Time and time again, real estate agents contact me telling me their companies aren't giving them any training. Which begs me to ask the following question -- who is responsible for training real estate agents? Is it the companies they work for, or is it the agents' responsibility themselves?

I continually hear stories from agents telling me that they're basically given a cubicle and a phone, and are somehow expected to go out and become successful agents with very little direction from anyone. But while I can understand seasoned agents needing less direction than new agents, I find it unconscionable for managers to expect people, who are brand new in the business, to become successful without any training or direction. There seems to be a mentality of "sink or swim" by some managers that's going on out there. It's kind of like, "Here's a desk and a phone, and if you were meant to be successful in this business you'll find a way to do it."

I think our new agents deserve better than this.

And when it comes to training seasoned agents, I can better understand a company's position on paying for only a small amount of training out of their own pocket. From my own experience, only about 10 to 25 percent of the veteran agents in most real estate offices are interested in more real estate training for themselves. They oftentimes feel that they already know everything they need to know, and there's nothing new that they're interested in learning. So this means that when a company spends money on training for veteran agents, very few of them will even want to attend the training. Sometimes the veterans only attend because management insists that they be there. And with this lack of interest in learning on the part of the veteran agents, very little if anything from the training itself will be assimilated into their real estate businesses.

But if you're reading these words right now, you probably don't fall into the group of agents that I just mentioned. The fact that you're even willing to take the time to read this article, to see if you can learn something from it, places you into a very different category.

Companies, and managers, will definitely have their own policies when it comes to making training available for veteran agents, but I really think that companies need to do a better job of making good training available for new agents.

The habits that an agent forms in their first two/three years in the business often determine whether they'll be on the road to great success, or on the road to great mediocrity in our industry. In some ways, it's like learning how to play golf in the beginning on your own without any instruction, versus learning the correct swing from a pro before you ever even hit a golf ball. Once you've ingrained those bad habits in both golf and real estate sales, they often become very difficult to change.

Published: April 8, 2005

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Jim Gillespie, Ph.D., is America's Premier Real Estate Coach℠. He has over 20 years of experience in real estate sales and is a past president of three different real estate companies. His FREE real estate E-newsletter with tips and creative ideas to help agents make more money is now read by over 35,000 agents nationwide. You can subscribe to his FREE E-newsletter by visiting RealEstateSalesCoach.com or contact him at Jim@RealEstateSalesCoach.com.