4 Tips For Real Estate Agents to Make More

All agents work their sphere of influence (SOI), but what happens when tapping this realm isn’t generating the income you want quickly enough anymore? Or if it’s plateaued in general? The answer is simple: expand your roles.

When you can’t boost your commission in your existing market or just land more sales, you’ve got to take on additional roles to increase your income beyond the average real estate broker salary. This most definitely means going outside your comfort zone, but once you’re there your new territory will be part of that zone as well. And the added confidence from playing outside your sandbox won’t hurt on your next job in the role you picked first, either. Below are our four tips for real estate agents to make more: expand yourself into rentals, investment, development, and management.

Represent Rental Clients

Are you having trouble breaking into the listing market for residential real estate in your area? It’s a tough beginning because every other broker either wants in or is protecting their territory. That’s why you may need to look to rentals, particularly as a beginning agent—there are so many people looking to rent today that the demand for agents in most markets is absolutely insatiable. Don’t get so attached to helping people buy or sell that you neglect valuable rental income. Typically the commission on a rental is a month’s rent split between you and the broker. The upside is that you can flip renters into buyers if you provide excellent memorable service, and it only takes a day or so of work to secure a rental.

• Investor: So you help people buy or sell most days of each week and still haven’t started purchasing properties for yourself? As a new agent, maybe you don’t have the cash, but as an established one, why not start becoming an owner? This doesn’t mean you have to be the only one investing—diversify by joining a carefully selected group of other savvy investors, each with their own role to create a well-rounded vision: banker, contractor, attorney, and builder.
• Development Consultant: A developer needs help putting a price on either the cost to build or the sales pricing. Usually they understand how much it’s going to cost them, but accurately pricing the property for sale is difficult due to a myriad of local factors; and by local, we mean hyper-local. How well do you know the real-time details of every nook of every neighborhood in your city? It’s hard to be that in-touch without being a real estate agent. Target your local developers, get in on their deals at the planning stages, help them price, and then sell them on why you should be the listing agent.
• Property Management: You can land big sales if you manage the properties after the sale. Yes, this is extra work, and no small amount of responsibility at that; this requires you to be very judicious in which of these deals you take on. Target the property owners you’ve sold to who have multiple properties, probably leasing them out, and then contact the owners who you know are having a hard time managing these properties. Likely they’ve already reached out to you. Lots of agents manage properties they sell and find its a solid additional source of revenue.