What Education Should New Real Estate Agents Ask About When Interviewing at Different Brokerages?

In a previous blog, How to Pick the Right Real Estate Brokerage for Your Business (which you can read HERE), I touched on a few types of education you need to ask about when interviewing at different brokerages. In this blog, I want to take it a few steps further because what a brokerage offers will have a lot to do with how quickly you succeed in this challenging industry.

From my experience, most brokerages typically offer some sort of education for their agents. But there is no industry standard. Each brokerage can offer as much or as little as they want. Some take this seriously and make education a priority, while others expect their agents to figure it out on their own. Sadly, most of the education I have seen is geared towards veteran agents, rather than new ones. I saw this personally at brokerages I worked at and spent countless hours studying other ones. After owning a brokerage for almost a decade, I can tell you firsthand why this is the case. You see, most of a brokerage’s income comes from agents’ commissions. The more their agents sell, the more the brokerage earns, so it makes sense that the education they focus on is to help proven veteran agents sell more instead of new agents with no business. It is why the subtitle to my book, The Education of a Real Estate Agent, is “How to Succeed in an Industry Unintentionally Designed for Failure.” While I don’t blame these brokerages for how they set their education up, bills do need to be paid, but it does leave a void for people who want to make real estate their career.

But even though brokerages might not offer much education specifically for new agents, they still can offer education that will help you, so let’s focus on that. To keep it simple, I broke up the education into mentorship and training. While the training is important, mentorship is where the real magic happens, so let’s start there.

Mentorship

If you are interviewing at a brokerage and they do not offer mentorship, there is no point in continuing the interview. Kindly thank the person you are meeting with, get up, and walk out of that building as fast as possible. No new agent should EVER join a brokerage that does not have mentorship available to guide them through the stupidly challenging beginning of a real estate career. Building a real estate business is insanely hard! Not having someone to guide you is like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. The only difference is you won’t die when you hit the ground, but you will waste part of your life trying to figure things out, which I would argue is almost as bad.

When you are speaking with the person designated to convince you to join their brokerage, there are a few things you want to ask about IF they do offer mentoring.

1-on-1

The first thing you want to know is if the mentor will only be meeting with you or if it is offered in a group. There is a massive difference in the amount of knowledge you will gain from someone helping you 1-on-1 vs with others. 1-on-1 means the sessions will be personalized, specific to you. As everyone’s needs are different, this ensures you will be getting the right help for your business. I don’t care what anyone says, when you have someone’s full attention, the depths you can go to are far greater than when others are around. So, make sure you will be the only one meeting with the mentor.

On Demand

The next thing to ask about is whether you contact the mentor if you need help in between meetings. Having someone to help you when you need it (not when it is convenient for them) is key. At the beginning, you will encounter new things every day that you will likely need help with. If you do not have someone you can turn to in that moment, you might as well try your luck with ChatGPT because having to wait until you meet next doesn’t help you. A good mentor should always be available to help when you need it. If a mentor is not willing to do this, ask for one that is. Your development is too important to wait on anyone!

TIP: Ask if you can speak to your mentor after the interview to get to know and understand who will be helping you. You must trust this person, so getting to know them before you sign anything is important.

Training

After mentorship, the next thing you want to ask about in your interview is what training the brokerage offers. As I mentioned, most brokerages typically offer some sort of training, but there is no standard, so each is different. If they offer training, ask if you can see the training schedule. The brokerages that make educating their agents a priority likely will plan out their education in advance, so you will be able to see the types of classes they offer. Again, keep in mind, the education you see is typically going to be for veteran agents, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still attend and learn. At my second brokerage (my first offered zero training), I would attend every class they offered, regardless of the topic. I didn’t know anything, so I figured whatever I could learn would help me be better than I was before the class. Even if it meant not using that knowledge until later in my career.

There are two types of training most brokerages offer, online and live.

Online

For online, I am only going to speak about pre-recorded training and not webinars. I’ll touch on those next. I know a lot of brokerages (and real estate coaches) like to tout their online classes as all you need to learn to build a successful business, but I disagree. If that were the case, the success rate in our industry wouldn’t be 13%! Look, I’m not saying pre-recorded trainings are terrible and shouldn’t be taken. You should absolutely do all of them, especially at the beginning, since you don’t know anything, and learning anything is better than not learning. But, do not just rely on these trainings, thinking they will provide you with everything you need to succeed.

For one, since you cannot interact with the person in the video, you cannot ask questions in real time to help you understand the subject matter better. While you can certainly ask someone later, your memory of what you heard will not be the same as when you initially heard the item in question. Meaning, you will not be able to get the true answer to your question, which is ideally what you are looking for.

Second, many of the programs are scripted, so you are only getting the information someone wrote down. We learn better when we hear stories and examples we can relate to. Anything pre-recorded likely won’t offer these. Plus, someone speaking off script will be able to go much deeper depths on a topic since our minds pull information that we know a lot about to the front. So a person talking about a topic will be able to share information from their past to make the material more relevant. Scripts can only teach what is written.

Live

With live trainings, these are usually either webinars or in-person. These can both be very effective IF the training is interactive. If you can ask questions to the presenter in real time, these trainings can be very beneficial. But, if it is just someone speaking from slides the whole time, well, that’s just boring, first off, and second, it is no different than what I spoke about above. Either way, you will still learn, but it won’t speed up your learning curve to the level you want it to. The more interactive, the better!

So make sure when you ask about training, you get the full story about the amount they offer, what they offer, and how they conduct their training. The same goes for mentorship. Make sure you fully understand both before making any decisions.

If you want more information to help make sure you choose the right brokerage, my book The Education of a Real Estate Agent has a whole chapter dedicated to joining a brokerage, and The Education of a Real Estate Agent Workbook has a list of questions to ask when interviewing at a brokerage. You can pick up both HERE.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” —Nelson Mandela

P.S. IF you are serious about becoming a real estate agent and want to learn how you can avoid the mistakes 87% of new agents make, I encourage you to check out the coaching program I have developed to help agents before they enter the industry. The program is designed to help you avoid the frustrations I and so many other agents felt when entering the industry, struggling to survive while clinging to the belief we will succeed. It is completely based on proven results from my experience as a top-producing agent, owning a brokerage for almost a decade (where I helped agents average 2x4 times the amount of sales and income), and from spending over 25,000 hours learning from history’s most legendary people! If this sounds like something that would benefit you, please click HERE to set up a FREE 30 Minute Virtual Call to learn more about how I can help you.