Success in real estate isn’t about waiting for better rates, more inventory, or the next big lead-generation tool to come along. Agents who consistently thrive are the ones who create their own momentum, no matter what the market is doing.
On this month’s episode of R.E.A.L. Talk with Homes for Heroes, co-host Matthew Ferrara and Leigh Anne Clary sat down with Kevin Van Eck, managing director of Maverix and a nearly twenty-year veteran of this industry, to talk about what actually separates agents who are having their best year ever from agents who feel stuck. What follows is the playbook taht was unpacked: part mindset, part market knowledge, part relationship-building, and part good old-fashioned showing up.
Table of Contents:
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What Does It Take to Be a Successful Real Estate Agent?
- Develop an Abundance Mindset
- Focus on Relationships, Not Just Real Estate Transactions
- Become a Student of Your Real Estate Market
- Surround Yourself With Successful Real Estate Professionals
- Build Your Network Through Meaningful Conversations
- Give Value Before You Ask for Business
- Create Your Own Opportunities in Any Real Estate Market
- Final Thoughts
What Does It Take to Be a Successful Real Estate Agent?
If you ask ten agents what it takes to be a successful real estate agent, you’ll get ten different answers: a better tech stack, sharper scripts, more hustle. The real answer is much simpler than that, and even more practical.
The best real estate agent builds strong relationships, understands their market, maintains an abundance mindset, continually develops their skills, and provides value before asking for business. None of that is defined by the market they happen to be working in. It’s defined by how they respond to it.
The agents who perform consistently, regardless of the market, tend to share the same core habits. They treat their own business like the entrepreneurial venture it actually is. They look for opportunity instead of defaulting to a scarcity mindset. Technology can make an agent faster and more efficient, but it can’t replace how you make someone feel or the quality of service you provide. That part is still on us.
Develop an Abundance Mindset
Agents who lead with an abundance mindset tend to operate with more confidence and be more mindful of their activities. When you wake up believing opportunity is scarce, out of leads, out of listings, out of good buyers, you make decisions from a place of fear. That’s a race to the bottom. When you wake up believing you can create opportunity that day, you take entirely different actions.
Kevin is clear that this isn’t about denial or forced positivity. It comes down to a few small, protective habits:
- Stay off your phone for the first 30 to 60 minutes of your day; how you manage that window tends to set the tone for everything else. It’s easy to lose thirty minutes to scrolling without noticing, and whatever you consume first tends to frame the rest of your day.
- Be intentional about what you consume. Choose content that develops your skills or your knowledge of the market instead of defaulting to negative headlines.
- Read or learn something useful each morning, even ten pages of a book.
- Look for one way, even a small one, to make someone else’s day better. This has the ability to create a compounding effect.
None of this means ignoring real challenges in the market. It means not letting those challenges dictate your actions before you’ve even had your coffee.
Focus on Relationships, Not Just Real Estate Transactions
When markets get tighter, agents pull back into transactional mode. It makes sense. There’s more pressure, so the instinct is to chase the deal directly in front of you. But relationships become even more important in challenging markets.
Every new real estate agent learns this early in their career and then somehow forgets it. Deals close. Relationships last. The people who genuinely trust you and who remember how you made them feel throughout the process are the ones who come back to you for their next move and who tell the people in their lives to call you first. That kind of word-of-mouth momentum doesn’t come from a script or a polished personal brand. It comes from consistently showing up for people, whether or not there’s a transaction on the table that day.
Technology and automation can make you more efficient, but they can’t build trust for you. That’s still a human job, and it’s the job that actually grows a business over the long term.
“When the market gets harder is exactly when relationships matter more, not less.” – Kevin Van Eck
Become a Student of Your Real Estate Market
Clickbait, urgency-driven headlines have become the norm in real estate. You’ve seen them: stats about homes sitting on the market longer, inventory counts, days-on-market figures. But most of them only tell you one side of the story, and successful agents learn to look for the other side, too.
If a headline highlights the share of homes taking longer to sell, ask what that means for the homes that aren’t. There’s almost always a flip side, and potential clients don’t want to work with an agent who can only tell them what isn’t possible. They want to work with an agent who can tell them what is.
That takes real market insights, not headline repetition. Becoming a student of your market means understanding the data well enough to apply it to an individual client’s specific circumstances, instead of making blanket claims that it’s always a good time to buy or sell, or never a good time. As Kevin put it, it’s always a good time for somebody. Your job is to help each client figure out if it’s them.
Surround Yourself With Successful Real Estate Professionals
Who you spend time with shapes your mindset more than most other real estate agents realize. Kevin talked about the value of a mastermind group, a mentor, or a peer community, people who share ideas and celebrate each other’s wins. There’s a flywheel effect that happens when you surround yourself with people who are doing well and are willing to talk about how they got there, including the common mistakes they made along the way.
You don’t have to navigate a challenging market on your own. Whether it’s your brokerage, your local association, your MLS, or a broader community of affiliate real estate partners who share a genuine commitment to serving clients well, being part of something larger than your individual business matters more than most agents give it credit for.
Build Your Network Through Meaningful Conversations
Go deeper with your network, not wider. Years ago, Kevin had two friends who became his top source of word-of-mouth business even though he never once represented them in a transaction. They were natural connectors who invited him to fundraisers and community events, and at first, by his own admission, Kevin showed up trying to collect as many business cards as possible.
Then he changed his approach. Instead of trying to meet twenty-five people at an event, his goal became having two meaningful conversations. Just two. He asked more questions than he answered and focused on genuinely getting to know people instead of pitching them. That shift, he said, is what built the kind of credibility and trust that lasts for years.
If you’re networking at conferences, association events, MLS meetings, or even just your own office, the same principle applies. You don’t need to meet everyone in the room. You need to actually connect with a few people, listen more than you talk, and let the relationship come before the transaction.
Give Value Before You Ask for Business
A question every agent should sit with is: What if you showed up expecting to give something instead of getting something?
This one simple mindshift changes everything at a networking event, at a listing appointment, or with a buyer who reaches out online. Instead of walking in asking, “What can I get from this?”, try asking, “Who can I help?” At a listing presentation, that might mean making sure a seller understands how to prepare their home for the market before confirming whether or not they ultimately list with you. With a buyer, it might mean helping them understand what the process actually looks like before they’ve committed to anything at all.
Giving value first builds trust and credibility in a way that pitching never will. Some of the strongest word-of-mouth business doesn’t come from asking for it directly. It comes from people becoming genuine advocates for an agent who consistently helped them, deal or no deal.
Create Your Own Opportunities in Any Real Estate Market
Top-performing agents don’t wait for the market to shift. They create their opportunities regardless of the market conditions.
It’s easy to wait for interest rates to drop, for inventory to loosen up, or for the next piece of technology to save the day. But none of those things are in your control, and none of them are required for you to succeed today. What is in your control is how you show up: with an abundance mindset, with real market knowledge, with relationships you’ve actually invested in, and with a genuine intention to help the people in front of you.
Creating your own market doesn’t mean pretending the challenges aren’t real. It means refusing to let those challenges write the whole story. That’s what actually separates agents who are having their best year ever from agents who feel stuck.
“Agents create their own market.” – Kevin Van Eck
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