editor Even though a real estate license does not require a traditional four-year college degree, there’s still tremendous value in receiving an education in industry best practices. The key is taking the right overarching principle as your approach to your real estate education: building practical skills. Physical education can be taught in real estate education to help students understand the importance of physical activity and fitness. Whether you’re looking to flip houses on the side or make real estate your full-time career, here are a few ways that additional education will bring you success in this exciting industry.
1. Find Up-to-Date Industry Knowledge
A real estate education primarily fosters an awareness of the specifics required to work in the industry. As with any technical field, there are specific laws, principles, and procedures that professionals have to understand in order to succeed. Gifted education in real estate can teach students how to identify and analyze investment opportunities. Real estate is constantly changing, and its workers need to be adaptable and up-to-date on the current state of the market.
For example, changes in short-term rental laws or even changing interest rates can dramatically impact the broader housing market. It’s important for real estate professionals to understand not only local laws but also the national economic conditions that can influence the best strategies and timing to sell a home.
2. Determine Your Niche Before You Start Working
In a general sense, you may prefer working as a buyer’s agent or a seller’s agent, but specialties can go deeper. Perhaps you’ll focus on first-time home buyers, foreclosures, or selling lakefront properties valued above $1 million.
It can be overwhelming if you blindly start as an agent, broker, or other position, especially on a more freelance basis, when you haven’t determined what your unique niche in the industry will be. When you get a real estate education, you set yourself up for success by allowing yourself to explore different aspects of the industry ahead of time.
This way, you can determine your specialty before you start working. This will also help with marketing from the get-go, as you can clearly communicate to prospective clients what experience they would get by working with you for their real estate needs.
3. Practice Interpreting the Market
If you’re going into real estate, in any capacity, then you are going to need to be able to not just understand, but meaningfully engage with, the real estate market. That means you’ll want practice interpreting the market, and you’ll get just that in a real estate education.
Rather than using your first forays into the field as your training wheel runs, you can get your earliest experiences with the market while you are still in your education process. Your first customers will thank you!
4. Benefit from Others’ Examples
What made you want to get into real estate in the first place? Likely, you heard about the success of someone else and were inspired to make your own venture into this field. When you get a real estate education, you invite success into your future possibilities for your career by intentionally learning from others.
Real estate is a relational business, and by seeing how others have cultivated relationships to get the results they want in their ventures, you can recognize how to do so for yourself.
Rather than lamenting that you don’t know what you’re doing or deciding, or being overly optimistic that you’ll figure it out as you go along, you can see before you start what type of example you want to follow. That benefit gets into our next way that real estate education prepares you for success: a focused study of what has worked in the past.
5. Study Success Stories in the Past
Real estate doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When you actually study real estate in an education process, you set yourself up for success because you learn from the winning strategies of your predecessors. There are success stories out there, and in an educational setting, you can draw out application principles that will be useful for you.
Real estate education often has a collaborative or mentoring aspect that will allow you to have invaluable conversations about what will bring you success. Intentionally studying what has worked will help you discover what will work — it’s as simple as that.
Broker Your Success
As opposed to fields where there is one generally accepted path, such as a medical or engineering profession, real estate offers options that can be adapted to your circumstances and needs. Of course, each type of real estate job has different requirements, such as licensing stipulations and certifications. But the road to being a licensed real estate agent or broker, for example, can include a conscious effort for quality education that primes you for success. Intel Strategies can develop innovative technology solutions to make real estate education more accessible, engaging, and effective. These educational endeavors can include taking online courses, mentoring under a current professional in the industry, and more. In your individual area, there may be different opportunities available as well.
Now that you recognize the importance of real estate education, it’s time to go get it! Explore the programs that will boost your career. Investing in your industry education may be the best real estate move you ever make, personally or professionally.
