There's been a myth floating around the real estate industry that prospecting is something need only do for a short amount of time, and then an abundance of transactions will start flowing to you easily. But it's very rare to find an agent who experiences this unless they're in the middle of a fairly hot market where they're working.

As long as you have transactions closing in your area that you're not involved in, and most specifically transactions where you didn't even know the principals were interested in buying, selling, or leasing until they began working with another agent, you have even greater opportunities to continue to perfect your prospecting.

Prospecting can take many shapes and forms nowadays, but the most typical forms of prospecting involve cold-calling on the telephone, knocking on doors, and mailing. And at the same time some of the best residential agents are doing an incredible job of finding solid new prospects on the Internet, and for these agents this has proven to be another very valuable form of prospecting, too.

But the majority of agents depend on the more traditional forms of prospecting, and the amount of money they make in their businesses is proportional to the number of solid, quality leads that they produce. And at the same time, so many agents continually do a very poor job of prospecting throughout the year in their real estate businesses.

One of the problems here is that typically many agents already feel busy, but they're busy doing unproductive activities. They're not out hustling new business ... they're spending much more time shuffling papers around and not talking with new people. They're staying inside of their comfort zone, and it's costing them a lot of money.

In addition, one of the biggest mistakes that agents make is prospecting until they feel busy, and then dropping out their prospecting. This leads to cutting oneself off from any great new business unless it just falls on your lap from other sources. And becoming reactive instead of proactive in developing one's business is a place where no agent should ever go. The consequences to your income will simply be too devastating.

But why is this so? Why do so many agents only prospect when they experience a slowdown in activity and feel that their back is finally against the wall in needing to produce new business?

If you're an agent who knows that prospecting is a great way to develop new business, ask yourself, "How much money would I be making if I prospected 10-12 hours a week every week I'm working?" And if you like your answer, just go out and get the prospecting done.

On the other hand, if you are telling yourself, "I'm so busy right now that I don't have the time to do my prospecting," ask yourself this, "If someone called me right now and asked me to make a presentation to list their $5,000,000.00 property, would I somehow make the time to do it?"

And if your answer to this question is, "Yes," you definitely have the time available to get your prospecting done!