Braden Wheatcroft

If you’re frustrated with your buyers right now, this is probably why.

You're treating everybody like there's only one phase to the home-buying process: meeting you and then buying a home.

In reality, after helping agents successfully serve thousands of buyers, we've realized that although it may look like that from the outside, there are actually two very distinct phases in the home-buying process:

1. The research phase
2. The decision phase

My recommendation is that you offer two different levels of service for each one, because if you give a research-phase client decision-phase service, you're going to feel pushy and aggressive. If you give a decision-phase client research-phase service, you'll feel like you're not on the ball and don't really care about helping them buy.

In my experience working with hundreds of agents through this process, most agents are well equipped to help with the decision phase, but they struggle with research-phase clients. That is why you often refer to them as tire kickers, lookie-loos, time wasters, and energy vampires. Really, they're a great client 18 months from now. You just haven't built a service to serve them to get them there, which is why they end up doing a lot of the research on their own. A year and a half later, they meet an agent and close a deal quickly that could have been yours, but it wasn't.

How do you know what fees are in it? It's by asking a question in your buyer consultation in a lighthearted way:

"If I showed them the perfect home in an ideal neighbourhood at a great price, would they be ready to write a full-price offer today?"

The reality is nine out of ten of your clients would not be -- and thats OKAY! That means they're in a research phase, and it's time to onboard them to that level of service.

Helping buyers purchase a home isn't an event; it's a journey.

Meet them where they're at, help them make the next natural step forward, and you'd be amazed at how many more happy buyers you help.

Playing to your strength when you're running a team is often a huge mistake. Instead, you want to star in your role.

Most team leaders I work with are where they are because they're exceptional at so many aspects of the job. Maybe not all of them, but pretty darn close, which is why it's so hard to let go truly.

Even when you bring other people on, loosening your grip on tasks can be very challenging because you often feel and are often correct in feeling- that you are better at that task than the other person. But this is how you stay stuck and stunt your growth, while also potentially increasing your overhead and sending your profitability into a nosedive.

If you want to experience the true benefits of running a team, everyone needs to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and that starts with you.

That way, even if you are better at something than the team member whose R&R falls into you, you can heed the advice Dan Martell gives: "80% is 100% awesome."

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for having B-tier teammates. We want A players to surround us in each role on the team, but not letting those A players rise to the occasion is a big mistake.

If you were to spend five minutes thinking about what your roles and responsibilities are, what makes the list and what doesn't, I'd be curious to know.

Send me a DM, and I can give you some feedback.

⏰ Are you a daily snoozer? I was. These three tactics helped me beat the battle of the bed.

1. Your morning starts the night before: it’s simple; if you want to get up consistently, start by going to bed consistently. And what you do before bed makes a difference.

2. Embrace automation: Set an alarm, sure. But set the alarm down outside your bedroom to force yourself out of bed to turn it off. Consider automating your lighting and temperature to match when your clock goes off.

3. Have a boot-up sequence: I care less about what you do with your morning routine as much as I do about you having one. Exercising, reading, journalling, meditating—whatever you like, treat it like a job and show up for yourself.

Embracing these things has helped me have a great start to more days than I count and has been the foundation for everything else that follows.

Follow 👉 Braden Wheatcroft for more tips on growing your business and improving your life

If you're finding yourself standing alone at the sales altar on your wedding day, there's a good chance you're making this mistake.

A lot of agents think about the end result that they want rather than where the person they're talking to is at in the process.

For argument's sake let's assume that there are ten steps from when someone first reaches out to you about a real estate need to when you hand them the keys to the home they just bought.

Every single person you meet is gonna be at a different step in the process but most agents act as if everyone is good to go. That couldn't be further from the truth.

That's why it's so important to keep a list of all of your prospects organized from number 1 to number 10 and beyond and ask yourself three critical questions for each person:

- Where are they at in the process?
- Where are they stuck in the process?
- What's the next natural step?

By applying that level of understanding and empathy to each person and meeting where they're at in the process, you'd be amazed at how much quicker people move through the process from step one to step ten.

If times are tough right now, I want you to know that I believe, to my core, that you already have everything you need to succeed within you. I have seen way too many positive examples in my career to think otherwise.

