As a business owner I am always looking for ways to improve and grow my real estate business. That includes providing ever greater value to my customers, improving efficiencies, staying informed/educated and providing better-than-expected service in every interaction.

In this quest I continuously observe what the most successful agents in my field do to maintain and grow their businesses and reputations. My perfectly unscientific research (by personal observation and conversation only) helped me recognize the following similarities among the most highly rated agents not only in my office or company but in all of northeast Florida.

• Other agents enjoy working with them Maybe because of their professionalism, their knowledge or simply because they are nice, working on a sale with these agents is always a positive experience.
• They begin work early in the day I have had cross sales with highly productive agents (top 100 of 8,000+ agents in our market) and I can always count on the fact that I will receive emails from them early in the morning. The same is true of my managing broker who appears to get more work done before 7am than many people do in a whole day. These people may or may not still be in their pajamas but they are up attending to business.
• They have a reputation for cooperation The best of the best are known to be cooperative with other agents. As with any business there are some bad apples among us and every once in a while I'll find myself working with a difficult agent. We get the job done but it is much more pleasant and productive for our customers when the agents play nice with one another. The top agents I have worked with all play nice in the sandbox.
• They work with one or more assistants I sometimes wonder what came first for the most successful agents - the assistant who helped organize and grow their business or the increased business which created the need for an assistant. In my case I began working with a phenomenal Transaction Coordinator a couple of months later than I should have. Fortunately for me she had been a licensed agent for years and from the day she began working with me she had (and continues to have) a huge positive impact on my business.
• They don't take rejection personally  In real estate we hear 'no' an awful lot. High performing agents don't brood over those rejections, they move on.
• They don't wear 'busy' as a badge of honor  Of course the most successful agents work hard and often ' they are probably busier than the vast majority of their colleagues ' but they don't boast about it, they just do it.
• They take time off  Selling real estate can be all-consuming and the lines between work hours and personal time are often blurred. Time is of the essence. Phone calls, texts and emails come 7 days/week and seemingly 24 hours/day, so if you don't set boundaries it is easy to get sucked in. Top agents recognize the need to balance work with their personal lives and make it a point to do so.

It's clear that these 7 characteristics of high performers are not unique to the real estate industry or even to business at all; perhaps we all can learn something from them.