10 Best Real Estate Books for New Agents

Whether you are a new agent or a seasoned professional, the most successful real estate agents find that there is always more to learn in this profession. Agents need information on not only the buying and selling process, but on how to manage and grow a successful real estate business.

It isn’t necessary to be an expert in business management, psychology, accounting, finance, banking, selling, prospecting, economics, and counseling; but all of these come into play and having a basic understanding of the basics is essential. Prosperous agents know that they must take it upon themselves to increase their knowledge through both formal training and independent reading.

Here is a list of 10 books recommended for new agents or anyone interested in increasing profitability in real estate.

The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: It’s Not About the Money…It’s About Being the Best You Can Be! by Gary Keller, with Dave Jenks and Jay Papasan

“Whether you are just getting started or a veteran in the business, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent is the step-by-step handbook for seeking excellence in your profession and in your life.” –Mark Victor Hansen, co-creator, #1 New York Times bestselling series Chicken Soup for the Soul

“This book presents a new paradigm for real estate and should be required reading for real estate professionals everywhere.” –Robert T. Kiyosaki, New York Times bestselling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad

The Millionaire Real Estate Agent explains:

  • Three concepts that drive production
  • Economic, organizational, and lead generation models that are the foundations of any high-achiever’s business
  • How to “Earn a Million,” “Net a Million,” and “Receive a Million” in annual income

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

Welcome to the world of real estate sales, and the start of an exciting new career! Your destiny is now in your hands. Along with endless opportunities, flexible hours, and the freedom to chart your own path, you also have the potential to earn fabulous amounts of money. All you need for total success is preparation. Revised and expanded, Your First Year in Real Estate contains the essential knowledge you need to start off right in today’s vastly changed real estate market, avoid common first-year missteps, and get the inside edge that will take you to the top.

Real estate expert Dirk Zeller has compiled the industry’s proven secrets and strategies that will enable novice agents to hit the ground running and excel from day one. Concise and thorough, Your First Year in Real Estate is like having the top coach right by your side. You’ll get the insider’s guide to:

  • Selecting the right company
  • Developing valuable mentor and client relationships
  • Using the Internet and social networking to stay ahead of the competition (NEW!)
  • Setting—and reaching— essential career goals
  • Staying on top in today’s challenging real estate climate (NEW!)
  • And so much more.

The Honest Real Estate Agent: A Training Guide for a Successful First Year and Beyond as a Real Estate Agent by Mario Jannatpour

Have you been thinking about getting a real estate license? Are you going to real estate school now? Have you recently passed your real estate exam where you live?   One of the drawbacks of most real estate courses and schools is they don’t teach you how to succeed as a Real Estate Agent once you get your license. This book will help you hit the ground running once you get your license. Thousands of new Agents have bought this book as they embark on their career in real estate.

Mario Jannatpour is an active Realtor with RE/MAX Alliance in Louisville, Colorado and what he writes about is based on his experience of what it takes to be successful today as a Realtor. Mario has been a Realtor since 2002.

How To Become a Power Agent In Real Estate: A Top Industry Trainer Explains How to Double Your Income in 12 Months by Darryl Davis

How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate gives real estate agents both the powerful sales techniques and the practical management tips they need to double their income by closing more transactions. Based on the outstanding success of Darryl Davis’s seminar “The POWER Program,” this motivational guide utilizes POWER Principles to help the new agent as well as the experienced top producer dramatically increase listings and sales.

The book is full of Davis’s surefire methods for managing the sales process, including time management for agents, prospecting for listings, handling the seller’s and buyer’s concerns, maintaining a winning attitude, and generating more sales in less time. He also reveals how clever use of the Web can provide a competitive edge and how the top producers work smarter not harder. Offering field-proven tools and techniques, Davis shows agents how to progress at their own pace to their own personal Next Level and accelerate their entry into Top Agent status.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to do About It by Michael E. Gerber

In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

The Essential Daily Planner for Real Estate Agents: Success in 10 Minutes a Day by Melissa Zalava

