Why veteran agents should think like rookies

Experience can make an agent better at the job, but it shouldn’t mean they're done learning. Staying curious, coachable and willing to pick up new skills can matter at every stage of a real estate career.

Kyle Crawford, vice president of strategy for Century 21 New Millennium, said in Inman that one of the biggest factors separating agents who stay in the business from those who don't is their willingness to remain coachable throughout their careers.

“Being coachable is not a beginner setting. It is the whole career,” Crawford wrote.

Early in his career, Crawford taught himself Facebook advertising and social media skills that many more experienced agents in his office had not yet developed. In exchange for helping them, he gained connections, open house opportunities and chances to learn from agents with deeper transaction experience.

His larger point: Successful agents continue looking for what they do not know, even after they have built experience.

What that can look like:

• Learn new tools before they become standard across the industry.
• Ask questions instead of assuming experience means having every answer.
• Use training, articles, videos and other learning opportunities to build skills.
• Share what you know while learning from colleagues with different strengths.
• Put new information into practice instead of letting training notes sit unused.

Crawford said that mindset later led him to learn artificial intelligence tools before they became widely discussed in real estate. AI is now part of his daily workflow, but only because he invested time in understanding it while it was still unfamiliar.

The specific technology will continue to change, he wrote, making the ability to learn more valuable than mastery of any one tool.

“The agents who make it are not the ones who showed up already knowing everything,” Crawford wrote. “They are the ones who never decided they were done learning.”

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