The 3 ways I LOST over $250,000 as a Real Estate Agent

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So if you want to learn from my mistakes, it's really easy; all you have to do is not click out of this video. Mind blown!

So these are the top three mistakes I made as a real estate agent that have easily cost me over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in lost commission, and this is what they are.

So my first mistake was not showing buyers the homes they did not want to see. Now, this sounds totally counterintuitive because, like, why would you show a buyer something they don't even want to see? Well, the thing that I learned is that buyers are liars and that they generally have no idea what they want until they see it.

It's happened to me so many times in my career where a buyer says, "I only want this specific house; I want this type of home in this neighborhood in this price range," and you show them homes that fit exactly that. Then what happens? One night, months later, you're about to go to bed and you have a smile on your face because you're thinking, "I'm about to close this buyer; I'm about to get this commission!" Then you start spending the commission in your mind.

You'd be like, "Okay, I'm gonna buy this, I see. Oh, and I'm gonna buy this Kodak coin, and I'm gonna put it in a BitConnect X, I see. Oh, you're about to be a millionaire!" What happens is that the buyer sends you an email or a text: "Hey, thanks so much for your help! I ended up buying a property over there for this price range I didn't tell you to look in and for a property that didn't fit anything what I wanted. Thank you very much for your help; I really appreciate it."

And you realize the buyer had no idea what they wanted. I would have shown him that, but he said he didn't want that, and then you cry yourself to sleep that night because you lost out on that deal. It took me a few lost deals to realize that, wait a second, many buyers have no idea what they want, and it's up to me to show them what I think they will like.

So now when it comes to this, I'm like a ninja when it comes to avoiding this scenario in the future. That rack was not built by ninjas! The way I counteract this is by warning the buyers ahead of time and telling them, "Listen, from my experience, a buyer will tell me they want this but end up buying something else." So I recommend to the buyer, "I will show you all the properties you say you want, but I'm also going to be including some other properties that don't quite fit what you say you want that I think you might also like."

This covers you in two ways. The first way is that they don't get upset when you send them something that they didn't initially ask for. You don't want them calling you and being like, "Graham, did you even listen to what I had to say? Why are you being like Grant Cardone and sending me exactly what I wanted? I told you I wanted 16 units or more. Do you know?" So this covers you on that.

This also covers you that you're sending them other properties that they may also want because the last thing that you would want is for them to go off and see something else you didn't send them because initially, they didn't want it. Happens all the time, so avoid this. This is the easiest commission you can ever not lose, yeah, I think that's right.

Now, my second mistake is not following up with certain clients. Now I'm getting better at this. I'm still not perfect at this, but I have lost so many deals just because I've lost touch with the client. I would say when it comes to real estate, half the game is really just following up.

"Hi Nikki, this is Mike. I met you at the open house I was holding the other day. I just called to say that I had a great time, and you should call me tomorrow or in two days, whatever." Because you could be perfect in everything else. You can have the perfect lead generation, you can have the perfect talking skills, you can show them the perfect homes, but if you don't follow up with them, all of that is just gonna go to waste. Like I said, half the game when it comes to real estate is just continuous follow-up over and over and over and over again.

"Hi Nikki, this is Mike again. I just called 'cause it sounded like your machine might have cut me off when I finished leaving my number." There have been clients where—my own fault—we just lost touch. I figured, you know, I hadn't heard from them in six months; you know what, I'm not gonna waste my time emailing them again. I'm not gonna waste my time sending a text that they're not gonna get back to. Why should I continue? If they really want something, they're gonna reach out to me.

Yeah, no, that's not how it works. You have to stick with it over and over and over again. "Hi Nikki, this is Mike. Could you just call me when you get in? I'm gonna be up for a while, and I just rather speak to you in person instead of trying to fit it all in today." Because what ends up happening is you go through your roster in the future and you end up realizing, like, "Hey, wait a second, I haven't talked to these people in like a year. Let me call them."

