Fake it Till you Make it.

I am living proof that you can become a successful real estate agent in a market you know nothing about in a profession that is new to you in less than two years.

Two years ago I was an Air force tech Sgt flying supplies in and out of Iraq on one of worlds largest cargo jets. The job was fun. I was able to travel all over the world but the pay sucked and the thought of being shot down by a manpad and burning to death was not one that sat well in my stomach. I watched my wife who had gotten her real estate license just a year before start to come home with some very large commission checks. I weighed the pros and cons and enrolled in real estate school.

After graduating (The classes were the easiest I have had since high school) we moved to a beach town where I was thrown to the wolves. I knew nothing about the local communities, I knew nothing about the home buying process and I did not have a network of friends and family to sell to, yet somehow I was able to morph myself into one of the busiest Realtors in town.

So how do you fake it the first few months while you are trying to learn the area and profession?

• Don't even give the client time to ask you questions about the market. Find something you have in common and talk about that instead. What did you think of the Monday night game? Where do you like to travel? Tell me about your family...  If you can  quickly become friends with them  they won't care  that a new agent is handling the biggest purchase of their life
• Proclaim yourself to be an expert in a niche market.  It does not really matter if you are or not.  If the perception is that you are an expert you are the expert till someone proves you wrong. I proclaimed myself an expert in a niche market and now I have the state legislature calling me for information on the local market.
• Don't get lost. Buy yourself a GPS unit and ALWAYS do a dry run of your tour before you go out to look at homes with your client. Nothing spells "Real Estate Newbie" quicker than a Realtor who can't find the listings.
• Research, research and more research. Before you go out to show homes don't just read the MLS data for the house you will be showing. Look up the other listings in the neighborhood, see what's sold, expired & withdraw. You don't have to memorize these stats when you can just print them out and hand them to your client.
  
• Work with a mentor. This is great advice that  I did not follow myself. I learned through trial and error. Thank god none of my errors were large enough to get me into trouble. I highly recommend teaming up with an experienced agent.
  
• For me the first three months were really the worst. I got lost almost daily, I could not answer simple questions about how the home buying process worked and quite often I felt like the people I was driving around knew a good deal more than myself about real estate. The only solution is knowledge. I've now got a small library on real estate related books, I spend hours on forums like www.realestatewebmasters.com and I go out of my way to tour new neighborhoods.

Two years into it and I now have a pretty good grasp on local market conditions and rarely if ever get lost anymore. I'm also making eight times what Uncle Sam was paying me. To sum up, If It walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it might just be a duck or a new agent who is really good at pretending. Pretending is fine for the first few months but practice and hard work will pay off in the long run.

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