please let me know!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.