“Staying organized is the key to being top of your game as a real estate agent, and The Essential Daily Planner for Real Estate Agents will help you do just that. This clever book is a business coach and an accountability tool all in less than 250 pages! Read it, use it, and watch your productivity skyrocket!” — Barbara Corcoran, real estate mogul, business coach, and star of ABC’s Shark Tank

The Essential Daily Planner for Real Estate Agents is an easy-to-use daily organizer with a unique format that includes six months’ worth of space for you to record your daily activities and achievements. Endlessly useful, the daily log makes it simple for you to note prospecting, marketing, and sales goals while also including space for record keeping, appointments, and personal notations. The thought-provoking daily motivators offer a starting point for any agents seeking additional direction in their business. Research shows that goal setting and self-monitoring accelerates success. So whether you are a novice real estate agent or an experienced top producer, this daily planner will provide motivation, tools for analyzing patterns in your daily and weekly activities, and a record of your accomplishments. It’s amazing the success that you can achieve in only 10 minutes a day! When you employ the strategies and use the tools in this perennial organizer, you will see increased efficiency and organization in your business.

Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate by Spencer Rascoff and Stan Humphries

How do you spot an area poised for gentrification? Is spring or winter the best time to put your house on the market? Will a house on Swamp Road sell for less than one on Gingerbread Lane? The fact is that the rules of real estate have changed drastically over the past five years. To understand real estate in our fast-paced, technology-driven world, we need to toss out all of the outdated truisms and embrace today’s brand new information. But how?

Thanks to its treasure trove of proprietary data and army of statisticians and data scientists, led by chief economist Stan Humphries, Zillow has been able to spot the trends and truths of today’s housing market while acknowledging that a home is more than an economic asset. In ZILLOW TALK, Humphries and CEO Spencer Rascoff explain the science behind where and how we live now and reveal practical, data-driven insights about buying, selling, renting and financing real estate. Read this book to find out why:

  • It’s better to remodel your bathroom than your kitchen
  • Putting the word “cute” in your listing could cost you thousands of dollars
  • You shouldn’t buy the worst house in the best neighborhood
  • You should never list your house for $444,000
  • You shouldn’t list your house for sale before March Madness or after the Masters

Densely packed with entertaining anecdotes and invaluable how-to advice, ZILLOW TALK is poised to be the real estate almanac for the next generation.

Secrets of a Master Closer: A Simpler, Easier, and Faster Way to Sell Anything to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere by Mike Kaplan

If you want to know, step by step, how to sell and quickly, easily, and smoothly walk anyone from being a skeptical prospect to a happy customer that refers you friends, family, and colleagues, then you want to read this sales book.

Here’s the deal:

At its core, selling isn’t a patchwork of cheesy closing techniques, annoying high-pressure tactics, or gimmicky rebuttals. True salesmanship follows very specific laws, has very specific steps and stages, and leaves a customer feeling happy and helped. It’s honest, respectful, enlightening, friendly, and done with real care. It’s the type of selling that wins you not only customers, but fans. Not coincidentally, this is the type of selling that truly great salespeople have mastered. This is the type of selling that keeps pipelines full and moving, and that builds a strong, loyal customer base that continues to give back to you in the form of customer loyalty, reorders, and referrals.

That’s what this book is all about. It will give you a crystal-clear picture of the exact steps that every sale must move through and why, and how to methodically take any prospect through each, and eventually to the close. And how to do it with integrity and pride.

In this book, you’ll learn things like:

  • The eight precise steps of every sale. Leave any out, and you will struggle. Use them all correctly, and you will be able to close unlimited sales.
  • The true purpose of the presentation and the crucial, often-missing steps that need to be taken first. If you’re making the same presentation mistakes as most other salespeople, this chapter alone could double your sales.
  • How to easily discover which prospects can use and pay for your product/service, and which can’t. Time is your most valuable commodity as a salesperson, and if wasted, it costs you money.
  • Learn how to smoothly create an abundance of closing opportunities, and know when to act on them and close. This is the hallmark of every master closer. Learn it, use it, and profit.
  • Why it’s a myth that you need to know multiple ways to close deals. Learn this one, simple method, and you’ll be able to use it to close all of your sales.
  • Simple formulas to turn any objection into a closing opportunity. Use them and never fear hearing a prospect’s objection ever again.
  • And a whole lot more!

