Why do we need undergraduates and even 985 or 211 graduates to sell a house? Is it overkill?
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “pole Business” (ID: jdsy2020), Author: pole business.
Why do you need undergraduates and even 985 and 211 graduates to sell a house? Is it overkill? From the perspective of the industry, this is the basic condition for cultivating the “Five High Talents” in the housing agency industry with high academic qualifications, high professionalism, high professionalism, high community participation, and high emotional intelligence.
Author | Liu Shanshan chindy
Edit | Yang Ming
“A good job is too hard to find. I plan to be a real estate agent.” When talking about future plans, Xiao Juan (pseudonym), a senior who is about to graduate from Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said.
Data released by the Ministry of Education show that the total number of college graduates in 2021 is expected to be 9.09 million, a record high. “Graduation is unemployed”, “finding a job and majoring is not the right one”, “it is difficult to find a job in a well-known company”…… Let the difficulty of employment once again become a hot topic of social concern.
For Xiao Juan, although her parents expressed respect for her career choice, “graduating from college and working as a housing agency” is still being questioned. In the parents’ impression, her daughter should have a “decent position” in and out of high-end office buildings. “Work”, real estate agency is a very low-threshold profession, with mixed personnel, uneven quality, too tired and indecent, would it be a pity to graduate from college to be a housing agency?
Xiao Juan’s explanation is that the industry in the past did not represent the present and future of the industry. Now the real estate agency has become more formal. Many graduates from prestigious schools have joined the real estate agency team, and many people earn far more than ordinary workers.
The influx of college students into real estate agencies is indeed becoming a trend. Take the data provided by Shell Chongqing platform as an example. In 2020, brokers with bachelor’s degree and above accounted for 17.5% of its cooperative brands, and 56% of brokers with college degree or above, and even graduates from 985 and 211 key colleges and universities Rarely. Judging from the recruitment plan for 2021, among the 35,000 broker recruitment positions, 10,000 schools recruit broker offers.
Why do you become a real estate agency and start to pay attention to your academic qualifications, and you even need to graduate from a prestigious university?
“Real estate agents are gradually moving towards younger, highly educated, and large-scaleThe direction of development. “On March 30, An Ning, general manager of Shell Chongqing Northwest Theater, said to “Extreme Business” that when real estate intermediaries have gone through the chaotic “cursive age”, they have transformed and upgraded from a single “sales type” to a diversified “service type”, with a higher level of ownership. Those with academic qualifications are more suitable for this industry.
“In any case, from the perspective of service providers, people are the core support of this industry.” An Ning said.
01
Graduates from prestigious schools flood into the real estate agency industry
Different from Xiao Juan’s difficulty in finding a job and entering a real estate agency, Nie Shan entered the industry more to realize the value of her life. For this reason, she gave up either “decent” foreign companies or high-paying jobs.
After graduating from Chongqing Normal University, Nie Shan entered a Danish foreign fashion company to do training-related work, and later entered Chongqing Jinke headquarters and Sunac Real Estate, becoming the sales champion of Sunac’s largest real estate in the region-just a commission , Tens of thousands per month.
After becoming the top seller, she saw a bottleneck in the future development of homeowner consultants. “This is a youth meal of physical strength.” Nie Shan said, she hopes to enter an industry where she can strive to take root and realize more life value.
In September last year, she unexpectedly became an M (store manager) of the Deyou store of Shell Department, focusing on second-hand housing sales. “I hope to work in this industry for a long time.” She said that although she graduated with a bachelor degree and has working experience in foreign companies and well-known real estate, she does not feel that being a second-hand housing agency will “not be recognized and have no future.”
Nie Shan’s New Year’s resolutions
Xu Huaqiang has the same idea as Nie Shan.
After graduating from Chongqing University of Technology and entering a store in Chongqing Zhonghuan Real Estate as a broker, Xu Huaqiang Yihuang has taken root in the real estate agency industry for almost 4 years. “This job gives everyone equal opportunities for development. As long as they work hard, they can make more money. I don’t think there is any gap with other jobs. It deserves everyone’s respect and recognition.”
