Oct 7, 2009: Small real estate agents can close more transactions by offering best services in investment consultancy, insurance, real estate settlement and escrow services. You may be specializing in commercial real estate, or residential. Look around your city or locality, you can execute highly sophisticated transactions operating outside the bureaucratic constraints of a large company. Big competitors really cannot move at our speed!

Property business in India is drowned in paper work, and you have to make a commitment as a firm, much like builders and developers. Listening is the key to doing business, and finding common ground is incredibly important. Many people ask here if they should get into real estate brokerage and the simple answer is “We don’t know” – only because we don’t know if they can work as hard as the successful ones do.

Remember, most owners and buyers like to work with experienced and trust-worthy agents to enhance their chances of successfully negotiating a home purchase or sale. Your reputation can be a critical factor in getting deals regularly. Unfortunately, there are some real estate agents whose wrongful activities make the entire community suffer.

This is what a property owner has commented about property agents – “I will never use a real estate agent to sell or buy property. I have in every case been either ripped off or not told the full truth about a property that I was interested in. And as far as I’m concerned, if their lips are moving, they’re lying.”

Another angry home buyer has this to say – “In my opinion the property agents are a bunch of crooks, they manipulate the price of the houses to keep themselves in jobs and drive expensive cars. They are the people who sell houses to foreigners/NRIs and jack up the prices. They keep encouraging people to sell and resell their houses to raise the house prices.”

Getting a reputation of high integrity and ethical conduct will serve agencies well. Exhibiting any practices that are not highly ethical will most likely cause owners, builders, other dealers or brokers to hesitate or refuse to do business with you. It’s impossible to serve the client properly if the broker on the other side of the transaction is suspicious of you.

Thanks to the digital revolution, you can be exposed even before you act, and you really cannot hide! In a market with thousands of property agents and brokers, there may be only a few dozen successful agencies and/or brokerages. A reputation for integrity and ethical business conduct will be quite important in agency business anywhere in the world. Finally, if you works hard, plays hard and thinks fast – success in somewhere near you. Successful people are tenacious, dependable, inspiring, helpful and highly driven. Get a Real Estate PR blog and start spreading good things.