Every professional real Estate agent reevaluates its position and the way he/she operates their business, as a way to grow and enrich their business. Some common questions asked during this reflection include:

How can I reach out to my clients more often?

How do I get labeled as a real estate specialist rather than a generalist?

How can I make my clients play fairly with me?

The answer to each of these questions and many more is very simple, you must earn your client’s TRUST.

Your goal in the real estate industry is to become a trusted real Estate Advisor.

The question now is, how?

Trusted real estate advisors all share the same attributes:

• They naturally focus on the client as an individual rather than a person fulfilling a role to satisfy their needs and wants.
• They show a strong competitive drive but not in the sense of business competition always but through finding new ways to be of greater service to the clients – This means that they aren’t looking out for their own business, they keep their client’s best interest in mind.
• They focus on doing the next right thing instead of on specific outcomes for your benefit. This means being customer-oriented again – put your client’s interests first.
• They believe that both selling and serving are aspects of professionalism; both prove a dedication to helping clients with their issues – it is like creating win-win situations for yourself and your clients.

So, how do you become one?

The Core Real Estate Advisor Skills

1- The Power of Trust

Trust is a power that is both earned and deserved. You must do something to prove yourself as a trusted real estate advisor to your clients.

At the core, trust is about relationships; with real estate, you will notice clients tend to trust real estate agents who care for their benefit and not simply looking to maximize their wallets alone.

Trust is all about the “law of reciprocity” , which is as simple as this:

You help me and I’ll help you.

Just as Gary Vaynerchuk book is titled, ‘Jab, Jab, Jab, Right hook’ or in other words give, give, give, get back.

By providing your clients with the valuable information, you are essentially building a trust bond between you and them.

This will, in end, work in your favor. Getting your clients to trust you will allow more leads down the road as they are satisfied with your services. Not only this, they will turn into your advocates and will help you in building your referral business by providing you with more referral leads.

2- Giving Advice

Advice is not exclusively all about logic. Many real estate professionals believe giving advice is all based off technical, exact knowledge and expertise. Instead of this, giving advice should be a beautiful harmony between the real estate advisor and the client.

Now, what do I mean by this?

In the simplest terms, if you can not learn to recognize, process, and respond to your client’s emotions, then you cannot be an effective real estate advisor.

Clients want an advisor who will take away their worries and absorb their hassles. But, instead, what they frequently get are real estate professionals who add to their worries and create unnecessary headaches by forcing them to confront things they would prefer to ignore.

Point to Ponder: Clients are loyal to your standards, NOT YOU!

You must take into account that clients are anxious and uncertain – it is your job as a real estate advisor to provide reassurance, calm their fears, and inspire confidence.

Now that you have this skill down, you are capable of providing your client with strong value.

But you must keep the following in mind:

1- Find the right words

We often are not aware of how we come off across to clients, the certain things we may intend to convey may have a different meaning to your clients. This affects the impact you make on the clients.

The way to overcome this barrier is to develop the skill of rehearsing a client conversation with a friend or colleague. By doing so, you will have live feedback and are now able to rephrase things differently, to avoid the perception of being unclear.

2- Ask the right questions

Let’s welcome back the questions in real estate.

Just like a good teacher, your role for giving advice to your client should be getting them from point A→ B. In order to do so, you must have a strong understanding of point A (what they know and understand as of now) and be able to take the prospective client to point B (what you want them to understand) with logic and reasoning.

Questions you will be asking include:

• “What advantages do you foresee for the different homes we’ve seen?”
• “What financial goals do you want to achieve with your real estate investment property?”
• “When do you plan to move in your new residential property?”
• “What made you take the decision of owning a home?”

The point here is trying to fulfill their real estate needs by determining exactly what they want and need – this will also help you manage their unrealistic expectations and also help you connect with them on an emotional level.

3. Building Relationships

One way to succeed in real estate business is to CONNECT since it’s a people’s business. Which is why, building strong relationships is the foundation of your real estate business and can be a way to build your sphere of influence (SOI). To build a strong relationship in real estate, you must be:

• Thoughtful
• Understanding
• Considerate
• Supportive

Luckily for you, there are some key principles of relationship building that apply to your real estate and personal lives:

Principle No # 1: Go first
You must give a favor to earn a favor. To become a trusted real estate advisor, you must display your willingness to invest time to help your prospect, this is how you earn their trust.

Principle No # 2: Show, don’t tell
Creating opportunities to show that you have something to contribute is a way to show your clientele that you are not just all ‘talk’ rather you have the proof the back it up.

Principle No # 3: Earn the right to offer advice
One can not just approach a prospect and start giving them advice, at this point they will be wondering “who are you?”. To break this ice, start by understanding the client’s situation by asking closed-ended questions. Follow up by finding out how the client feels about then, then begin with advising the clients and make sure you both are on the same page.

Principle No # 4: Trust for the client differs from the trust for advisors. This clearly means that everybody have their own definition of trust so you need to understand that and watch out for that.

Now that you know how to build trust, let’s simplify it a little more and break trust building into a process!

5 Stages of Trust

1. Engage with the prospect
2. Listen to the situation/complication
3. Find the true reason behind an occuring of issue while providing a fresh way to think about it
4. Envision the many solutions to the problem to find the best way to fix it
5. Commit – by this stage the problem has been framed and the vision you wish to attain is clear to fix the problem

Trust is many things for real estate, it is a two-way relationship on personal level which you can achieve with your prospect. It entails risk but over time it you make a connection with your client on an emotional level. Building trust is important, especially because every agent should have it between them and their clientele. You are able to become a top agent by becoming a trusted real estate advisor through asking the right questions and utilizing your value, during the right situations to show your prospects that you are here for their best interest.

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