In the outside world, the previous occupational awareness of real estate agencies was very vague-for a long time, low entry barriers and low academic qualifications were one of the labels of industry practitioners. The “2018 China Real Estate Brokers Report” stated: “Nearly 84% of brokers have a college degree or below, and about 32% of brokers have a high school degree.% And above, with a college degree or above accounting for more than 92%. “Bai Xiaoyun, general manager of Shell Chongqing Lianjia Division, said.
This proportion is slightly lower than that of Shanghai, but considering that the school will recruit 10,000 agents in 2021, the proportion of local highly educated talents will increase substantially in the next year.
It is worth mentioning that in order to attract more college students to enter. Lianjia also increased the base salary of recruiting agents in 29 cities across the country, with a minimum of 4,000 yuan and a maximum of 8,000 yuan in Shanghai and Shenzhen, in an attempt to solve the concerns of high-educated talents during the adaptation period.
This has completely subverted the perception of the outside world. Why do we need undergraduates and even 985 or 211 graduates to sell a house? Is it overkill?
02
Easier to portray a new generation of agents?
The increase in occupational threshold is closely related to industry changes-real estate agencies have acquired customers from traditional offline, quickly integrating with online customer acquisition, VR viewing, electronic contracts, real estate dictionary and other technical tools, allowing real estate transactions The process is becoming more online.
“Once, due to the low threshold for practitioners, small intermediaries and black intermediaries can be seen everywhere. The housing intermediary industry transactions are indeed relatively extensive. It is not an exaggeration to describe many methods as “swindling and kidnapping”. All purposes are for the transaction. It has caused great harm to the healthy development of the industry.” In Xu Huaqiang’s memory, these constituted his initial impression of traditional real estate agencies.
However, the future development of any industry must be the pursuit of better services and more professional and standardized operations. Key words such as “trust”, “service”, “values”, etc., are topics that cannot be circumvented in the digital age.
“From the perspective of the general trend of the industry, as the quality of consumer groups becomes professional, the professionalization and specialization of employees is an inevitable trend.” Said Bai Xiaoyun, general manager of Shell Chongqing Lianjia Division.
According to industry insiders, the “professionalization” and “specialization” of the industry include two aspects: one is to have received systematic professional training, with profound theoretical and practical experience; the other is to represent the highest professional level in the professional field, which is worthwhile People trust and respect.
In the United States, more than 60% of real estate agents have a bachelor’s degree or above. In addition, general knowledge of accounting, law, economics, finance, etc., is a must for salespersons and brokers to be certified, and they can obtain a professional license after passing an exam. . In addition, a certain amount of continuing education is required every year to extend the license.
But in China, the real estate brokerage industry has lacked service standards for a long time, and there are different service standards for what is “professional and professional”. Not only the consumer experience cannot be guaranteed, but also the overall service quality of the industry cannot be recognized. The content that American real estate agents must learn is precisely the professional knowledge that domestic real estate intermediary practitioners lacked the most.
“It is not that the platform did not consider it, but that many employees in the past had low academic qualifications and insufficient professional education, which hindered the professionalization and professionalization of real estate agencies.” A Lianjia insider said that as early as 2011, Lianjia Through training systems, micro-school training platforms, big data products, etc., brokers are empowered in multiple dimensions, such as technology and professional, to promote their professionalization. However, “the level of education is low, the mastery and pass rate are obviously not as good as those with high education.”
At the end of November last year, Lianjia released 15 “Green Gold Service Standards” that regulate real estate brokerage services, which have been launched in major cities across the country. Just recently, Shell Search also launched a new broker-only navigation system, the purpose of which is still to promote the professionalization and specialization of the real estate agency industry.
“In the standard 15, the polite language used when communicating with brokers is as small as the risk disclosure before signing the contract, covering the key touchpoints of real estate brokerage services.” said Bai Xiaoyun, general manager of Chongqing Lianjia Business Department, only forced Only when real estate agents take standards as guidelines and improve their professional service capabilities can they promote the progress and upgrade of the real estate service industry.
