Any new agent or veteran agent can instantly move to the top of their earning potential by simply applying high quality information. Working smarter not harder!

Here is an excellent example of this kind of thinking. I call it the new agent phenomenon. For many years it has been a passion of mine to find, coach, and mentor new real estate agents. My real estate company often holds career seminars where we invite people who are considering a real estate career to a two hour program about the real estate business.

Inevitably we are able to recruit folks who, after attending our real estate school, end up becoming real estate professionals. To help ensure that these new agents will be able to compete in the hyper-competitive real estate market our company provides a thirty day, fast start training program.

This training is designed to help new agents get their business up and running quickly, and this is where it gets interesting. Almost without exception those agents that commit to the program begin to instantly make appointments, take listings, and create new sales. Surprisingly in many cases these fresh new recruits, green as grass, can out produce twenty year veterans within just weeks of entering the real estate business.

How is this possible? Because they don't know what's impossible. These new agents believe and trust that what their trainer tells them as an absolute fact of life. They believe that they can take ten new listings in a month if they work hard; they believe if they are organized that they can work with three buyers in one day; they believe they can close every listing they interview for if they come prepared.

The secret to their success is that these agents have not yet been poisoned by veterans telling them that it takes six months to close their first commission check, or that For Sale By Owners are actually aliens dressed up like humans, or that expired listings are all overpriced dogs. Instead they are armed with high quality information, and the motivation to put that information to use.

The new agent phenomenon should demonstrate something incredible simple, yet incredibly powerful. If we can find good high quality information, believe in that information completely, and then most importantly take action we can achieve incredible results very quickly.

One example of the power of combining these three simple elements -- information, belief, and action is an agent I met at a real estate convention nearly ten years ago. His name was Brian and he had just been awarded the rookie of the year award by a large national franchise for closing over six million dollars in sales in his first full year in business.

Brian is what many of us in the industry call a young lion. By young, we don't mean that the agent is necessarily young in age, although Brian was; instead we simply mean they are rookie agents. Young lions are those agents that have demonstrated that they are on the path to becoming long term superstars. They are taking on the competition and winning.

After the ceremony and his acceptance of the award I had the opportunity to speak with Brian about how he had achieved so much success in such a small period of time. One of his secrets was that he used the stop, drop, and knock method, a technique he had learned from another superstar.

Here's how it worked, every time he would drive by a For Sale by Owner he would first stop his car. This is perhaps the most difficult part of this technique, because most agents do the exact opposite we accelerate past the sign and pretend we never saw it. The next step was to drop what he was doing. This means that he would clear his mind of what ever was happening in his day, setting aside any of the numerous projects and crisis that he had on his to do list, and then most importantly he would knock on the door.

Stop, drop, and knock -- complicated isn't it? No, it's not. This magic to Brian's system is its simplicity. By simply offering his services to every private seller in his marketplace Brian was doing something that 95 percent of real estate agents will never do and that is to consistently prospect. Why did Brian choose this method? He was simply modeling success, he found a prospecting technique he could use, he believed in the system, and most importantly he took action.

Published: September 9, 2005

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Jim Remley is a speaker, author, and consultant. He is also an active real estate broker in Southern Oregon where he owns a network of six offices. Jim won the Rookie Instructor of the Year award in 2001 from Realty-U, the largest network of real estate educators in the nation. He was the winner of the 2002 Pacesetter Award, and nominated for the Real Estate Instructor of the Year Award during the first quarter of 2003. To learn more about Jim, please visit ProPerformer.com or e-mail him at .