Love people and their personalities. This helps establish trust.  Having an appreciation of architecture, decorating or interior design won't be of much help with those emotional, stressed and volatile clients you will be working with. Real estate is about people and their personalities. Houses are just the vehicles for the personalities to interact. You have to truly like people and want to help them to achieve their goal of buying or selling real estate through the good, the bad and the ugly.  Out-goingness, reliability and even-temperedness are all traits of successful real estate agents. Consider role-playing difficult client personalities with your mentor to gain experience in dealing with the emotions that come with real estate transactions. Having prepared for these situations in advance, you will be able to show your clients that when they are strung out you are the voice of reason.

Work smart and use good time management skills. After the fiftieth home you have shown your potential buyers, it's not about the homes anymore, it's about your clients. Learn how to qualify your clients from your mentor to save yourself time and energy that you could spend on clients that are ready, willing and able to go to contract. The sooner you learn to terminate nonproductive clients the easier it will become. Many agents dislike firing clients because of all the time they have invested with them. These same agents though are the first to announce they're self-release from the clients that were really just shoppers, abusive, or were working with multiple agents. 

Be technology proficient. Social media, digital photography, smartphone, wifi - these are musts for today's agent.  Use the Internet. It's changed how buyers start their purchase process. It wasn't all that long ago that a buyer had to call agents to find out what properties were available to purchase. But as multiple listing services moved to the Internet and the public accesses listing information - a dramatic shift started to occur in real estate brokerage. Instead of floor duty originating buyer leads calling on office listings, buyers started their home search on websites such as Realtor.com before contacting a real estate agent. So how do you get in the path of these technology-savvy consumers? Have a Web presence on both your brokerage site, have your own real estate website, a blog and profiles in as many places as possible.  And develope a value proposition that is unique  - different from being a source of data.

Know all the details of the transaction process and keep written records of them. When you deliver one of your first offers to a listing agent and she says to you that there are multiple offers on the property, this is not the time to learn about the strategies for multiple offers. Have your mentor or managing broker explain the transaction process, participants, documents, and disclosures.  You need to know all the transaction terms from attorney review to walk-through. Ask about common wrinkles in transactions in your market and what you can do proactively to eliminate them.  Remember that your clients have only one focus and that's buying or selling a home. If you don't know something, don't improvise, find out and report back to your clients. Don't give legal advice, don't violate fair housing laws, but do celebrate after a successful closing!.

Keep your client pipeline pumping. Never stop prospecting! This is the most important lesson! You'll find other agents at your office multitasking to the tenth degree, talking on the cell phone, landline, and e-mailing at the same time. They have four transactions going at once and all they do is manage them, they're too busy for open houses, prospecting or direct mail campaigns. Then suddenly they all close in the course of two weeks.  The agent has now hit what I call "pipeline failure." It could be at the least thirty days before the agent finds a qualified buyer or seller, puts a contract together and goes to closing. Transactions are exciting, but don't get distracted by the day-to-day management of them. You have to keep looking for new clients that will keep your pipeline going when your transactions close.