Jared James

By Jared James

As many of you know, I make my living as a speaker/trainer and have had the opportunity to speak to tens of thousands of REALTORS® and entrepreneurs over the last 12 months. My job is not just to communicate effectively, but to entertain and make the audience feel something. As Maya Angelo put it, “People will not remember what you do or say, but they will remember how you made them feel.”

About six months ago, I had the opportunity to keynote a large event in Texas, and it was one of those times when you feel completely connected with the audience and everything was going well. At the end of the event I had a younger guy come up to me and tell me how he loved my speech so much that he was ready to run through a brick wall. (Not a practice I recommend or condone.) He said that he loved everything I had to say, but there was just no business in his area. He said it didn’t matter what he did, there just weren’t any transactions.

I don’t usually have the time to do this, but on this day I did, so asked him to grab his computer and pull up for me every transaction that had happened over the last 30 days in his area according to his MLS. He did this and it turned out that there were 337 transactions! So much for NO transactions…

I looked him dead in the eye and I said that it seems that the problem was not a lack of transactions, the problem was that his name is not on those transactions! *friendly smile*

I am not mentioning this agent by name because he is not the point of the story. I bring up this point because I think this mindset is running rampant among many REALTORS® today. They are 90 percent committed to their job, but they use the economy as an excuse for their lack of production. Many agents get into real estate because their other job didn’t work out or for whatever reason. There is nothing wrong with getting into real estate for this reason, but you better be fully committed or you are not going to like the results. I mean, could you imagine looking at your spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend and telling them that you are 90 percent committed to them? It probably wouldn’t go over too well, and it doesn’t go over well in your career either.

The funny thing is that when a market decreases by 5 percent (which to the average REALTOR® isn’t even one transaction), nobody talks about the fact that the number of agents usually decreases by about 10 percent as well. This really means that if you are still around, your market actually just increased by 5 percent, right?!?

I guess the bottom line is this: If your business is not doing well because of a bad economy, then you better be ready to give all the credit to the good economy when things turn around, because after all, we don’t really have anything to do with the results of our business anyway, right?

Jared James is the CEO and founder of Jared James Enterprises (JJE) and travels around North America speaking to and coaching REALTORS®. Connect with Jared at www.jaredjamestoday.com, on facebook.com/jaredjamestoday, or follow him on Twitter @jaredjamestoday.