My advice to new brokers…

A common question I receive from new brokers is “what tips can you give me to be successful and what mistakes did you make?” I’m going to write a few blogs on this because I have made a lot of mistakes and knowing what I know now, I’m certain I could build a broking business very quickly. One of the biggest problems facing new brokers is leads. This will be the first topic I’ll write about.

Most established brokers get most of their business (typically 80% or more) from repeat clients plus referrals from existing clients. The challenge facing new brokers is that they don’t have any clients! Therefore, new brokers need to do two things:

1. Start building a list of prospects that you can communicate to and build trust with. This will typically be an email list. Make sure you collect everyone’s email address you come in contact with. Make sure you have some good content on your website (to attract traffic) and include something of value that people can download in exchange for them entering their email address (like a free report). Gather as many email addresses as possible.
2. Get access to someone else’s list. If you don’t have your own list then borrow someone else’s. This means approaching someone that has an existing list and ask if you can send their clients some valuable information (e.g. write a blog for their website, ask them to email a free report to their clients, contribute to their newsletter) or co-host a webinar with them. The best way to make this successful is to focus on getting more business for the list owner first. Don’t worry about yourself at first. Initially, you want to earn the right to speak to their list. Focus your content on getting them more business. For example, maybe you can interview a few clients about the benefits of using a buyers’ agent. Then approach a local buyers’ agent to publish the article in his newsletter. Eventually you can start including some content that is more relevant to mortgages.

Mortgage broking is a contact sport. The more contact you have with potential prospects, the more successful you will be. So the aim is to build a large database of potential clients and communicate to that database often but only with high quality, valuable information – not sales pitches.