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Real Estate Sales Agent

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Being a real estate agent is not really about houses and building lots. It's really about people.

It's the people part of her job that agent Mary G. Ross likes best.

"It's so much fun to reach their goal," she says.

A client's goal may be selling a house or buying a home. Ross gets to know her clients' goals by talking with them.

"You don't rely on the question, 'What do you want in a house?'" she says. "You go beyond that."

So, Ross finds out what the clients do for a living, about any hobbies and about their lifestyle.

"By listening, they tell you who they are. Then you look for the match that fits the person."

Sound like hard work?

Sure, but it's not impossible. "Every house will sell -- there is no doubt about that," she says.

She adds her current problem-solving skills "translate into years of real estate experience." Results, explains Ross, are more important than the amount of time in real estate.

But you have to start somewhere.

As a young real estate agent, Rick Neilson has had to learn a lot about his field. He has a bachelor of commerce degree and his real estate license course, but much of the world of real estate is still a mystery to him. It's a mystery he's uncovering every day.

Neilson learned one of the most valuable lessons of his career during his first sale. He had been hired by a young couple looking to purchase their first home. He spent a long time talking with them and then researched the real estate market to find a home he thought they would like. When he drove his clients past the home he selected, however, the clients thought the house was too plain and decided they didn't like it.

"The next day I went to the house myself to check it out again. It was a nice house, but it did look really flat. When I got a closer look, I realized there had once been shutters on all the windows, and the house would have looked a lot better with them."

Still eager to find the right house for the couple, Neilson went back to his office and sketched shutters on a picture of the house. He then faxed the picture and a cover letter explaining what he had done to his clients.

"For some reason, the cover page didn't arrive with the fax, so all my clients got was the picture. An hour later, I got a call from them. They thought it was a house I hadn't shown them and they were dying to see it. This was the house they ended up buying."

It was a valuable lesson in psychology, says Neilson. "You have to be very good at reading people. You almost have to know what your client wants better than they do."

A flair for psychology is just one of the many skills real estate agents need. A knowledge of construction, accounting and law is also essential for people in this field.

Neilson says one of the most important skills for surviving in the real estate field is the ability to sell oneself. This is particularly important for people just starting out in a real estate career, he says. "You have to be able to market yourself, to be confident. If you don't believe in yourself, how can anybody else?"

Marketing yourself as a real estate agent can mean everything from cold calling -- for example, contacting homeowners to see if they would like to list their property with you -- to putting ads in the newspaper. It takes a lot of confidence to market yourself.

It also helps to have a bit of money set aside. Experts recommend that agents who are just starting out have six months in savings put away. That should be enough to carry them through to their first commission and pay for the cost of advertising.

Neilson believes his investment in marketing himself will pay for itself several times over. He plans to be earning a six-figure salary within the next five years. "Real estate offers you an opportunity to really take control of your income. It's exciting to have the challenge of determining your own salary."

There is a downside to this challenge, however. Real estate is a workaholic's dream -- and a loafer's nightmare. People in this career usually work about 60 hours a week and are on call almost 24 hours a day.

It wasn't the long hours that Neilson found difficult at first, but the absence of any time that was solely his own. He recalls one occasion when he had to draw the line with a client. "I had listed his house. He was so anxious to sell that he would call me three or four times a day to find out how things were going. He even started following my car around.

"One time I was at a restaurant having dinner with my family. He spotted my car in the parking lot and came into the restaurant to talk to me. He sat right down at the table and ate dinner with us! I had to start parking my car down the street whenever I went anywhere!"

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