100 Days To Sold: How To Become a SUCCESSFUL Real Estate Agent in 2023

Two and a half years ago, I embarked on my journey of becoming a real estate agent. I passed! Oh my god, I'm so happy. Yeah, maybe I saw Selling Sunset and was a little inspired, but let me tell you, it is nothing like that. A lot has happened since I was newly licensed. I've sold over 40 homes, done over $20 million in volume, and taken home about $500,000 myself. Real estate can be such a fun, rewarding career. Here, you can make life-changing money that can make a big impact on your future. And every day, I get questions from people on how and if they should become an agent themselves. And today, I'm starting a new series where I take you along starting all over in becoming a licensed real estate agent because I am working on getting my real estate license in a new state, which means completely starting over from scratch. Taking the test again, getting to know the areas, getting to know all the forms, getting clients. If you have ever been interested in maybe becoming a real estate agent, be sure to subscribe to my channel and stick around because this series is going to show you everything that goes on and how to potentially be successful in this industry. But before we get started, today's video is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp is the world's largest therapy service and it is 100% online. Their mission is to make therapy more affordable and accessible for everyone. BetterHelp makes it easy to get started. You take a short questionnaire and then you are matched with a therapist in as little as a few days. With my link below, betterhelp.com slash church, you do get 10% off. I am a past and present BetterHelp user. Seriously, when I first got my license and was thinking about making this career switch, it was so overwhelming. It was super exciting, don't get me wrong, but one thing I did not talk about was how anxious I was and scared that I really was. Being able to talk through all of that helped me make this leap of faith and this big career change in a time where things felt really uncertain and scary to me. I'm really happy to have them as the sponsor of today's video and thank you again so much to BetterHelp for supporting my channel. You've thought it through, you know you want to be a real estate agent, now you have to decide what market that you want to work in. This might be super obvious, it might be literally where you live right now, you're happy there, but maybe you're open to a change. This is something I haven't heard other people talk about, but the opportunities in different markets. You are going to be a more successful real estate agent if you move somewhere or already live somewhere where there are the most volume of transactions happening. You want to find that balance of not too high of a concentration of real estate agents and a good amount of homes for sale per residence. In Washington last year there was about 100,000 transactions that happened versus in Florida there was 287,000 transactions that happened. Florida is like triple the amount of people of Washington though, it is just like bigger more people. But there's more transactions happening in Florida. If you're open to moving and you want to be a successful real estate agent, you should consider moving to a city with a really hot relocation market where like an Amazon's moving in. All of Texas has a lot of transactions and a lot of homes. Florida has a ton of homes, California has a ton. But some small town in Nebraska, it might be a little tough to get your business moving along there. I've heard some crazy success stories of real estate agents that have moved to like hotter markets and just sold so much more because there was so much activity happening there. So I will be in Riverside County in California, the Palm Springs, Palm Desert area. Maybe I'll dabble in a little bit of Orange County too, who knows? So today I am taking the first step that you have to take, which is buy a licensing course. I have to say, I still remember like it was yesterday, buying the licensing course for Washington. I am going to study for the real estate exam. It was a very exciting day because you are taking that first step and it's super cool. If you just simply Google your state, California real estate courses, California real estate licensing course, it's overwhelming sort of to decide which licensing course I'm going to take. There's this Calibri real estate one, CE Shop. They say they have a 62% pass rate. That is not impressing me. That is not very good. There's Allied School in Washington. I did Rockwell Institute. I really liked that. I'll have that linked below. I definitely recommend that for Washington. All of these try and like upsell you on other things. I would just buy the cheapest thing that also includes a bunch of practice exams. I'm just going to go with Calibri. The licensing course is $158.90. Okay, I just bought the course. So you bought the course. Now you need a study plan. The real estate exam is not hard. I remember getting it and feeling overwhelmed and being so scared. I have to go to a testing center. I haven't taken a test in years. This is going to be so hard. It's not. The information isn't hard. What is difficult about it is it's a lot of information. It really is a lot. It's no bar exam. It's no medical school, but it's still a fair amount of effort for any normal person to go through. I promise you your brain has the capacity to remember everything. It's just going to take a little bit of time. Let's come up with a goal for you of when you should be done with the course. Based off my experience of taking the Washington course once, I would say if you have a job, and you're studying in between your job, give yourself three months, and I think you can do it. And seriously, to actually get the studying done, you need to prioritize the studying in your schedule, not prioritize other things, and then try and fit the studying in. If you do that, you're just not going to do it. So realistically, in the next three months, you're going to have to make sacrifices. I wish I had some magic study tip answers for you, but you just actually have to put in the time. And it's really true what they say. The test does not prepare you for becoming a successful agent, so if there's any advice you need to listen to, cram in the information and get it done as fast as you can. Another thing you should consider doing is getting some sort of accountability partner. When I got my real estate license, I was going to join a team, and so the team lead at the time, he was always pestering me. Honestly, if it weren't for him being like, when are you going to finish? Where are you in it? I don't think I ever would have finished. So get some sort of accountability partner, whether it's a mentor that's already licensed, or a friend that's also going to get licensed. My goal is to finish all of my licensing stuff in 45 days and have my exam date scheduled. And then after passing the exam, I want to have gotten my first client and closed a home in 55 days, giving me 100 total days to become a licensed real estate agent and close my first house. So now that I've got the course, I'm just going to go ahead and do a little bit of studying really quick. If today's your first day, definitely do a lot of studying because this is the day you're going to be the most excited about it. And then it's only going to go downhill from there. I have launched the course. Here we go. This is the introduction to California's real estate principles. I like to do things a little bit weird. I like to not read any of the information and take the quiz and like, see what randomly I get right and what I might know and just like, see what kind of questions they're going to be asking. And then I get a terrible score and then I go back the whole, does anyone else like to do that? I like to do that. So let's see how I do. Here we go. Let's see my results finish. Oh, 50%. Okay. Now let's talk about some regrets that I have studying the first time around that I would recommend that you don't do. Number one, I wouldn't pay extra for physical copies of books. It's literally a waste of money and resources and paper. It's all the same stuff that's online. I felt like it slowed me down and I studied slower, but I didn't learn faster. I wouldn't do the books if they have like pay an extra a hundred bucks for the books. I would skip that. What I would pay extra though for is any sort of crash course or other like off brand, different brand exams. When you start to get to the end, a lot of it is just taking a bunch of exams and starting to get your pass rate up and up and up. Another thing I would not do, I would not take very copious notes. Okay. When I first started, I remember I opened lesson one and I started taking notes on literally everything. It just slowed me down so much. It made me go through the chapter so much slower. And I found that once I stopped taking the notes, I went through the chapters quicker and I still retained the information the same. When I do take notes is after I would do an exam, go through all the questions and any of the ones I got wrong. If I knew that was a subject I was getting stuck on, then I would actually go through and take the notes. But first I liked to just go through a little bit quicker and see what sticks in what I kind of was just getting quickly. I'm actually going to go through now and take notes on some of the things that I got wrong. Another thing that helped me stay on track with studying was watching just YouTube videos of other real estate agents, like nothing about studying tips and like how to be successful, just day in my life blogs. It was something that got me excited about the idea of being a real estate agent and the day to day activities, which kept me on track and excited to reach my goal of keep on studying. I have a lot of studying to do, so I'm going to do that now and that's going to be it for today's episode of becoming a real estate agent. If you are interested in becoming a real estate agent, I would encourage you to get started today. As I said, there's never going to be a convenient time to have to cram in all of this studying and take the test. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. I'll see you next time. Bye.