I was the national head of agent development at Compass, and I’ve been in front of more than 30,000 agents since. I’ve also sold the thing I’m about to take apart, so keep that in mind while you read.
Here’s the usual scenario: You sign up for a coaching program. You’re excited, and you should be. Everybody wants to feel a little less alone in a job you mostly do by yourself, in your car.
- Week 1 is great. New room, new plan, a coach who sounds certain. Nobody names a program Mediocrity Mondays.
- Week 2 gets tricky. Fifteen scripts, a tracker, a daily number and a database project you’ve been avoiding since 2019.
- By Week 3, you’re behind. Not because you dropped anything. Because 8,000 things got thrown at you, and nobody sat down to help you find the one that would make you better at what you do.
- By Week 4, you’ve stopped showing up. Not because the coach was bad, but because you now feel like a person who starts things and doesn’t finish them, and that feeling is worse than the problem you signed up to fix.
You didn’t fail the program. The program failed you. How come?
The real estate coaching truth
The reason is simpler than anybody wants it to be. Nearly every coaching program in this business teaches professional sales skills to people who are not in sales. We’re consultants, advocates, advisors and educators.
Nobody has ever talked a family into a house they didn’t want to live in. What we do is help people through the largest and most emotional decision of their lives with the least amount of damage. We read a room. We tell someone the truth about their kitchen, and we hold a deal together at 9 p.m. on a Sunday when the buyer’s father has opinions.
That is not selling. We’re consultants, advocates, advisors and educators. If you can fog a mirror, you can get a license. Very few people can do those four things well, and I’ve yet to see a program that teaches them as a skill set.
This isn’t the coach’s fault. Coaches were trained the same way the rest of us were. Build the database. Reach as many people as you possibly can. Add value, and then add more of it tomorrow.
There’s a word buried in there that I think is the dumbest one in our industry, and I say that with love. Value.
We all have the same value. Every one of us can pull a comp, open a door, write an offer and get to a closing table. What almost none of us have is a point of differentiation, the thing that tells a consumer specifically what you do for them and why it ought to be you. You can follow “add value” for a decade and stay interchangeable with the other four agents the seller interviewed.
There’s a second reason the homework never gets done: Agents live in two periods of time: now and not now.
Now is the pipe that burst three hours before a closing. Now is the appraisal, the inspection, the client calling at 10:30 p.m. about something that could have been a text. Now is loud, it’s permanent, and it pays this month. Not now is quiet and pays in three years, if at all.
Toxic positivity does real damage
The trouble is that everything producing long-term income security in this business sits in the not-now column. The National Association of Realtors’ 2026 member profile puts median gross income at $88,500 for agents with 16 years or more in the industry, and $8,000 for agents with two years or less.
The veterans report a median 49 percent of their business from repeat clients and another 32 percent from referrals. For the newest agents, both of those medians are zero.
Somebody will say that’s just arithmetic, that you need a past client before you can have a repeat one. That’s the point. The whole gap is 15 years of relationships, and not one hour of that work feels urgent on a Tuesday. This is a patient business being coached like an impatient one.
We do something else I think is worse. We coach in a permanent state of enthusiasm. Everything is fabulous; every market is an opportunity; you’re crushing it; this is your year. I call that toxic positivity, and it does real damage. You sit in a hard month with two deals coming apart, you hear all of it, and you quietly conclude the problem must be you.
How to provide real support
What would help is unglamorous. This job burns through five things: prioritization, organization, time management, impulse control and emotional regulation. By Thursday of an ordinary week, most good agents are running low on at least two.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those people. Real support builds bumpers around those five, the same reason a bowling lane for kids has them. You don’t make the gutter disappear by concentrating harder.
That work means dealing with people as they are, for who they are. Not more, more, more. Not the next great thing. One thing, chosen for that person, small enough to start on a Thursday when everything else has gone sideways.
We haven’t served this business well on that, and I include myself. I’ve sold the four-week cycle. It’s a comfortable thing to sell, because Week 1 always works.
If you’re picking a program this fall, ask what gets cut. Anybody can hand you 15 things. The one worth paying is the person who tells you which one matters and which 14 you can skip.
We’re not in sales. We never were. Until the coaching in this business is built for that job, we’ll keep running very good people through programs that leave them feeling like the problem.
You aren’t the problem. This is still the best time there’s ever been to be a great agent. We just have to stop training you for somebody else’s job.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the contributor and separate from the Inman newsroom.
Lance Pendleton is the founder of Reframe Lab, a coaching and consulting practice for real estate agents, and the former national head of agent development at Compass in Connecticut. Get connected on Instagram.
