My Agents Must Read Books From 2021 List Archives - Wade Webb Real Estate Coaching

Must Read Books for Real Estate Agents in 2023

Wade Webb on March 15, 2023

A quick Amazon search for real estate books comes up with over 60,000 titles. There is no shortage of coverage on the subject. Whether you are a real estate agent looking to increase your business or an investor looking to grow your real estate portfolio, here is the list of the Top 25 books for real estate agents in 2023. These books have been hand-chosen because I believe they have impacted my success as a real estate agent.

I’ve made it my goal for years to read a book a month. This is in addition to the blog posts, YouTube videos, and podcasts I follow and listen to. I feel it’s crucial always to be learning. I’ve never picked up a book where I didn’t learn something new. I honestly attribute any success I’ve had in business, personal, and life to a never-ending quest for knowledge, and books are a significant part of that.

I challenge you to set a goal for reading books through Audible in the car or setting time aside to read. Pick several books you will read this year and stick to them. You’ll be amazed at what reading will do. Not just for your knowledge but your hunger for more information!

1. The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: It’s Not About the Money It’s About Being the Best You Can Be.

The 1st book I ever read getting into the business. It’s like the realtor’s bible. Read this and it’ll spell out all pieces of the business that any agent should plan to invest their time in. Covers lead generation, leverage, mechanics of the business, and finances. Start here!

2. Your First Year in Real Estate, 2nd Ed.: Making the Transition from Total Novice to Successful Professional

It’s no mystery that your first year in real estate is likely going to be the most challenging year you face. Many agents give up before even hitting their one-year mark. Much of this is due to the expectations of agents that get into the business. With Dirk Zeller’s book, Your First Year in Real Estate, he shares the proper expectations and gives solid advice on how agents should spend each day throughout the year. He also shares some of the common pitfalls that new agents make, saving you some time and energy.

3. 6 Steps to 7 Figures: A Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Own Destiny

I love Pat Hiban. I’ve listened to his podcast, Real Estate Rockstars for years. He’s interviewed some of the best minds in real estate. This book is his step-by-step guide to creating success in real estate. All steps are relevant and spot-on to truly have success in this business. Pat’s all about actionable content so be prepared to have a lot to do after reading this book.

4. The Conversion Code: Capture Internet Leads, Create Quality Appointments, Close More Sales

This book by Chris Smith, who I’ve watched and learned from afar, is one of THE best books for real estate agents on internet lead generation and conversion. I read this book in the summer of 2017. I had already been doing internet lead generation for years in a big way but got WAY more out of this book than I could have ever imagined. It has since quadrupled my lead generation and vastly improved my conversion process.

5. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Here’s a book that doesn’t necessarily have to apply to real estate but because Gary Keller of Keller Williams wrote it and he references some real estate examples I’ll put it here. It’s just a great reminder, especially after reading the books above, that real success is done ONLY with focus. That’s not to say you can’t do multiple things in real estate to be successful. However, after reading this book it’ll make sense as to why focusing on your “one thing” is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

6. YouTube for Real Estate Agents: Learn How To Get Free Real Estate Leads And Never Cold Call Again

Door knocking and cold calling are two of the least favorite activities for real estate agents, and for a good reason – our potential buyers and sellers don’t like them either! That’s why YouTube is such a powerful tool for real estate marketing. With a well-crafted channel, you can learn how to get free real estate leads without making those dreaded cold calls or going door-to-door.

7. The Miracle Morning for Real Estate Agents: It’s Your Time to Rise and Shine

The Miracle Morning for Real Estate Agents is a guide to help you achieve greater success in your career. It offers tips and techniques from top-producing agents Rick and Michelle Masters, based on their experience of starting their day with The Miracle Morning routine.

8. The Book of YES: The Ultimate Real Estate Agent Conversation Guide

In The Book of YES, you will find today’s most powerful scripts in the real estate industry. These scripts have been proven to help agents close more deals naturally. Whether you’re tired of the same old sales scripts or have done away with them, this book has something for you. Written by a real estate agent who was determined to figure out the perfect thing to say in every situation, this book provides agents with witty and compelling dialogue that will cause sellers and buyers to want to say “Yes!” to them every time.

9. Your First 365 Days in Real Estate: How To Build A Successful Real Estate Business (Starting With Nothing)

Your First 365 Days in Real Estate is the essential guide to starting and building a successful real estate business. Written by experienced agent Shelley Zavitz, this book provides all the tips and advice you need to make it through your first year in the industry. This book covers everything you need to get ahead in real estate, with chapters on finding your niche, setting goals, marketing yourself, and more. So whether you’re just starting or you’ve been working in the industry for a while and want to take your business to the next level, Your First 365 Days in Real Estate is a great next read!