This is more than a just a book, really. It’s a step-by-step sales training course. Each chapter ends with precise exercises that will help you master each technique taught and each step of the sales process. If you are new to sales, make this book the first one you read, and you will greatly increase your chances for quick success. If you are a seasoned veteran and are looking for ways to improve your numbers, this book will help you make your sales goals a reality.

Sell With Soul: Create an Extraordinary Career in Real Estate without Losing Your Friends, Your Principles or Your Self Respect by Jennifer Allan-Hagedorn

Even in so-called boom markets, rookie real estate agents almost always find their new careers to be harder than anticipated. Statistics quote figures ranging from 70% to 95% dropout rate for first year agents and it is common knowledge in the industry that only a small percentage of the licensed agents are making enough money to live on.

What agents need is good solid training on how to competently sell real estate and Jennifer Allan-Hagedorn’s book Sell with Soul offers just that. The book provides a blueprint for success to help new agents navigate the critical first year and beyond. Sell with Soul comes complete with checklists to help agents keep on top of listings and contracts, step-by-step guidelines for building a thriving real estate practice as well as anecdotal examples of real world real estate dilemmas and solutions to them.

Yet the book is so much more than a rookie survival guide. The author discusses such touchy subjects as commission discounting (she’s all for it), buyer agency (don’t push it), prospecting at open houses (do so with caution) and generating bidding wars (it’s your duty). Practical advice is offered on everything from building a loyal client base to marketing listings to negotiating inspections and even handling pricing objections.

Sell with Soul focuses on helping new agents become competent at their craft, so they can be confident with their prospects and clients. This confidence enables them to stay true to themselves because they will have no need for the Old School prospecting strategies and aggressive closing techniques that force many new agents out of their comfort zone. Readers consistently praise the readability of Sell with Soul, commenting that it reads almost like a novel instead of just another business self-help book. The book is written in a casual voice, with a relaxed style that is noticeably different from the more authoritative voices of the competition.

The Real Estate Agent’s Guide to FSBO’s: Make Big Money Prospecting For-Sale-By-Owner Properties by John Maloof

According to the National Association of Realtors, 86% of new real estate agents don’t make it past their first year. The majority give up due to frustration and the overwhelming start-up costs involved in the industry. But there is an untapped resource that will help agents take their careers to new heights – the For-Sale-By-Owner (FSBO) listing. Many homeowners try to sell their home without an agent, believing that they can find a buyer just as quickly and avoid paying a commission. But often nothing can be further from the truth. Author John Maloof has built a stellar career by farming FSBOs. He made six figures his first year as a real estate agent using his prospecting plan. Now, in The Real Estate Agent’s Guide to FSBOs, he shows other agents how they can do the same. Complete with Internet resources and a sample resume and log sheet, this is the one book that will show new agents and experienced Realtors alike how to make more money than they ever thought possible. Using these proven techniques, agents will learn how to:

  • find FSBOs
  • approach a prospect
  • make a listing presentation that will convince even the most reluctant homeowner
  • handle rejections
  • formulate a marketing plan
  • service listings
  • build a referral base
  • stage open houses
  • close the sale

This list only scratches the surface of books available to instruct Real Estate agents how to make the most of their time, their prospecting, and increase their sales. As real estate is such a variable and competitive industry, it is imperative to get and stay informed. Other books you might consider are:

A Real Estate Agents Guide to Offering Home Staging Advice by Barbara Jennings.

Statistically, staged homes sell faster and at higher prices (17% higher on average).

Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos by Andy Donaldson

This one may not teach you in depth strategies, but it will be a nice addition to your collection and will show precisely what NOT to do with your listing photos.

Endless Referrals by Bob Burg

This book frequently lands on various must-read lists; proven relationship-building principles to brig even more clients to your door and helps you attract only those who are interested in what you sell.

Laugh Your Way to Real Estate Sales Success by Cathy Turney

Top-producing real estate broker and award-winning humorist Cathy Turney shows real estate sales people how to reliably achieve and sustain a six-figure income in this laugh-out-loud expose and how-to book about the real estate sales business.

For more outstanding real estate books, and information on the above listed books, visit amazon.com.

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