The One Characteristic Differentiating a Real Estate Pro and a Real Estate Rookie

What makes one real estate professional better than another real estate professional. For investors, this may be the most important questions we can answer.

Kim Ade, who is the President and founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and was recognized as one of North America’s Top 50 most influential women in real estate, has built a career around answering that question. She began investing in real estate, attending conference and events, and coaching investors in order to learn what drives the best real estate professionals.

In our recent conversation, Kim provided the insights she discovered by studying the top performing real estate and business professionals.

If I were to ask you, “what do you think makes for a top performing real estate investor?” Are they good at building rapport? Closing deals? Identifying different options available on both the buyer and seller side? Something else?

According to Kim’s studies, while all these skills are important, they are not critical. What’s really critical is if a person has a high degree of emotional resilience.

Kim said, “As a real estate professional, if you lose a deal, what do you do when that happens? And even as an investor, what do you do when you lose a deal? What do you do when a deal goes south? What do you do when you’re actually losing money on a deal? What do you do? How do you bounce back from that?”

The professional who has the ability to bounce back with the greater speed and agility, meaning they have high emotional resilience, is much more likely to succeed.

Calculating Emotional Resilience

To determine a real estate professional’s or your own level of emotional resilience, analyze failures. It’s easy to remain resilient when things are going according to plan. But it’s the losses that allow us to determine someone’s ability to not only move on as opposed to wallowing in a defeat, but to also take a bad situation and turn it into an advantage.

For example, Kim said, “Years ago, we used to own this software company, and we went to our first ever trade show and FedEx didn’t deliver our booth. We were a little bit upset, because it was our first trade show, so how do you show up to a trade show and have a booth with no actual booth? There was nothing there, so what we did is we went to Walgreens in the states and we bought a board and some markers and some tape and we made a sign; the sign says ‘FedEx didn’t deliver our booth, so now we’re forced to give you 50% off just to attract your attention.’ Man, there were line-ups at that booth…”

Kim didn’t allow this failure to emotionally trigger her. Nor did she remain calm, chalk the tradeshow up as a loss, pack up what little materials she had, and go home. Instead, she went into brainstorming mode and was able to turn a potential devastating situation into a positive and profitable one. What would you have done?

Kim said, “you have to move on, and the faster you move on, the better. I will also say that if you can do something with your experience, turn it into a positive somehow, then not only are you just moving on, you’re leveraging it. You’re winning from it. You’re not just losing and learning a tough lesson. You’re actually winning.”

The idea is that no matter what, there is always a silver lining. But many people aren’t used to looking for it. Most people just assume a silver lining or opportunity doesn’t exist. But from Kim’s experience, and my personal experience, that just isn’t true.

How do you look at things in this silver lining and always seeking out the opportunity way?

When Kim teaches people to make this mindset shift, she said “number one is we look at their history. There’s a philosophy and the philosophy is this – we always look for evidence to support our beliefs… One of the things we do is we help someone look backwards and we say, ‘look at all the things that have happened and let’s look at how they showed up.’ We’ll start to show people that they have been involved in a huge number of opportunities over time, but they never thought of it quite that way.”

The other thing, Kim said, is looking “at how so many awesome things happen to you all the time, every single day, that we just take for granted. Like this morning – did you have a hot shower? You probably did, and you don’t kind of stop and take notice. Or if you go into a building and you go up in the elevator, do you know how much planning went into that elevator or you, how many people were involved in creating the building, creating the structure that allowed you to get into that elevator that day? We don’t think of getting into an elevator as an opportunity, but it’s pretty massive.”

It’s about going from a limited mindset to an abundance mindset. We don’t live in a zero-sum world. There are infinite numbers of opportunities, but if you’re stuck in a limited frame of mind, you just don’t see them.

Make the shift!

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