This one for my 20+ year vets.

One of the best parts of this business is that every day can be so different than the last but after a couple decades it stops feeling that way.

Many veterans of the industry share with me that although they've got a great business — one where many of the up-and-coming agents would gladly swap businesses with them — they have lost their passion for the work but I actually don't think they've lost their passion.

I think they've lost their vision.

There's no story that drives this home better than the three bricklayers, where one says his job is to lay bricks, another says it is to build a wall, while the last one, unsurprisingly, the most fulfilled one, says that he's building a cathedral.

Laying bricks = Task 🔴
Making a Wall = Goal 🟡
Building a Cathedral = Vision 🟢

🧱 All of them are doing the same activity. One of them has a deep sense of meaning behind it.

If you feel like you've lost your mojo or are a little jaded, maybe even burnt out, there's a very good chance that you've simply lost sight of your vision for what you're trying to build or the life you're trying to live.

One activity I recently started with a very experienced agent is getting him to write out his vision by hand every day for 30 days.

It's only been two coaching sessions since that challenge was accepted and I almost feel like I'm talking to a totally different person. It's like the old saying: when we have a strong enough why, we'll endure any how.

I'd love to know what your vision is for your real estate business. Drop in the comments.

“Flexible schedule.”

That was the number one answer I got. Over ten years running a brokerage I did probably 500+ interviews with people thinking about getting into real estate, and I’d ask what was drawing them to it. Flexibility, almost every time.

Don’t get me wrong, the flexible schedule is great. It’s also the reason a lot of agents don’t make it.

Back when we had five physical offices, I was trying to figure out how to sell agents on renting one. So I ran a little study. Average income of agents paying for office space versus agents working from home.

I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was staggering. Something like 100K from home. Half a million from the office.

And yes, people told me those agents could afford an office because they were already making 500K. Fair point. But we’re talking a couple hundred bucks a month. That’s not what’s moving the needle

It was never about the office. It was about the structure and the schedule the office created.

There’s no question in my mind that the agents who had a set schedule with routines in place are on a whole, more productive. And they also seemed to have a better personal life too.

Are their exceptions? Of course, but success leaves clues and having a set schedule sets you up for success.

Lock in 🔒 📅

Have you noticed that as information has become seemingly unlimited, clarity and confidence have declined?

I sure have, and it’s leading me to believe that, almost ironically, the more AI Chat people are using, the more valuable a trusted human is to help them make sense of it.

What a great opportunity to lean into your expertise and connect with people, helping them make sense of the market so they can move forward with clarity and confidence.

My Honey-Do list just taught me a valuable lesson.

After living with a broken hinge on a cabinet door in my kitchen for longer than I’m comfortable admitting (don’t ask my wife), I finally took the time to fix it.

Ok, well, I don’t know how to fix things, so I took the time to find a person who could - Thank you, TaskRabbit!!!

And after the contractor left my home and everything was fixed, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself.

And after laughing, the lesson sank in.

By spending one hour finding the fix, I saved four hours of work... and that was the expert’s time. I bet it would have taken me longer; it wouldn’t have been done well, and I would have hated every minute of it.

So why didn’t I fix it? Because the hinge was broken, but it still kinda worked. And I had better things to do. Sound familiar?

We all have these things in our business that are “broken hinges.”

They are annoying, but they still kinda work, so we don’t take the time to fix them so our future self can enjoy the benefit.

That Google Drive folder structure that you can find anything in (because it’s all saved to your desktop)

That 2017 listing presentation is good enough for past clients, but when you have to compete for business, you’re embarrassed putting it on the kitchen table.

The bookkeeper hire that would finally make sure your tax returns are filed accurately and on time.

The list, just like my Honey-DO list, is endless. But these are all things that, if we spend time on them now, would multiply our time in the future, not to mention make our lives more enjoyable.

And here we are, three weeks out from being on the other side of Labour Day, heading into what typically is a busier time of the year.

What one broken hinge in your business could you fix that would make the future you want to give the present you a hug? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and the contractor for your business isn’t a contractor; it’s a coach—so if you want help getting further, faster, let’s talk about how my team can get you there.