We owe you an apology. We may have lied to you a little.
We told you to get your real estate license because you wanted freedom. Control your schedule. Build your own business. Make more money. Never have a boss again. Maybe you watched an agent on Instagram explain how they sold $30 million last year while apparently spending most of their working hours getting out of a Range Rover in slow motion.
Whatever got you here, we sold you some version of freedom. Then you got your license.
Now your phone is attached to your hand, Saturdays are apparently a workday and despite telling everyone you’re “in business for yourself,” you have somehow acquired 47 bosses. Buyers want to see houses tonight. Sellers want to know why nobody came to the open house. Your broker wants paperwork.
And after spending an impressive amount of money on licensing, MLS dues, signs, lockboxes, marketing and a headshot you already hate, your new business has produced approximately $11.
Welcome to real estate.
Here’s the part we probably should have explained better. We weren’t lying about the destination. We were lying about the distance.
The freedom is real. The income opportunity is real. I’ve watched thousands of people build businesses around the lives they want. But almost none of them started there.
If you’re in your first year wondering what the hell you’re supposed to be doing, I think we make this much harder than it needs to be.
There are three things. Unfortunately, they’re all hard.
3 truths no one tells new agents about their first year in real estate
1. This is a trust sale
New agents become obsessed with leads almost immediately. Where do I get leads? Should I buy leads? Facebook? Google? Zillow? YouTube? TikTok?
Meanwhile, your phone is filled with people who already know you. That’s where I’d start.
Real estate is a trust sale before it’s anything else. People are asking someone to help them navigate what is probably the largest financial transaction of their lives, and most would prefer that person not be a complete lunatic.
In your first year, you don’t have 200 past clients or 10 years of referrals. But you do have a lifetime of relationships. Your friends know you. Your family knows you. Former coworkers know you. Your neighbors know you.
They don’t necessarily know whether you’re a great real estate agent yet, but they know whether you’re a good human. Borrow against that trust while you build the professional part.
And please don’t interpret “work your sphere” as “treat everyone you’ve ever met like a prospect.” Stay in people’s lives. Be useful. Talk about what you’re doing. Ask about what they’re doing.
Real estate happens inside ordinary life. Stay close enough to people that when life happens, they think of you.
2. Sacrifice some freedom to the real estate gods
This one is going to hurt.
You got into real estate for freedom, and I’m going to suggest that for a while, you voluntarily give some of it back.
One of the cruel little jokes of becoming an independent contractor is that you spend years wishing nobody could tell you what to do, and then eventually nobody tells you what to do.
Turns out that was doing more work than we realized.
Your old boss expected you at work. There were meetings. Deadlines. Responsibilities. Someone noticed if you disappeared for four hours on Wednesday afternoon.
Now nobody notices. You can answer three emails from bed, reorganize your CRM, spend 40 minutes researching whether you should change CRMs and arrive at 2:30 p.m. genuinely exhausted from accomplishing absolutely nothing that could result in a commission check.
Freedom without accountability is frequently just procrastination with nicer branding.
So sacrifice some freedom to the real estate gods. Put prospecting on your calendar. Decide how many real conversations you’re going to have every day. Track appointments. Know your numbers. Find somebody who will ask whether you did what you said you were going to do.
The agents with the most control over their lives usually aren’t the ones who avoided structure. They’re the ones who built enough structure that their business stopped depending on whatever they felt like doing that morning.
You earn the freedom later. For now, give some of it back.
3. Don’t effing quit
Your first year in real estate is uniquely cruel because you’re doing the most work while receiving the least benefit from everything you’ve already done.
Think about an agent in Year 5. They wake up with five years of people behind them. Past clients. Friends of past clients. People they met at open houses. People who said “maybe next year” three years ago. Hundreds of conversations that occasionally come wandering back carrying a real estate transaction.
You wake up with Tuesday.
That’s why the first year can feel so unfair. You’re planting and watering while wondering why there’s nothing to harvest. You’re learning contracts while trying to find clients. You’re watching agents who have been doing this for 15 years receive referrals and wondering why nobody is referring business to you after four and a half months.
Because you’ve been here four and a half months. Give it time.
Year 2 isn’t easy, but you’re better than you were. You’ve had conversations. You’ve made mistakes. Hopefully, you’ve closed some transactions.
By Year 3, conversations from Year 1 start coming back. Somebody you helped refers their neighbor. You recognize problems before they become emergencies.
The business begins to compound. But compounding has one extremely annoying requirement: time. So don’t effing quit.
That doesn’t mean real estate is for everyone. It isn’t. If you hate the work and wake up every morning wishing you’d chosen literally anything else, you’re allowed to leave.
But if you still want this, don’t confuse hard with wrong. Don’t look at somebody else’s Year 10 and use it as evidence that your Year 1 is failing. Don’t let one terrible month convince you that you picked the wrong career.
We should probably have told you all of this when we recruited you. We should have told you the freedom comes after discipline. That your first and best source of business is probably the people who already trust you. That there would be months when you worked ridiculously hard, and the scoreboard barely moved.
But we weren’t lying about what can be on the other side of it.
I’ve watched this business change people’s lives. I’ve also watched talented people leave six months before things probably would have started working. So if you’re in your first year in real estate, broke, tired, questioning every decision that brought you here, consider this the part we forgot to put in the brochure.
Work the people who already trust you. Give some of your freedom to the real estate gods. And don’t effing quit.
Year 3 is waiting for you, but you have to make it through Year 1 first.
Keith Robinson is the president of strategy at NextHome, Inc. and co-host of Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered.