You call them up, and then magically they pick up the phone and they say, "Oh, you know what? We didn't hear from you. We got all the emails you're sending us. We were just, you know, we weren't quite ready to buy it. We got them all; we got all your text messages. But yeah, we didn't hear from you." And then, "My best friend's uncle's cousin's sister is a realtor and showed us this one house, and we loved it, so we ended up buying." But again, this is the buyers always say this: "We really appreciate your help."

There we go—follow up with your clients! So my biggest recommendation when it comes to this is just put everybody on an email list that you can email consistently. Even something on MailChimp—send something like once a month, every other month—the new listings that you're getting, the recently sold homes, a market analysis. Send something consistently. That way, if they're these people that just aren't getting back to you, you haven't heard from them in forever, at the very least they're getting an email from you every single month or every other month or how often you want to send them an email. Just do something like this. This is better than nothing.

Follow-up is so important because a lot of times, some of the clients that I get, I won't hear from them for like a year or two, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, I get a phone call or an email: "Hey, we've been getting your emails; I'm ready to buy something, ready to sell something." That's always how it works. That is another really easy commission not to lose.

Now my third mistake is not taking some clients seriously. And again, this is my own fault that I have learned as I go through the business of taking everybody seriously and treating everybody as an equal opportunity to do business. I have one scenario that stands out from all the rest.

I had four roommates that called me to find a lease in Venice, and I initially thought to myself, "Why do I want to waste my time with four roommates?" In Venice—didn't take him seriously! I did no background research on them; I had no idea who they were. This would have been about 2012 that this had happened, and I figured, "You know what? I'm not gonna not work with them entirely, but I'm just gonna do the bare minimum, and if they end up getting something, great; if not, I'm not gonna put a lot of effort in this."

What I ended up doing is I sent them some properties and they wanted to see a few homes. Now they're in Venice, and I'm in West Hollywood. And for people that know Los Angeles at all, that is like a journey! If you're gonna drive from Hollywood to like Venice, you may as well just be going to another country at that point with traffic and everything. So I figured, "You know what? I'm just gonna send them on their own." And I sent them to all these showings on their own, and you know, they didn't like any of the homes.

I sent them another batch, and they wanted to see a few more, and I sent them to those again on their own. They were somewhat interested in one, but the owner didn't want to deal with roommates. I figured, "You know what? At that point, they're probably not gonna be clients I really want to work with, and I'm gonna let them look on their own." I just didn't take them seriously.

It wasn't until maybe two weeks later I was at the gym, and I ran into a friend who's another real estate agent. He was the one that ended up showing them one of the houses that I had set up for them to see. He says, "Dude, those are great clients you have! Did you end up finding them something?" And I was like, "Yeah, it was just kind of like, you know, I'm like, oh yeah, great clients," and he was mentioning the company that they worked for and this and that.

Then I realized that those four roommates were the co-founders of a very popular Venice Beach company. You guys can look; I'm sure you know who I'm talking about here. But yeah, it was for the four co-founders of—I'm sure they're all billionaires right now. But didn’t take them seriously enough to go and meet them in person and show them houses! Had I done that, had I just made the effort to go down to those showings, had I just made the effort to meet them and build that sort of rapport and trust and everything else that goes along with something that's in person, that would have been an easy in to that whole industry and to those people and to build a relationship with them.

Of course, as soon as that happens, I frantically call them back and like, "Hey, did you end up finding something?" And they ended up finding something just a few days prior to that, and I missed out on that. Of course, now I see that they're all buying five to twenty million dollar homes, and you know, that by the way could be well over a million dollars in lost commission there.

So my recommendation is you treat everybody seriously. You treat everybody as an equal opportunity to do business. Don't go in with any preconceived notions that they might be a difficult client, that you don't want to work with roommates, that they have a bad credit score. That it's ideally, especially in the beginning, you work with as many people as possible and you learn from my three mistakes right here.

Really simple things to do; it doesn't take a lot of effort to do them. These are all really easy ways to make more money in real estate just by learning from my mistakes.

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