Are you going through a hard time in your real estate sales career at the moment? If so, maybe you could use a word of caution about your attitude.

Don't spend your time among yourselves comparing yourselves to yourselves. I call it "comparisonitus." It's a virus that can cost new agents their careers. It's contagious and it's deadly.

If you start comparing your office policies and procedure to those in other offices in a negative way, you may find yourself paralyzed and totally unproductive in a very short time. Your solution: change brokers. My recommendation: stay put.

My guess is that you may have already been a victim of this and either got over it, or you are just hanging on, not making any real money.

Here's the scenario:

You come out of sales meeting where your broker has just announced that your E & O insurance is going up two dollars. You didn't think too much about it until you heard another agent complain "They don't charge that much at XYZ Realty". You note it, but don't comment about it. Next week you here that ABC Company doesn't do something else your broker does, maybe has a family picnic once a year and yours doesn't, or gives a $50 dollar prize every month and yours only gives $25. Whatever.

You know what happens next?

You hear about these comparisons often enough and you start wondering if you joined your present company too soon. You start wondering if maybe you should interview with these companies "before I get too deeply involved here." It only follows that since you could be changing offices, it doesn't make sense to get any listings. Right? It called paralysis by analysis, and it's deadly.

If you continue to let others cloud your vision, you will eventually leave the business, because you didn't do any business. You lost your focus and started drifting. Your hot passion for the business turned lukewarm. Why? Because you started listening to nonsense comparisons.

What is the solution?

Set your own standards. Accept the standards of your present broker. If you are new in the business, stay with the office you are with right now. Renew your mind. Reinforce your determination to become a professional real estate agent. Your problem is not necessarily your broker's fault!

In most cases, changing offices is not your answer. Changing your attitude is.

Published: February 4, 2004

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David Fletcher has been a Florida real estate condominium and new homes broker for 30 years with more than $3 billion in new construction sales. In 2008, Keller Williams Realty International named him a "Lifetime Achiever." Along the way he has chaired the Florida Homebuilders Associaiton Sales and Marketing Council, trained thousands of general agents and on-site agents to work together, and was a featured speaker at the National Association of Realtors. Recently he founded New Homes Niche, a builder-certified co-broker training system "to meet the growing trend we see in short sale buyers moving to new homes for a lot of reasons." Call David at 407 234 2349, , and visit his website.