How to be a Real Estate Agent in 2025!

I got to ask the question today, should you become a real estate agent in 2025? And as somebody who's been a real estate agent for a while now, I've bought, sold, I've sold million dollar houses. I've sold little lots. I've done just about everything. I've done investing. I've bought houses for myself as an investor, as a real estate agent. I'm going to talk to you about what I think about it, but doing this a minute, I've sold a lot of real estate and a lot of people have asked me in my opinion, well, here's the, here's the meat and potatoes of the whole thing. One, if you want to become a real estate agent in 2025, you really got to understand the new NAR ruling. We've been dealing with it since I think July now, where you have to have a buyer's agent agreement before you can show a house. You got to have a few things underneath your sleeve when you're trying to navigate real estate. Now, uh, as a listing agent, it's a little more complex. As a buyer's agent, it's more complex than just opening a door. The number one thing you've got to be able to do as a new agent is to show your value. Okay? When you're going up against a, uh, an agent that has been around for a while, like myself or some of my peers, I work at one of the top brokerages in my area with some of the most elite agents. When you're going up against somebody like that, you got to say, what is my value proposition to my client? And you've got to be able to eloquently put that forward. You got to understand this before you can go into any of the other parts of real estate. And if I was a new agent, I would do it like this. I would say, what are my, what is my power base? My friends, my family, the people that know me that are three feet of contact around me. How can I leverage that and get them to sign a buyer's agent agreement with me? Because as a new agent, you're going to be working with buyers, predominantly buyers. And that's going to be your, your breadwinner, uh, you know, until you have enough underneath your belt to get a listing. You might get a listing right off the bat, but, um, we're just going to go forward with, you're going to be a buyer's agent mostly. So you're going to say, Hey, how, how do I have a proposition against Jack that's crawled underneath a hundred houses that can talk his way out of just about any. Your value proposition is you're going to be very close to the people you're helping. You're going to do it with honesty. And if you don't know, you'll find out. Hopefully you get a good broker to start out with and that broker will train you to be a great agent. We'll teach you how to navigate the contract. We'll teach you how to talk to people. And if you don't have that, you need to go and find the best agent you can and get as much free information from them as you can, uh, free. Okay. And then navigate that and practice. You're going to approach a hundred people because your value proposition is going to be, you're going to show up on time. You're going to answer the phone. You're going to do whatever they need. You're going to open 30 doors before you ever sell a house. And you just have that in your head that you're going to work your tail off. 2025 is going to be a weird housing market and you're going to have to learn the skillset needed to play small ball, to sell the small deals, to get the experience. You're going to do stuff for free. Okay. And I say this because as a buyer's agent, you're going to do a lot of stuff for free and you're going to work your tail off, but you're doing stuff to get a skillset to get better. And when that buyer says, why should I sign a contract with you for two and a half percent or 3% or whatever your deal is, when I could go sign one with somebody else. And you're going to say, because I answer the phone, I work really hard. I show up on time. And if I don't know, I will find out. I will be the best person for you at that moment, no matter what. And, and you're going to try to progress yourself as fast as possible. You're going to have, you're going to, you're going to try to get a house under contract in your first month or two. That's just what you're going to do. Like what is your projected end status of being a real estate agent? Are you trying to do one deal a year? Are you trying to do 50? Well, a lot of people like to do it as a side gig. And I think as a new agent, you should do it as a second tier thing to whatever your first thing is. Don't quit your job and just think you're going to jump into real estate. Selling real estate is hard. Okay. And it takes a minute. I see many agents fail because they quit their job and they go and do this. The only way you can really do that is if you have a comfortable situation where you can spend the next six months working for free and learning, because there's a lot to learn and you really got to pick what you're wanting to sell. Single family, land, commercial, don't mix commercial with residential. Okay. Don't do it. Some brokers won't let you do that. And that's good because they're totally different cookies. You need to do one or the other. And I would say this, don't do land. Don't do vacant land as a new real estate agent. Okay. And I know I'm going to catch black on that and the comment down below. And I hope I do catch black on that. That way you can read the comments you can decide yourself. But if you try to sell land at first, there are a lot of landmines and say selling vacant land, you got to know a lot about, you know, your area. And if there's any like regulations codes or any bureaucracy, red tape on building or, or doing whatever you want to do with that land. Uh, where I am like on the beach and, and some of these areas, they won't even let you build on certain things. And you got to know those things or you'll catch a landmine on your client. I like to pick what I like looking at residential real estate. There's already a house there. It's been permitted and you just learn that. Okay. Get really good at it. When you get really good at that, you can do the rest, but learn that first. Okay. Or just do vacant land, but you got it. You get, there's going to be a learning curve in all of it. Number two, and I'm putting this as number two because it, it needs to be talked about at number two marketing. You got to figure out how to market yourself. When