How hard is it really for a mortgage broker just starting out in their early 20s? Not being put on a team, but being a female, and working for a top 10 firms (Berkadia, Greystone, etc). Multifamily agency lending focus.
Thanks in advance!
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Age, gender, and company brand aren't really much of a factor in your ultimate success in CRE brokerage. Company in some cases, but it's not nearly as important as some in the "preftige" crowd here would make you think. Being a great young broker is truly about about being trustworthy, adding value at every turn, and knowing how to avoid/minimize the innumerable mistakes and fuck-ups that we inevitably make starting out. In that vein, get a mentor, business partner, or on a team ASAP. The learning curve is so steep that most can't hang on, and is especially difficult if you are on your own.
Good/great brokers are artisans in managing the myriad of issues, personalities, emotions, and expectations of everyone involved in the deal, and there isn't a person alive in their early 20s that has the knowledge, experience, and capabilities to be a top level broker. It's really one of the last true mentor/apprenticeship type professions, and is truly a craft. You could literally watch every brokerage training video ever made before starting, and you would likely still be a shitty broker starting out. There are extremely subtle and nuanced aspects of this business that can't be learned outside of making mistakes. It's a constant process of situational errors and behavioral revisions for the first 5 years in the business, and if you don't have an someone with that experience guiding you, you are very likely to fail. A mentor helps smooth over the mistakes you will make until you are competent.
Sure, there are some brokers out there who can hack it and carve out a niche for themselves on their own, but by and large, those folks tend to be of the sales-first and deal-chasing mentality, which doesn't generally lend to being a thoughtful sales consultant like most of the top brokers are. The best in the business have a highly unique blend of charisma, strategic analysis/insight, hustle, personability, business intuition, genuineness, and tactfulness. Find someone with those traits and work/learn from them.
Very well said. I like that the first word you used to describe a great young broker is being "trustworthy". I think that trustworthiness is the most important word that separates a successful broker/banker. In the mortgage banking world, you will find people that run the gamut in terms of personality traits. Many people would assume that the incredibly charismatic brokers are most likely to be successful. If you attend CREF, you will find folks who look like Abercrombie models in their past lives, know how to work a room, appear very well put together and are incredibly personable. You will also find people that are the exact opposite. They look like flounders, are shy and don't come off as particularly friendly or put-together. What you will typically find is that both archetypes can be successful in their own way and almost always the success can be attributed to their ability to earn trust.
It is important to consider that trust can take many forms and people establish trust in many different ways. One way that someone can gain trust is through friendship. Clients trust brokers they know well and consider friends and assume that the broker would work especially hard on the deal and would treat it (and them) with utmost integrity. Another way that people can earn trust is by displaying competence which can be a combination of reputation, experience and knowledge/intelligence.
A debate that I've frequently encountered in the brokerage/banking space is: If you were a client, would you prefer to work with a broker who you enjoy personally, or with a broker who you may not particularly enjoy but you deem them more hardworking/competent? In other words, what's more important, relationship or ability?