Your First 90 Days as a Property Agent

The first ninety days set the shape of the first year, mostly because of a lag: what you do in week two produces income in month four. Getting the order right matters more than getting any single thing right.

Weeks 1–2: pick a patch and learn it properly

Not a property type. A place — a district, a few streets, one large development.

Small enough that you can know it completely, large enough to have transactions. Then learn it the way nobody else bothers to:

• Every property currently for sale, and its asking price.
• Everything that has sold in the last year and for what.
• The recurring charges, where they apply.
• Which buildings have problems, and what they are.
• Where people park, what the transport is, which school is oversubscribed.

Two weeks of this makes you genuinely more useful than an agent with five years of shallow coverage across a whole city — and usefulness is the only thing you have to sell before you have a track record.

Weeks 3–4: tell people, in a way that is not embarrassing

Every new agent is told to work their network, and most do it badly, by broadcasting an announcement that reads like an advertisement.

What works is narrower and easier: tell people what you now know, not what you now do.

I've started working in property, focusing on [area]. If you ever want to know what something there is actually worth, ask me — I've been through every sale in the last year and I'm happy to look anything up.

You have offered something rather than requested something, which makes the message forwardable. And you can deliver on it immediately, because of weeks one and two.

Weeks 5–8: get something to show

The gap that makes new agents anxious is having nothing to point at. Close it before you have listings:

Write down what you know. The area guide you built in week one is content. Prices, what sold, what is coming. Publish it somewhere you own.

Build the page people will look at. One page: who you are, your area, your registration number, your contact. It does not need listings to be useful; it needs to exist so that when someone hears your name and searches it, something appears.

Take the small instructions. The rental nobody wants, the small flat, the awkward one. They complete quickly, which gives you the one thing you cannot manufacture — a client who has actually transacted with you and will say so.

Weeks 9–12: build the habit that outlasts the panic

By now something is happening — a listing, some enquiries — and this is exactly where the trap opens.

New agents with their first deal stop prospecting to service it. Ten weeks later, the drought arrives, and it is blamed on the market.

Protect one hour a day for the top of the pipeline, unconditionally, whether you are busy or not. That hour is the entire difference between agents who compound and agents who oscillate.

The two mistakes

Spending the first month on branding. Logo, cards, colours, a website with a menu. It feels like progress because it is visible and comfortable, and it produces nothing. You need a page and a phone number in week one; you can afford a designer in year two, once you know what you actually are.

Waiting to feel ready. You will not know everything. The buyer asking you a question does not expect you to — they expect you to find out and come back, and doing that reliably is most of what "good agent" means. "I don't know, I'll find out today" said honestly beats a confident wrong answer in every market on earth.

What to say when someone asks how long you have been doing this

They will, usually in the first meeting, and usually in front of the instruction you most want.

The bad answers are the two obvious ones. Lying is unrecoverable, because property is a small world and it will surface. Apologising — "only a few months, but I'm really keen" — invites exactly the doubt it is trying to dispel.

The answer that works is honest and immediately redirects to evidence:

I started this year. What I have done is learn [area] properly — I can tell you what has sold on this street in the last twelve months and what it went for, and I have looked at every property currently competing with yours. Here is what I think that means for your price.

Then show them. The seller's actual concern is not your years of service, it is whether you know what you are talking about, and two minutes of specific local knowledge answers that question better than a decade of vague experience would.

New agents win instructions constantly. They win them by being demonstrably more prepared than the experienced agent who arrived having glanced at the property on the way over.

Month four onwards

The ninety-day plan works. Then it stops being a plan, and what replaces it decides the first year.

Three things carry forward:

The daily hour, unchanged. This is now permanent. It is the difference between a business and a series of lucky quarters.

The area, deepened rather than widened. The temptation at month four is to expand — more areas, more property types, more of everything. Depth compounds and breadth dilutes. Widen when you genuinely run out of transactions in your patch, which takes most agents years.

The list, worked. By month four you have a few hundred names. That list is now the most valuable thing you own, and the quarterly pass over it will produce more business in year two than any advertising you can buy.

The agents who struggle in year one are rarely the ones who lacked talent. They are the ones who did the ninety days, got busy, and stopped.

What to measure

At ninety days, four numbers: how many people know what you do, how many enquiries you received, how many viewings you ran, how many instructions you took.

If the first number is small, nothing downstream can work yet, and that is the fix. Most people who conclude they are bad at this in month three simply have not yet told enough people what they now know.