Real Estate Brokers To Be Immortalized with Baseball Cards?

Athletics:

Successful professional athletes are highly compensated.  They all have coaches and they practice the majority of their week to then perform a handful of times in front of spectators who pay to see them perform.  In the modern sports era, fans and analysts have become addicted to statistics on these players.  You can measure now everything that you want to know about an athlete: vertical jump, earned run average, height, weight, 40-yard dash time, shuttle run time, etc. These stats were so important they were put on cards and collected by fans, what we now call baseball cards.

All athletes practice to improve their skills and to gain muscle memory to be able to compete under pressure during a performance. This is no different than what real estate agents should be doing.

Why don’t we have Real Estate Cards?  We could have number of calls, conversion of calls to meetings, total meetings with clients, total showings, total listings, etc.

Acting:

Successful actors are highly compensated. Many have acting coaches and immerse themselves for months on end studying people and situations in advance for taking on a role in a major motion picture.  In the modern movie era, fans and analysts have become rabid in following the stars’ every move.  You can measure many statistics about these stars now: IMDB lists every fact about their careers, you can find rankings by how many dollars their movies bring in at the box office, their number of twitter followers, Forbes ranks the richest ones every year, etc.

Almost all actors constantly practice to improve their skills to become more credible and realistic in their performances to perform under pressure in the same way they practice.  Unlike with sports, they may get a few more takes of the camera to get it right, but none the less, they still need to do rehearsals to nail it.

Agents:

Successful real estate agents are highly compensated.  Some have mentors, but many are just running hard in the game and don’t have anyone coaching them up. Most agents I know don’t know or understand their statistics. You can’t improve what you don’t measure and not keeping track of your daily, weekly, quarterly and annual statistics is a mistake most agents make.

Athletes and actors rehearse, practice and measure their results when they perform and compete.  I haven’t been able to put my finger on why most agents are disorganized and not focused on measuring their results.  Most of us do not practice, most do not rehearse—they just do. When we win, we don’t replay the tape to understand why, and when we lose we don’t find out why.

As an agent in our game, you are competing on a daily basis and should take a page from these two other professions for guidance on how to become a top producer.  If you are committed to your craft and moving our profession forward I would encourage you to follow these simple rules:

• Measure your results
• Seek out coaching and mentorship
• Practice your craft: calling, meetings, negotiating, speaking
• Rehearse your performance and seek feedback from others
• Always find out why you won
• Always find out why you lost