DANGER Report: The Greatest Threat to the Real Estate Industry

SUMMARY

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hey there it’s Kevin Ward, with YesMasters real estate success training helping you get more yes’s and more successes in your business and in your life. Today I want to talk to you about a danger, and it is specifically about the D.A.N.G.E.R. Report that was published recently by the National Association of Realtors. It was actually created by the Swanepoel Group that was commissioned by the National Association of Realtors to identify what are the greatest threats to our industry. What are the biggest threats that are coming around to the real estate industry.

The Swanepoel Group group does massively in-depth studies and research and just the research behind this is insane. I’ve got here the Report.  The Report was actually 164 pages long. In fact I was surprised when I heard that the National Association of Realtors actually published this to the public because it is not pretty. It does not portray real estate agents in the best of light but it is the truth. It does give us some stuff that we can really learn from.

In today’s video I want to talk about what were the key findings in the Danger Report. What is it that is our greatest threat to us as real estate agents in the real estate industry? More importantly what can we do about it? It just turns out that they studied a whole lot of things, I’m not going to go through the whole report or even a majority of the report. They’re just one thing that I want to talk about today and that is the number one danger that they found to real estate agents in the nation. What is the number one threat to our industry and this is it right here.

The number one danger, the number one threat are the masses of marginal agents that destroy our reputation. In fact the title is Masses of Marginal Agents Destroy Reputation. This is what it says, “The real estate” … Now this is not this is the National Association of Realtors commissioned this and this was the findings, “The real estate industry is saddled with a large number of part time untrained unethical and or incompetent agents. This knowledge gap threatens the credibility of the entire industry.” Now if you’ve been following my training or you’re in one of my coaching programs or been to my event, unfortunately I have been talking about this for the last several years about the bar in our industry is too low and it’s time for us to raise the bar. Well now we have it in black and white. It’s actually in purple and white but it’s in black and white in writing saying this is the number one threat to us. We our own worst enemy.

I read through this and I’ve read most of the report and I wanted to share with you today what I think it really is telling us what a call to action has got to be for us. Number one whatever is happening in the industry or whatever’s happening across the board does not have to and should not define you as an individual real estate agent because you’re a professional. You are an independent contractor most likely and your success or failure doesn’t depend on what everybody also industry’s doing, It depends on what you do with your business and what you do with yourself and how you treat your business. How you approach the business is going to determine how much success you have or how little success you have. We’re talking about huge opportunity if we approach this right. There’s a lot of things that could happen potentially out of this. One, at some point there’s and there’s already cause of this is there’s a call to raise the bar to get into real estate.

One of the things they talk about is that for example it says, “Just to become a cosmetologist requires an average of 372 hours”, 372 hours of training to get your cosmetology license to do makeup right. “To become a licensed real estate agent requires only an average of 70 hours and there are some states the lowest a requirement is only 13 hours of training to get your real estate license.” Let me get this straight. You’re going to get trained for 13 hours or 70 hours or a 100 hours if you’re on the high end and then you’re going to have a license to help people handle a 500,000, 200,000, 1.5 million dollar assets that involves not just a financial transaction it also involves the moving, it involves a whole life transition for people and you’re going to get a license to do that, to facilitate that, to be an agent of that transaction with only 13 to 70 to 100 hours of training. I listen to that and I’m like, “Whoa, that’s scary!”

However, I want to also say this, one of the things I love about the real estate industry is the ease of entry. It’s a great opportunity if you show up and treat this like a business. If you show up like a professional and understand, I’ve got to learn, I’ve got to get training, I’ve got to get coached, I’ve got to get educated. I’ve got to learn and grow and become a master in this business.

As I look at the report I think there are two things that come out of it. I think you as an agent have it where there’s a great opportunity. Number one is there is too many amateurs. There are just too many amateurs. In my opinion one amateur is too many but you get what I’m saying. That most real estate agents approach the business the way an amateur would approach it. For example, if you’re going to play golf, if you’re going to make money as a professional golfer could you be successful on the P.G.A. or L.P.G.A. tour with the level of practice, with the level of training, with a level of coaching that you have had in real estate? In other words, if you showed up at your game the way you show up with your real estate game would you be able to survive in real estate?

I’ll take it even a step further than that. If you want to learn to play the piano when you’re in third grade, if you practiced your piano lessons the same amount that you practice your skills of selling real estate, your scripts, your your conversations, your listing presentation. If you practice as much on your piano piece to play at a recital as the average real estate agent does on their listing presentation, can I tell you what would happen? In piano, in third grade your piano teacher would not even let you play in the recital.