It is not difficult to formulate standards, but it is difficult to implement it, especially when dealing with hundreds of thousands of brokers in dozens of cities. Although the platform has its own “system methodology”, each store and each broker is crucial to the landing situation.
“For example, after I joined the shell department in my store, I entered, took a look, negotiated, signed orders… These seemingly simple services, in fact, have a heavy responsibility. Not only do they require certain technical skills, they also involve laws, policies, taxes, and fees. Transaction procedures, housing qualifications and other knowledge.” In Xu Huaqiang’s view, whether it is recognition of the company’s values, professional operation methods, or even passing systematic training and assessment, risk prevention and control, more high-level education is needed. High-quality talents join.
Many people in the industry believe that the current offline sales brokers are accelerating their transition to online digital advisory brokers, and the technical content is getting higher and higher. It is not a simple information provider and transaction matchmaker, but a professional depth In order to better solve the complexity of decision-making inherent in large transactions. “Therefore, academic qualifications are a bonus item, which to a certain extent represents the ability of new things.”
In Pan Xiaoxing’s view, she later discovered that the advantages of a high degree of education are very big: “Strong learning ability, personal etiquette, understanding and cognition of things, sense of service, etc., are more than those with a low degree of education. It’s better. Customers’ recognition and evaluation of high academic qualifications is also very high.”
This is understandable, why the real estate agency platform is more and more “loving” college students.
“Everything requires a stronger ability to learn quickly in order to better understand various customer needs and respond quickly.” Insiders said that from practice, it is obvious that high-quality talents have obvious advantages in complex decision-making. “Consultant brokers” are also the most.
The so-called advisory broker does not take the transaction as the main purpose. In addition to facilitating transactions through demand matching and multilateral cooperation mechanisms, it also needs to understand customer motivations, provide decision-making suggestions, and make risk disclosures. If this is the profile , Highly educated, high professional, high professional quality, high community participation, high emotional intelligence and other “five top talents” will be an important criterion.
In this regard, Sun Zehao, director of Shell Chongqing Brokers Growth Center, also said that digitalization is bringing huge imagination to the real estate agency industry. This is also the reason why Shell has increased its recruitment of college students because they are better at using new technologies. Consistent with Shell’s goal of being a consultant broker, it can be seen that there is still a huge gap in the demand for “five high” talents.
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The key to making the profession more “dignified”
In the view of real estate intermediary platforms, increasing the introduction of highly educated talents is a signal that the intermediary industry is moving towards professionalization and specialization. But for practitioners, it is not easy to truly take root in the industry. According to the data disclosed by Shell Chongqing, many real estate agents have been in the business for less than a year, and the short average number of years in the industry is still a pain point in the industry.
“The business principle of the intermediary industry determines its performance, revenue and customer volume, and the amount of attention directly proportional to it. The conversion speed of undergraduates is slow at the beginning, and only after 3-5 years of accumulation will they have a higher comprehensive literacy advantage.” Nie Shan believes that many people treat the work of real estate agents as a transition, not sincerely investing, and it is normal for the market to wash and settle.
This point is also mentioned in the documentary “Life in the Middle”. After Zhang Yonggang received his master’s degree from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he joined the army of real estate agencies in Beijing. “In the first practice, even junior high school students were inferior, the academic qualifications did not play a role, the pressure of survival was great, and the sense of dignity and decency disappeared.”
Zhang Yonggang felt embarrassed when he first entered the industry
Undoubtedly, the lower the turnover rate of high-quality talents, the better the platform and industry development. So, how can companies retain highly educated talents?
In addition to the basic salary guarantee period, Bai Xiaoyun said that the brand should provide brokers with a fair and clear upward channel, and improve the training mechanism of “mentoring with apprentices”, so that they can get more room for development at different stages. It is one of the biggest advantages of attracting highly educated talents.
Li Jian (pseudonym), who graduated from university in 2020 and entered a platform to become a real estate agent, feels deeply about this.
