Personal branding is growing in popularity and importance in the real estate world, with agents who can promote themselves successfully reaping huge benefits.
One of the key aspects of the personal brand is making sure that it’s you who’s getting the biggest benefit, rather than someone else in your office or further up the real estate chain.
Many successful agents already have a business model in place, even if it’s under someone else’s banner, which means promoting yourself can boost your own numbers and make the eventual transition to running your own real estate business all the easier.
For new real estate agents, working under someone else’s brand is a great idea. It means you can learn the ropes under an experienced principal’s wing, have the security of a base salary and get a marketing budget to make use of. This is a low-risk approach that allows you to earn your stripes and get a feel for the industry.
As you grow as an agent and gain experience, many industry professionals make the transition to becoming their own Pty Ltd, register for their full real estate license and start to advertise themselves as a personal brand or as a team. All while working for someone else.
Once you’re investing money to build your personal brand it becomes more economical to move to a network that allows you to keep more of your commission
Increased exposure brings in more leads and the individuals brand starts to be cemented as a go-to agent locally. Often, an agent’s reputation is synonymous with the agency they work for and in turn, their self-promotion boosts the agency’s reputation as a whole.
If you’re not a director or partner in the agency and your name and face are boosting someone else’s real estate brand, you’ll no doubt reach a point where you’ll start thinking about standing on your own two feet.
As you grow, learn the tricks of the trade and become more competent in your job, you’ll soon learn there are greater benefits available to you. Many of the top performing real estate agents in Australia take home as little as 33 cents in every dollar when they work under someone else’s banner. At One Agency, our members regularly take home up to 95 cents in the dollar after expenses and before tax.
As you’re already spending your own money to expand your agent brand, it makes a lot of sense to move to a model that gives you a better return on your investment.
Although it can feel like a risky or expensive move, the overwhelming response we get from our members is that they wished they’d started investing in their personal brand earlier.
In reality, there are only two essential things you need: confidence in yourself and the ability to list.
Confidence can come from a variety of sources, but if you’re considering building your own brand it suggests that you have at least an inkling of confidence. What you may lack is total confidence as you may feel you have a skill gap. However, no agent was born with all the skills they will ever need. If you can successfully list a home, everything else can be taught to you or delegated to an expert in the field.
Once you feel confident in your abilities to sell a home, you should think about your own branding as a means to grow your career.
Personal branding for real estate agents works on many different levels. The easiest and cheapest is to focus online.
Real estate agents in today’s world should be looking to create personal profiles and social media accounts to boost their own efforts. Being active on sites like Facebook and Instagram is a great first step to getting your name in front of sellers, especially when you add online advertising to the mix. You can use these accounts to share listings and advice from your blog, ideally hosted on your own website.
As well as industry websites and directories, LinkedIn is another great place to build your profile. Social and digital marketer, Melanie Hoole, recommends agents put social profiles to work so that you don’t digitally disappear. She highlights how you can build your online footprint in a way that will work in your favour as a stepping stone to bigger and better things.
Offline marketing is useful too. You may have seen real estate agents who invest in billboards or other forms of impact advertising. The benefit here is that you get your name and face in front of people in your area.
The real estate agents who make the most money are the ones who work for themselves. There’s very little you’ll actually have to change to be in that position, but a lot to gain by doing so.
One Agency helps new members make the transition with ease. As you’ll already have the skills and processes in place, we essentially lift you up with your feet still running, move you sideways and put you down running your own business. Everything will be done the way you want it to be done, but now it will be under your own name and your own brand, with the obvious benefits, financial and otherwise, that come with that.
If you’re ready to give yourself more freedom, to work how you like and retain more of your fees, One Agency will help you make the switch.
As founder and CEO of the fastest growing real estate network across Australasia, I offer real estate professionals an opportunity to reap the financial rewards of going it alone with the security and clout of an established brand. Talk to me and my team about your options.
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One Agency is a revolution in real estate, empowering both individual real estate professionals and established agencies to take control of their future and bring an entirely new level of service to clients.