If you practiced your piano the way the average real estate agent, now think about it, the way the average real estate agent practices their listing presentation. In other words how much does the average listing agent practice their listing presentation? Compared to how the average piano player practices playing the piano. Somebody’s getting ready for a recital … I was talking to my wife who was a concert pianist in college and she would talk about when they would get ready to perform in a concert that they would work on one piece for months working. Playing three to six hours a day usually three or four or five hours every single day practicing, rehearsing, practicing ,rehearsing being trained by their teacher. Helping them perfect and get the sounds right and get the flow right get the pacing right. Getting everything just right to perform and yet in real estate how do we show up? Most agents don’t practice seriously intensively with intentionality practiced their listing presentation virtually at all. If you try to do that in third grade with your piano recital, your piano teacher would not even let you perform and I right or am I right?

Why would they not let you perform because they know you would embarrass yourself and you would embarrass the teacher and you’ll probably embarrass your parents too, right. Think about it, if that’s the way we would perform at the piano or play golf or if you want to do anything else and actually be good at it, if you want to make money at it, how should you show up? Show up like a pro. Stop approaching your real estate business like an amateur and make the commitment to turn pro. That you’re going to practice like a pro, you’re going to think like a pro, you’re going have the discipline and the work ethic of a professional and treat real estate as a professional. Real estate is full of amateur agents.

People ask can I be a part time agent. The biggest problem to me with being a part time agent aside from the fact that it’s very very difficult to make enough money to make it worth your time. Is that you are an amateur. Most part time agents and most full time agents ironically show up as an amateur. My challenge to you and this is what I teach with Yes Masters Real Estate success training is to go from mediocrity to mastery. To stop treating real estate like an amateur and start treating it like a professional.

Here’s the beauty of it is when you start treating your business like a pro. When you commit to mastery you can kill it. The bar out there that there’s so much mediocrity that when you become a master it shows up in the way you show up on your prospect and your lead follow up, your listing presentations. Literally I tell my agents that I coach I say, “If you’ll do what I tell you and you’ll make this commitment to mastery and you’ll follow the process you follow what I teach you, people will not have the ability to tell you no”, They won’t want to tell you no. It’s not about your marketing presentation, it’s about you, how you show up, your presence not your presentation is what’s incredibly powerful. That’s the first thing that really comes out of this to me is that there’s too many amateurs in the real estate industry.

The second thing that comes out is are simply too much BS. I talked about this forever. It says it’s the untrained incompetent agents but the other part of it is the unethical real estate agents. Here’s my biggest beef about unethical agents. Sure there’s always going to be dishonesty, there’s going to be dishonest agents, there’s going to be dishonest people in virtually any industry right. The complaint or the beef that I have with the real estate industry is how much of our training is as agents you are taught BS.

When you’re taught to pretend to talk to seller to pretend like you have a buyer. To talk to a for sale by owner and pretend like you’re doing a survey? I’ve even heard of one recently from an agent that they went to a coaching program and it’s a major coaching program I was in shock when they were taught that when you talk to a potential seller you tell him how many listings you have. The way you count listing is if you have a lead, a buyer lead or a seller lead, that’s really kind of like a listing so you can tell them I have four listings. When you actually don’t have any listings but you have four buyer leads or seller leads or something like that.

My BS alarm is just going like crazy when I hear that. Is that why as an industry could we as leaders as brokers as managers and trainers and coaches expect our agents to be ethical when a lot of the scripts that you were taught were so full of BS. My call, my belief, my contention is that you can get Yes without the BS. You don’t need the BS, you don’t need the BS scripts that do the bait and switch, act like you got a buyer than to show up and you try to get a listing. You can have honest straightforward conversations with motivated buyers and sellers totally straight forward represent their best interest and inspire them to say yes to you without the BS. The shift has got to be in our mind and in our heart to say enough. Enough mediocrity, enough with the amateurs being amateur and enough with the BS. It’s time to raise the bar in the real estate industry.

Where does it start? It starts with me and with you making the commitment right now that I’m going to commit to mastery. I’m going to commit to be the best. I’m going to commit to continually learning and growing and as I raise my bar the other people around me will be forced to raise the bar or else they’re never going to be able to compete with me. I love the way Michael Jordan approached the game of basketball. He said, “There is no competition, I am the competition” In other words the way he showed up was he didn’t have to compete with all the other players he forced them to compete with him.

You want to talk about a way to have a great massively successful real estate business, commit to mastery. Commit to being the best. Go Pro, be the hero. Be a hero for yourself, for your family, for the people in your office, the people that your clients, your customers, all the people that you’re going to serve. When you show up as a pro you change the game. You change your game. You change the winning, the outcome for your whole family and together we can help change the industry.

If you liked this video click the like button or a thumbs up button. Share it, make comments, ask questions. Love to hear your feedback on it. I think we are in danger as a real estate industry but I think we can fix this. I’m committed to helping you fix it. I hope you’re with me. We’ll talk soon.