Commentary: Changing Times To Make Big Money, a Real Estate Agent Must Think Like an Investor
By Gary Eldred, Ph.D.
As a real estate agent, you have an amazing opportunity to benefit from real estate investment. First, you can boost your reputation and sales by learning how to pitch the investor market. More importantly, you can establish a new stream of income and generate more personal wealth by making property investments of your own.
As a residential real estate agent, you are on the frontlines of the real estate market. You have access to the kind of juicy, up-to-the-minute information that investors crave. The question you should ask yourself today is: am I using this intelligence to my advantage?
If you want to expand the breadth of your business by acting as a consultant to investors, you have to think like them. Thinking like an investor means focusing on the areas of real estate that concern investors, i.e., those that relate to their financial opportunity. Selling to an investor is not like selling to someone just looking for a place to live; investors think in terms of the property’s bottom line: what is the return?
By arming yourself with real estate investment knowledge, you enable yourself to better serve small investors, a market that accounts for 10% to 30% of all one- to four-unit residential sales, and more dramatically, an education in real estate investment gives you the tools you need to become an entrepreneurial investor yourself.
In order to think like an investor you have to remember that possibilities create value. A novice investor might look at a five-bedroom, two-bathroom home in a developing area and think it’s “too big” to sell. A savvy investor would look at the same property and think “college rental” or “home office.”
At the root of successful real estate investment is knowledge. Anyone can buy property, but knowing what to do after you’ve made your investment is the difference between success and failure. |