I jumped into real estate, I did everything everybody else said was wrong. Okay. And I did it on purpose because I came at it as a marketer, not as a real estate person. I was coming from the investment world. It's coming from the YouTube world. And I knew I had to break things and move fast and do it as cheap as possible to catch up to the agents that have been doing this for 20 years. And I knew I could do that digitally. And so like, I vlogged my, uh, my real estate stuff on my YouTube channel. I took pictures of every time I was doing something in real estate, it was on Instagram. It was on Facebook. It was on everywhere. I could blast it. And I shared it on LinkedIn. Everybody within three points contact of me knew I was either a YouTuber or a real estate agent or did real estate investing and all of it together at once. I broke every rule minus, uh, getting in trouble with the local MLS. And I don't say that as a joke. I'm saying that as I push the boundaries as far as I possibly could to catch the ground up on the older agents. They don't like when you do that because they spent a lot of time doing it. And a lot of them can't cross pollinate. And I'm not trying to, I'm not saying anything rude about older agents or respect a lot of them. I'm just saying that's the mindset. That's the crossover. That's what, um, you're going to be fighting against when you get into some of these high dollar properties, you go out to the beach. Some of these guys have been operating on the beach for a very long time. There's going to be a little turf war. It's going to be a little animosity. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying, expect it. Just know, how are you going to market yourself? How are you going to market these properties? What's your value proposition of when you get the listing that you're going to do different than any other agent that's just going to stick it on the MLS. Like for me, I had one of the biggest platforms on the Gulf coast. I, if I posted it, everybody saw it and I could offer that other agents couldn't. I came out the gate knowing real estate cause I was buying and investing and selling real estate on my own. I had done multiple, multiple flips, which I had done on my channel and shown everybody I could speak it. I could talk and I could walk and I knew a lot of things about the functions of a house. And that's another thing as a young agent, study everything you can about a house. Know the difference in 10 to wire 12, three, 12 to, uh, you know, 10 to know what a hot water heater, know how a toilet works, know how plumbing works, know how a roof works. You can learn all this from some YouTube videos and have a running bank of information and all this. So you got to know how to market yourself. You got to know how to sell yourself, right? Some agents can get away with walking around and flip flops and board shorts like me. And people still know they're confident in what they do because I have a, a resume behind me. I have a digital resume. Everybody can see. Um, and a lot of people want to live in flip flops and board shorts. So like sometimes I'm able to get away with that. Now you are trying to handle somebody's financial asset and you've got to know they have to respect you and be able to take you seriously. And, uh, so however your looks and that meet together, you got to look professional, act professional. And in some of these situations you're going to be talking to some very, very smart people and you got to know how money works. And that gets me into the next thing. You got to know a little bit about 1031 exchanges. You got to know a little bit about, uh, mortgages and financing and what some of these people want to do with their finances. What are their taxes going to be? Yeah, you're not a tax professional, but are they going to take a capital gains tax on this or not? They're going to want to talk with you about this stuff and you're going to need to know these things. So start studying. Okay. So next, a lot of the agents in this 2025 coming out of 2024 didn't make as much money. So their advertising for the next year is not going to be as, as big, as dynamic, as bloat stress is, is, is, is as loud as it was in many years. And I think as a young agent, it's the perfect time to get out there and compete with them because they're not spending as much money. I've seen agents spend 40, $50,000 a month to advertise, you know, whether it's listings or advertising themselves or, or whatnot through ad, uh, AdWords or through their websites or through social media, they're spending tons of money. And if you're in a first year agent, a first time agent, you don't have that money to spend. And it's now is your time to get out there and compete with them. Yeah. You're not going to make as much money in a down market. It's just the way it is, but you can learn, you can shadow, you can prep yourself. So when the market turns back on, you're ready to go. And I didn't care. I still don't care if the market's down. I still sold a lot of real estate when the market was down. I sold more real estate last year than I did during the boom. I ground pounded. I went out there and I talked to everybody and I made video after video after video. And you couldn't look two ways from Sunday without knowing that Jack Motley had a house to sell. Okay. And that's the attitude you got to have. You gotta be aggressive. You gotta be, you've gotta be professional. You've gotta be in people's faces. You gotta know if you can't market yourself, you can't market a property and just think about that and say, how can I benefit from, you know, from these words and how can I learn how to market myself? My mother-in-law got her a real estate license this last year. She's doing great, but you know what? She worked hard, put herself out there. She learned she was at every meeting. If there was a brokerage meeting, she was there. If there was a meeting on some type of new marketing ability, she was there. Anything free, she was there. And that's what the mindset you gotta have. And if you're willing to do that, you're going to be successful. If you're not willing to do that, then real estate might not be for you. You just gotta be aggressive and you gotta get out there and get after it. All right, here's another one. Bonus round. Work the open houses. If there is a big agent out