Top Books for Real Estate Agents

Knowing personality types, the keywords, and how it impacts sales is one of the biggest skill sets that a real estate agent should have.

I’m gonna do the one that I buy for every agent when they onboard. It’s Miracle Morning for Real Estate Agents. I think it’s such a hard business that if you don’t have the mindset right, you’re gonna be in that 87% that fail.

This one is the book that changed my career…It is Real Estate by Mike written by Mike Ferry… It’s basically a pamphlet…And it says, ‘Here’s what you want to do to be successful.’ And I didn’t even get through the whole book when I read it. It said, ‘Call your sphere,’ and this is in 2008. I said, ‘Great, well, my sphere’s not buying anything. People are losing their jobs.’ And then it was, ‘Expired listings, for-sale-by-owners,’ and I put the book down, and I started doing it. You guys got to know me through expired listings. That’s been one of my things that really drove my business.

I’m a big script guy. I find that NLP confuses people if you don’t really study it. Phil and Jimmy and Chris broke it down in easy ways to use the strategies that are gonna take the pressure out of having difficult conversations for people. And I think that skill is more important than ever right now in 2023.

It’s Jordan Cohen’s new book. He’s the number one Re/Max agent worldwide…He goes through from how he started [with] $400K homes, and the same principles apply on these multi-million dollar homes on how to win listing appointments. He could have written this book ten years ago or ten years forward, and these principles are going to be relatable if you want to actually win listings—if you’re going to be on the appointment and convert…Nobody is gonna call you off a postcard and be like, ‘Wow! You have now won the listing!’ And what he talks about in this book is being able to get in front of people and win listing appointments—how to generate them, how to win them, how to take them down. And I don’t care how many leads anybody dumps on agents (listing leads). If they’re not able to convert at the listing appointment, it doesn’t matter. And Jordan has some really tried and true principles in there—some things that even made me say, ‘Wow! That’s something I should be coaching differently. That’s something I should be thinking about differently.’ So, it’s The Agent’s Edge. It just came out. It’s fantastic!

Negotiation is so important. I think it is a skill that most of us don’t practice enough. And it makes or breaks sales and relationships across the board.

It’s a great read and it was one of the first ones that was game-changing for me in my mentality of how I started this journey

It’s one of the first books I read as an agent. Whether you’re an agent or a leader, this one fits right into the leadership category as well, so I think it’s something we’ve all read. If you haven’t read it, it’s a must read…absolutely a must as you’re starting your business or sales career to read that book. And every leader should probably even refresh on that every couple years.

I think this applies for any sort of business, right, where you’re working on yourself…Josh Rubin, who’s a friend of all of ours, read it. And it was after Summit one year, and he said, ‘Hey, let’s start a Mastermind Group, just like Think and Grow Rich.’ And that’s legitimately changed the trajectory of me as a leader and I think all of us, in a lot of ways…It’s a great book to think about taking ownership in your business.

[It’s] a book about Bill Campbell, who was the coach at Apple, Google, Intuit, and some other places where he had to deal with people, deal with issues…A couple of things that always stick in the back of my mind when I read that book is if there’s an elephant in the room, my goal was to shoot the elephant and pin it on the wall so you can move on.

I think the one that can be most impactful for the most people would be Traction by Gino Wickman. I’m such a big believer in EOS. Both BAM and the real estate team are running off of EOS. It’s game-changing. If you’re a leader, and you’re feeling, to some degree, like you’re floundering or you’re not organized, you’re not getting anything done at meetings, or you don’t have a structure on how to set and accomplish goals, this book kind of packages it all together for you.

It kind of talks through the cycles of business. And, as I’ve read it, every single time I’ve read it, I’ve been like, ‘Holy shit! That happened to me!’ It talks about going through the cycle of the fun stage, where money’s coming in and everything seems great, and then the inevitable start of things starting to fall apart, and the whitewater phase of business, where things get dicey because things have grown so fast, and people need to change. And it kinda helped me understand that sometimes, those that started with us aren’t always gonna be with us, but also understanding the psychology of it. And then it talked about the treadmill phase, which is where it’s easy to get stuck in a rut with business and leadership and the importance of not allowing that to happen. And I actually felt myself slipping there, at one point…It’s one of my favorite, favorite books.

It’s actually a very, very funny book, but…if you want to be successful, don’t follow anything in that book.