3 Essential Traits that Make a Remarkable Real Estate Broker

The watermark for success in real estate sales is high.

In spite of the required hours of class room instruction, qualifying exams and continuing education an individual must complete to become, and remain, a licensed real estate broker, it won’t impart the characteristics needed to be successful.

The best real estate brokers in Brooklyn, and throughout New York City, are innately aware of how their success is defined.

And what 3 character traits power the results their clients benefit from.

How success is defined by the masses

Thousands of people each year embark on becoming licensed real estate agents in New York City.  The majority are lured into the business by the dream of earning BIG commission checks.

For them, success is defined in finite terms: List Price, Offers to Purchase, Contract Price and Commission Earned.

While these business variables are important, their not the right indicators to measure the quality of the results achieved.

They only measure outcomes that can be interpreted best by the law of large numbers theory, where the more attempts made will result in an outcome that will often be no better than average.

Average results from an ordinary effort describes the modern day real estate business, long on promise and short on outcome.

Property owners despise average and ordinary

In fact, to avoid hiring a by-the-numbers broker, they rely on the experiences of friends, neighbors and colleagues to identify the best at what they do.

For them the search is personal.  After all, it’s their home.  There’s no other transaction as important to their immediate future.  With little room for error and no contingencies, the results produced by the agent must live up to what’s estimated in their presentation.

Average and ordinary are the results produced by real estate brokers who can’t find inspiration in what they do because they don’t know where to draw it from.

And while Michael Scott’s advice on sales will provide motivation for the 1,409 newly licensed real estate brokers, it won’t reveal the source that inspires the remarkable real estate broker.

The making of a remarkable real estate broker

These 3 attributes are the difference between remarkable and ordinary among real estate brokers.

Fortunate for new and existing agents, you don’t have to have the right parents to be born with them because the remarkable real estate broker is also a talented individual.

And no matter how gifted an individual is, they must harness their creative energy to develop their talent into an expertise.

Any individual can develop their talent as long as they approach it creatively.

Each of the 3 essential traits that make a remarkable real estate broker have one thing in common; each involves creativity for its own sake.

1. Abstract Observation

Each time the remarkable real estate broker meets a homeowner, they come equipped with market information.  However, they won’t begin to formulate a selling plan until they’ve heard the reason for the sale and the plan for relocation.

For them, the art in meeting expectations come with separating the parts from the whole.  Their focus is on how to develop a plan of action that achieves the highest value in the time frame allotted.

They use their creativity to merge the resources, action steps and relationships needed to produce an outcome that’s achievable

2. Innovative

The remarkable real estate broker knows first hand that anything that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong.  While the most competent agent can develop a  contingency in response to a condition not planned for, innovation will have addressed several scenarios long before a deal is negotiated and a sale contracted.

Beginning with the end in mind allows them to prepare adequately before the house comes to market.

3. Artistically inclined

Art is not linear.  There isn’t a piece of art that was ever created using a standard formula to produce it.

Any artist will tell you that each work of art they’ve created had a process all it’s own from what inspired its creation.

Which is why there aren’t two Jean-Michel Basquiat originals of the same name hanging in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Imagine if the owner of a brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant was told that all MLS brokers felt every brownstone townhouse was alike.

Do you think they would hire a broker who was a member of a Multiple Listing Service?  Especially if they thought that they were going to bring an average, ordinary approach to the sale of their home?

Or do you think they would hire a broker whose interested in promoting what’s exceptional about their home.  Who would use traditional and untraditional methods to increase the property’s exposure to the home buying public.  Who would bring all their creative energies to bear in making their house standout from the hundreds For Sale in their neighborhood.

Who would you hire?

Now I know I’ve taken some artistic liberty in my explanation of what makes a real estate broker remarkable, but the attributes described are exactly what makes their success uncommon as compared to their peers.

In whatever market, with whatever kind of property in whatever location, there’s not an obstacle they can’t overcome, objection they can’t defeat or opportunity they can’t capitalize on.

And they rely on one important business variable to measure their performance; a referral.

Michael A. Corley is a licensed Real Estate Broker and Exec. Vice President at Corley Realty Group.  Born and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant, he now resides in Crown Heights with his wife and children