there, he's got some listings. They're great listings. Say, Hey, can I work an open house for you? I will do that open house for free for myself and with myself for you. You don't have to do nothing. And what you're going to do is you're going to go and do these open houses for free and you're going to get the walkthrough traffic and everybody that comes in that door is hopefully a future client of you because you're going to be selling yourself. You're going to be selling everything you got as, Hey, I can be your agent and you can buy this house. I've seen more agents get big fast by doing this because you're one-on-one with somebody in a beautiful house. You got your paperwork right there and you say, Hey, I would be happy to represent you. And that's how you start. Start there and you go to every function and anything the brokerage is doing that you could possibly benefit from, do it. And then say, Hey, I'll do referrals. I'll do anything. Be a bird dog, be a door opener. Do whatever you can to be in the loop because when big agents have a deal that they're not able to do and it happens all the time, Hey, it's a little out of my area. Hey, I'm a little busy right now. Hey, I've got this deal holding me up right now. I just got this buyer that needs to see a house right now. Take that referral. Take all the referrals you possibly can, even if you're almost losing money. Because if you sell yourself strong, there'll be a repeat deal or they might tell about, tell their friend about you and it echoes and it builds and it builds and it builds. And once you get that moment, once you get that momentum, don't slow down. Don't go take two weeks off. Once you sell a house, go to the next deal, the next deal, the next deal, the next deal. Because once you stop, the momentum stops. I say this all the time in real estate. If you slow the momentum down, it will come back to haunt you. So make sure that is something you don't do. You keep it going until you're ready to implode and your bank account's full. Then go take a break. But real estate is a game of numbers and volume and you got to keep moving forward. So previously real estate, there wasn't a lot of inventory. Last three or four years was not a lot of inventory. And if you posted a house online, it was going to get eyeballs and it was probably going to sell. As inventory rises, there's going to be a lot of competition for listing when you post it. And it's going to take a ground game. It's going to take talking to every agent you know to get them to go look at your house. And whether people like it or not, double sides don't happen a lot. Okay. If you're a buyer out there or a seller and an agent's telling you he's going to double side, it doesn't happen statistically a lot. And if anybody's going to do it, it'd be me because I've got a big social media following. It takes other buyers agents to come through your listing to bring you a buyer most of the time. And that's why shorting the, buyers agent is never a good idea. And I know there's going to be people in the comments section and it's going to look, you want foot traffic through your listing. You want people to bring money through your listing. And if that means paying 2.5% do it. Okay. It is the longer that property is on the market. It is adding up all the holding costs and the risk and the, the ability for a tornado to come through and rip the carport off that's happened. I had one get a roof ripped off right before closing. That video is on this channel. Okay. Multi-million dollar house. So you want to get as many buyers agents on your list as possible. Same in reverse. You want to know every selling agent possible. So when they post that house, they're like, Hey Jack, I just listed the house on buy you. Oh, wait a minute. I got a buyer. Can I be there in the morning? Yeah, sure. I'll get it. I'll make sure the keys are out there. It'll go live at 9am and I'm there at 901 with my buyer. See how this works. Just got to learn to build a network and then learn how to get good at your trade to where the older agents don't run circles around you and negotiation. Once you learn negotiation, you're going to be good. But once you possess these, the skillset that I'm trying to tell you to possess, the sky is the limit. You find a property, you know you can relist it on the MLS. You get it for this price. You relist it, have to do some repairs, whatever. Make a hundred grand. Like I did that. I think like my second or third year as a real estate agent found a house. They had to get rid of it. I bought it, relisted it. I knew immediately what it would relist for. Made a hundred grand. What other industry can you do that? Because the knowledge base you learn through all the trenches that you had to crawl through, give you the ability to one day look up and make a lot of money because of the knowledge you possess. And there's a reason why not everybody's a real estate agent because it's hard and there's a big learning curve and they'll be like, Oh, real estate agents, they make too much. If that was true, everybody would be a real estate agent, but they're not because it's hard and it takes a skillset. The good agents are good agents for a reason. They work really hard and they're really good at it and they've been doing it a long time. The bad agents are bad agents for a reason. And this slow process will get rid of a lot of them because they won't have the money to operate. So just know down, down markets are a blessing too and it'll get rid of all the fraud. And I'm excited to still be a real estate agent. I've had a blast, made a lot of money, had a blast, and I'm going to continue to do it because I like doing deals. And if you have that mindset, you're going to do great in this industry. And I hope this video helped. There's really not that one thing that is just going to make you amazing. It's a lot of things. You got to work hard. You got to network, go learn how to market, go learn social media, go learn how to email market, got to do a lot of things and you got to enjoy doing it because it'll burn you out. Okay. Wait until that deal fall through at 60 days and you're starting over again or you lose it and you spend a ton of money on it. It's part of the game. Don't forget to like and subscribe, comment down below what you think. Let's argue about the stuff. I'll see you guys later.