10. SOLD: Every Real Estate Agent’s Guide to Building a Profitable Business

Looking to set yourself apart from the competition and build a successful real estate career? Look no further than SOLD, the guide that provides expert insight from a top agent. With tips for rookie of the year and top agent status, this book is packed with everything you need to know to succeed in today’s market.

11. The $100,000 Part-Time Real Estate Agent: How I Consistently Make Full-Time Income in Real Estate While Keeping My Day Job

If you want to make more money in real estate, this book is for you. It provides tips and strategies for consistently making a full-time income as a part-time real estate agent.

12. 365 Days of Social Posts for Real Estate Agents: The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate Social Media Marketing

Perfect for the Realtor looking to build a stand-out personal brand on social media! This guide has them covered! With tips for every social media platform, they’ll learn how to share their real estate knowledge and expertise with the world.

13. Exactly What to Say: For Real Estate Agents

Real estate agents are always looking for new information on how to keep up with the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of real estate, technology, and social media. Give them the gift of knowledge, a resource they are bound to enjoy.

14. Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies

– Learn how to become a top-performing real estate agent in the latest edition of Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies, expert author Dirk Zeller shows you how to sell high-value homes, short sales, and more. Discover key ways to communicate and prospect in a new online world with coverage on being successful selling high-value homes, how to sell short sales to buyers without scaring them off, and more. Use third parties like Trulia, Realtor.com, and Zillow to drive leads and create exposure

15. The Half Millionaire Real Estate Agent: The 52 Secrets to Making a Half Million Dollars a Year While Working a 20-Hour Work Week

– The Half Millionaire Real Estate Agent offers agents the secrets to making a half million dollars a year with only a 20-hour work-week. Learn how to use the best tools for saving time and increasing productivity so that you can make more money in less time.

16. The Full Fee Agent: How to Stack the Odds in Your Favor as a Real Estate Professional

The Full Fee Agent is a guide to charging your full fee and getting clients who are worth it. Written by a successful real estate agent, this book shows you how to stop discounting and start stacking the odds in your favor. You’ll learn how to find high-paying clients, negotiate like a pro, and close more deals–without feeling pushy or sales-y. Charging your full fee is the key to real estate success. The Full Fee Agent will show you how to get there.

17. What to Post: How to Create Engaging Social Media Content that Builds Your Brand and Gets Results (for Real Estate)

A step-by-step guide to creating social media content that will attract clients, build your brand and increase leads. Real estate agents with a desire to make more money by building their personal brand. This book is unique in its practical content on how to use social media to generate leads for your real estate business. It’s not another how-to book or a bunch of theories.

18. SOI : Building A Real Estate Agent’s Sphere of Influence

SOI: Building A Real Estate Agent’s Sphere of Influence is a training manual for those real estate agents wanting to move from a mere real estate practice to a systematized real estate business with the control and mastery of their results. You are not an ‘average agent,’ so you need to employ the tried and tested ways of the nation’s Top Producers to always have an abundance of prospective buyers and sellers lined up – people who know who you are by name and ‘brand,’ who come to you first to list their property or help them buy a house.

19. Ninja Selling: Subtle Skills. Big Results.

In Ninja Selling, author Larry Kendall offers a science-based selling system that gives predictable results regardless of personality type. Kendall teaches readers how to shift their approach from chasing clients to attracting clients by asking the right questions and listening to their clients. Ninja Selling is an invaluable step-by-step guide that shows readers how to be more effective in their sales careers and increase their income per hour.

20. Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline

Looking to ditch your failed sales tactics and fill your pipeline? Look no further than Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount, which provides a practical guide to prospecting with clear explanations of the why and how. This book is perfect for salespeople, sales leaders, entrepreneurs, and executives who want to learn how to keep their pipeline full of qualified opportunities.

Well, there you have it. 20 of the best books for real estate agents, in my opinion. I hope that you’ll go out and pick up one of these today. The saying goes, “Leaders are Readers,” and now you have plenty of excellent books to go out there and read.

Strength and courage,
Wade

Realtors© Must Read Books For 2022

Wade Webb on February 2, 2022

As you start to build your reading list for 2022, set your 2022 Reading Challenge in Goodreads, and prioritize which books are worth your time, we want to share my favorite business books in 2021. This list covers a lot of ground and we’re confident that each book will help fuel your business growth in 2022 and beyond. In no particular order, here are our top 15 business book recommendations for Realtors© for 2022:

1. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. – There are several takeaways that any business can implement. Here are three:
1. Their philosophy of generous severances for an adequate performance. 2. Their development philosophy: They develop people by giving them the opportunity to develop themselves, by surrounding employees with stunning colleagues, and giving them big challenges to work on. Mediocre colleagues or unchallenging work is what kills the progress of a person’s skills. 3. 360-degree feedback: I did this personally and solicited feedback from above, the side, and below on what I should start, stop, continue doing. Very useful exercise!

2. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. – I really enjoyed it because it was the first thing I have read that challenged all the sales training I have received in my life and validated my preference of building a relationship and using facts and numbers to provide a solution, rather than just figuring out how to make a customer buy. It introduced me to the concept of “Principle Negotiations.” Essentially, this means consciously taking emotions out of the decision and treating it more like an equation. It’s about being clear with both parties and working toward a mutually beneficial agreement, rather than worrying about margin/profit. It’s a very “cards on the table” mentality, which is my favorite style of communication. It’s about finding the option that gives BOTH of us as many wins as possible, with the understanding that we may not get 100% of what we want.

3. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions. – It’s a great introductory overview of data science/computer science. It’s framed in a very relatable way – applying the various algorithm concepts to things in our everyday life. We hear about “algorithms” all the time, but most people don’t really understand what that means. This book helps demystify it.

4. Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work. – Wilding introduces the concept of being a “Sensitive Striver” and how to channel sensitivity into a force for good in the workplace. Her website says “If you’re an empathetic, driven person trying to navigate your career and learn how to believe in yourself in the process, Trust Yourself offers the mindset and tools you need to succeed.”

That’s absolutely true. It offered a really interesting perspective around boundaries and achievement. There were a bunch of exercises and worksheets in the book as well which made it really interesting to read and interact with.

5. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. – Nudge is all about decision-making and the psychological processes that happen without notice. It shows the reader how to change their environment to alter their choice architecture for better overall decisions.

6. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. – The intention of this book is to teach and reinforce why it’s important that we rethink our thought process – even, and especially when our instincts have served us well in the past.

I love it for the number of frameworks and clear examples it provides such as the helpful (and not helpful) roles you can take on when problem-solving, the sweet spot of confidence between the Dunning-Kruger effect and Imposter Syndrome. Grant is an excellent storyteller. He includes anecdotes and studies in each chapter that really help the concepts stick.

7. Atomic Habits. – It makes a distinction between systems and goals and shows you how to set up for sustainable change and ongoing achievement rather than “I’ve reached my goal, now back to the bad habits.” It also deals with making small changes to see small, incremental improvements and getting 1% better at something every day vs. having to radically change everything.

8. Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. – This book is really written for product managers, but it outlines useful frameworks for team structures, etc. The biggest takeaway for me is how critical it is to be close to the customer.

9. The Effective Executive. – This book provides timeless principles that can help new and experienced managers build the skills they need to run world-class organizations — at any size.

10. The Go-Giver. – It’s centered around the idea that your income is congruent with the number of people you serve and how WELL you serve them. Taking the focus off of receiving and putting it on giving instead – that’s the “Go-Giver” strategy for attracting prosperity. This is profound if you consider that most people – especially in the current social climate – are all about me, my, mine, etc. Very narrow way of thinking that limits what people can truly accomplish… alone… and together.

11. Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want. – They share a great framework of understanding the jobs, gains, pains for customers and how to rank them. It’s a very visual book which is a nice change of pace.

12. They Ask, You Answer. – Sheridan presents an SEO framework that is very approachable. I think people get overwhelmed by “keyword research” and all the other very technical things that can come with SEO strategies. He uses a very simple approach: Think about the questions that you get from your customers and answer those questions. My favorite piece of advice was to avoid (at all costs) your instinct to shy away from difficult decisions. “What do Realtors get paid?” and “How do I FSBO?” are classic examples of questions that can be touchy for some, but they are questions that are on the mind of homeowners. By answering them honestly (from a neutral position) you have an opportunity to build a lot of trust with your potential future customers.

13. Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise. – I like to look outside our own industry to get a sense of what World Class Customer Service/leadership is like. Horst is truly one of a kind and his approach to a top-level experience for his guests is second to none. He overlooks no details & spares almost no expense (Famously allowing even the maids to spend up to $2000 to make for a mistake) for the betterment of the guests. Very old school in his philosophy (in a good way) which is rarely seen in many of the business books written by more contemporary writers.

14. Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it. – The way she reframes fundamental marketing principles to level-up professionals and helps companies to better understand their unique value proposition(s) is unlike any marketer out there. Her tangible case studies and examples of how the right positioning to the right people at the right time can have an immense impact are amazing. Plus, April Dunford is just genuinely super smart, wildly experienced, and really fun to read/listen to in other forums (on podcasts, in interviews, etc.) as well!

15. Th E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. – All about how to build a business through repeatable and well-documented processes that are refined over time. You build the business like a franchise.

Now it’s time to fire up your kindle, start your free Audible trial, or treat yourself to a hard copy and start building your 2022 business book library. Let’s get to work! Feel free to share any of your must reads from 2021. Love to hear from you.

Strength and courage,
Wade