“When I graduated, because the real estate agency met my free development and passionate career needs, I chose to join. But after entering the industry, I felt my eyes were smeared and I didn’t know where to start. Fortunately, I was learning and training. With the help of teachers and colleagues, they grow up slowly.” According to Li Jian, the first order he signed did not belong to the region where the store was located, but the master helped to accompany and match the listings throughout the process. , Colleagues from the outside area worked hand in hand to complete the contract.
Although there are not many signings at present, Li Jian has decided to work in the industry like Nie Shan and Xu Huaqiang. “Just like many industries, real estate brokers also need more patience and persistence. I firmly believe that with the improvement of service levels and resource accumulation, it is expected that income will continue to grow.”
Undoubtedly, more income security is a prerequisite for talents to stay. According to data from the Shell Research Institute, the average annual income of real estate agents is no more than 80,000 yuan. However, after several years of rooting in the industry, 12% of brokers can achieve annual income of 150,000 to 300,000, and another 6% of brokers can achieve more than 300,000. At the same time, the higher the degree, the higher the income.
“At present, in our stores, many brokers earn more than 10,000 yuan per month, and the minimum is several thousand yuan.” Nie Shan said. Pan Xiaoxing also revealed that his current monthly salary is tens of thousands of yuan. If compared with the average salary level in Chongqing, it is obviously not low.
In the long run, in addition to salary returns, professional recognition, dignity, self-confidence, and sense of accomplishment are also necessary prerequisites for retaining talents.
“At present, many domestic brokers are still unable to communicate with customers on an equal footing, especially when they encounter villa customers. Some even seem to be unconfident from the bottom of their hearts no matter how much money they earn.” When it comes to the status quo of the brokerage industry, there are some in the industry. People said that this has a lot to do with the previous chaos and vices in the industry, causing people to distrust brokers, while some brokers themselves have lost their self-confidence.
In fact, the broker and the customer should be an equal dialogue relationship, which is more similar to the role of a consultant providing quality service value.
“Housing intermediary transactionWhen it is complicated, how to accurately identify customer needs, screen and process according to the needs, sort out the most useful information, and conduct safe transactions while avoiding capital and transaction risks. “In the view of Xu Huaqiang and Nie Shan, this is the real value of brokers and the key to gaining customer trust.
The prerequisite for all this is still the self-recognition brought by high professionalism and specialization. Zuo Hui, the founder of Lianjia, said: “The foundation for winning dignity is the professionalization of the industry. What professional brokers need is an ecological environment for long-term practice. They need struggle instead of destruction, and they need incentives instead of chicken soup.”
From a policy perspective, real estate brokerage has also become a “regular profession”. On September 12, 2017, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security officially announced the National Vocational Qualification Catalog, listing real estate in one of the 59 professional qualifications recognized by the state to promote employment.
“As a service industry that has developed for many years, real estate brokers are constantly upgrading and changing. The development of the market and the improvement of the industrial chain have also created many new jobs, absorbing a large number of laborers.” Chongqing Public Service Center for University Students Employment and Entrepreneurship Guo Quanmin, Deputy Minister of Employment Services, said that the real estate brokerage industry, as an important service industry that affects the national economy and people’s livelihood, has played a positive role in promoting employment and stabilizing employment.
In the eyes of the above-mentioned people, continuing to match the supply and demand of the real estate brokerage industry and improving the skill literacy of workers is an important measure to promote the employment capacity of the real estate brokerage industry and improve the quality of employment.
In this regard, Shell also said in an interview that according to the Shell Spring Hope Plan, in 2021, it will cooperate with new brokerage brands to provide 600,000 broker recruitment positions, including 200,000 school recruitment broker offers.
“In any case, young, highly educated, and professional brokers in the new era are the inevitable trend in the future.” An industry insider commented that for the platform and the industry, this is to tap more value and importance. The key to shaping the health industry.
“Before majoring, the most important thing is truth.” Pan Xiaoxing said that people want truth, things want truth, things want truth. This is an important sign of service. He said he believes that “the future stock housing market will definitely increase The better you come, you also need more and more professional comprehensive talents in real estate services, and improving your ability and professional ethics will become an increasingly important part.”