Personalizing Your Real Estate Business

May 19, 2009

A common denominator of all highly successful people is they have a mission.  A mission is the raison d’être of your business, your response to someone asking you, “Why are you in real estate?”.  It’s the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, that sustaining thought that keeps your head up when things get bad.  Now the key part of a mission is it must be personal.  Very personal.  There must be something personally motivating you to want to be a real estate professional and succeed at it.  I believe there are two things you can do to personally motivate yourself and make your business your mission.

Your Passion

Ask yourself, “What aspect of my real estate business really makes me happy?”.  Is there any one thing about it you truly love doing?  For some real estate professionals, it’s simply helping people, general good will, magnanimity.  The ancient Greek philsopher Aristotle called magnanimity the crowning virtue.  Some love handing a couple the keys to their first home, others help finding them a mortgage they qualify for.  Other people may just have a joy for architecture and living spaces.  Whatever your passion, it should be something related to the job itself.

I’ve found the most successful real estate professionals don’t find their passion in the money they make.  I think the reason is money is too intangible a thing to focus on.  Also, if you’re focusing on money, you’re continually focusing on what you want.  Since customer service is the name of the game in real estate, how can you give top notch service if you’re continually focusing on what you want, not what the customer wants?  To be successful in real estate, your passion must be somehow aligned with helping people find the homes and lifestyles they want.  If it isn’t, you should seek a profession aligned with your own personal interests so you can enjoy your work.  People who love their work will always be far more successful than those who view their jobs as ‘work’.   The amount of money follows the level of passion.

It’s truly a sea change in one’s life when your daily work becomes a joy, not a burden.

Your Creation

When you’re passionate about your work, you keep doing it because that work is a part of you.  In the same way, when you create something, it’s a part of you.  When you keep working at and building something, it’s more and more a part of you, so you’re naturally inclined to keep working at it.  You may not necessarily be passionate about any part of the customer service aspect of real estate, but if you have created and built a system on your own from scratch or have taken someone else’s ideas and modified them to suit your way of doing business, you’re living your passion through your creation.

I believe your own creation can be an even more powerful motivator in the long run than a passion for real estate because people and passions change.  But if you build your business from scratch from day one, brick by brick, nothing can take that and your sense of pride and accomplishment away from you.  The most successful people in the world created themselves.

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” – William Blake

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