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Considerations When Choosing a Brokerage With Whom to Launch your Real Estate Career

A career in real estate is a choice which an increasing number of people find to be rewarding both financially and personally. Investing in a future as a real estate agent involves both a monetary and a professional commitment, and this commitment to education continues well beyond the minimum courses an individual must take according to provincial laws.

While completing the courses required and achieving the marks necessary to be certified is an important step in setting up your real estate career, it is also the smallest step on the long road to success. These courses will familiarize you with laws regarding real estate and the terms governing the process, but where your success will ultimately be decided is in the quality of in-the-field training you receive. This training will be provided by the brokerage with which you work, so it’s important to screen your brokerage options before you commit your career to them.

The very first thing you should look at in a brokerage is what kind of training program they provide to new agents. Some brokerages will provide minimum training or none at all, and these are the brokerages you want to avoid. Some good screening questions include how many agents the brokerage trains on average each year and how many stay with the company. A brokerage that does not include a comprehensive training program is most likely concerned with quantity of sales rather than quality of service, and is not likely to have a strong ongoing business outside of a real estate boom.

Next, you will want to look at the quality of the training that your short listed brokerages provide. The very best training will include a mentoring program, in which new agents are paired with seasoned veterans. New agents accompany the veterans as they interact with clients at all levels from the house shopping to closing the deal and even through after sale work. There is no more valuable resource and no better training available to a new agent than a seasoned professional who has seen all sorts of clients, markets and environments come and go.

With all training criteria being equal, a new agent might want to look at the possibility of expansion within her brokerage of choice. Larger brokers operate on a national and even international level; after a few years a well timed move could mean that your financial prospects jump as the expansion capabilities of a brokerage allow it to place offices further afield.

Choosing which brokerage to work for is an incredibly important decision to be made in the infancy of the career of any real estate agent. A wrong choice might mean spinning your wheels in neutral for several years, while choosing the right brokerage will mean the establishment of a great foundation for your entire career.