Starting a real estate career in 2025 means entering an industry transformed by technology. The skills that built successful careers twenty years ago—door-knocking persistence, phone manner, local knowledge—still matter. But they’re no longer sufficient.

Today’s successful new agents combine those fundamentals with digital capabilities that would have seemed futuristic a decade ago. Here’s what you need to master.

CRM Mastery

Your CRM is command central. Treating it as an administrative burden rather than a strategic tool handicaps your entire career.

What Mastery Looks Like

Contact management excellence: Every interaction logged, every preference recorded, every relationship tracked. Your CRM should know your contacts better than your memory does.

Automation utilisation: Using system automations for routine follow-up, campaign nurture, and task triggers. The agents who thrive work the CRM; the agents who struggle fight it.

Pipeline management: Understanding where every prospect stands, what’s needed next, and when to act. Your CRM should tell you what to do each day.

Data hygiene discipline: Keeping information current, removing duplicates, updating status. Clean data enables everything else.

The New Agent Trap

Many new agents treat CRM as data entry obligation—doing the minimum to satisfy management oversight. This creates a system that stores information but doesn’t enable success.

Invest early in genuinely mastering your CRM. The advantage compounds over time.

Digital Marketing Fluency

Property marketing is primarily digital. Understanding how digital marketing works is essential.

Social Media Competence

Platform understanding: Know where your market spends time. For most agents, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn matter most—but relative importance varies by market segment.

Content creation: Ability to produce photos, videos, and written content that engages audiences. This doesn’t require production expertise, but basic competence is essential.

Engagement management: Responding to comments, building community, maintaining consistent presence. Social media works through interaction, not broadcasting.

Advertising basics: Understanding how to boost posts, target audiences, and measure results. Organic reach alone is rarely sufficient.

Email and Communication

Professional email practice: Clear subject lines, appropriate formatting, mobile-friendly content. Most communication is email; quality matters.

Automation design: Understanding how email sequences work, when to use automation versus personal communication, and how to nurture buyer relationships at scale.

Analytics interpretation: Knowing what open rates, click rates, and engagement metrics mean—and how to improve them.

Portal Optimisation

Listing quality standards: What makes listings perform on portals—photography, description, information completeness.

Feature utilisation: Understanding and using portal features—highlight options, premium placements, analytics dashboards.

Performance analysis: Reading portal data to diagnose and improve listing performance.

AI Tool Competence

AI has become essential infrastructure. Resistance or avoidance isn’t viable.

What to Master

Content assistance: Using AI to draft descriptions, social posts, and communications—then editing for voice and accuracy.

Research acceleration: Leveraging AI to gather market data, analyse trends, and prepare for client conversations.

Communication enhancement: AI tools for improving email effectiveness, handling routine enquiries, and maintaining contact consistency.

Workflow automation: AI-powered features within CRMs and other platforms that reduce manual work.

The Right Mindset

AI augments capability; it doesn’t replace judgment. New agents should learn to:

• Use AI for efficiency, not as shortcut for learning
• Always review and edit AI outputs
• Understand what AI does well and poorly
• Stay current as capabilities evolve rapidly

Photography and Visual Content

Visual content quality directly affects listing performance and buyer engagement.

Minimum Competence

Smartphone photography: Producing acceptable images when professionals aren’t available. Lighting, angles, staging basics.

Video creation: Recording simple property walkthroughs and market update videos. Comfort on camera matters.

Virtual tour understanding: Knowing how virtual tours work, what makes them effective, and how buyers use them.

Visual storytelling: Sequencing images and content to convey property stories effectively.

When to Outsource

Professional photography and video should be standard for listings. But new agents need visual competence for:

• Social media content
• Quick property previews
• Market updates and personal branding
• Situations where professionals aren’t available

Data Interpretation

Real estate generates abundant data. Interpreting it effectively differentiates successful agents.

Essential Data Skills

Market data literacy: Understanding median prices, days on market, clearance rates, and what they indicate.

Valuation data familiarity: Working with CoreLogic, PropTrack, and similar platforms to inform pricing conversations.

Comparable analysis: Identifying relevant comparable sales and explaining how they inform property valuation.

Performance metrics: Tracking your own conversion rates, pipeline progression, and activity effectiveness.

Avoiding Data Traps

Data informs but doesn’t decide. New agents should:

• Present data with appropriate uncertainty
• Combine data with local knowledge and judgment
• Explain what data means rather than just showing numbers
• Recognise when data is missing or misleading

Communication Technology

Effective communication happens across multiple channels. Competence in each matters.

Multi-Channel Management

Phone: Still essential for relationship building and negotiation.

SMS/Messaging: Quick, informal communication that buyers increasingly prefer.

Video calls: Virtual meetings for inspections, appraisals, and consultations.

Social media messaging: Responding to DMs and managing platform-specific communication.

Integration and Tracking

Understanding how communication tools integrate with your CRM, ensuring every contact is captured regardless of channel, and maintaining professional standards across all communication types.

Self-Development in Digital Skills

Digital skills require ongoing development. The landscape changes constantly.

Building Learning Habits

Allocate time: Schedule regular time for learning and skill development.

Follow industry sources: Stay current with PropTech developments through industry publications and communities.

Learn from peers: Watch how successful agents use technology. Ask questions. Share knowledge.

Experiment actively: Try new tools and approaches. Not everything will work, but passivity guarantees falling behind.

Training Investment

Take advantage of:

• Agency training programs
• Vendor training for tools you use
• Industry conferences and events
• Online courses and certifications

The investment in digital skills pays career-long dividends.

The Competitive Reality

New agents without digital competence face significant disadvantages:

• Competing with technology-enabled agents for listings
• Inefficiency that constrains income potential
• Inability to serve digitally-savvy clients effectively
• Limited career advancement options

The agencies hiring new agents increasingly require digital fluency. The listings new agents win come from demonstrating competence that includes technology capability.

The good news: these skills are learnable. New agents who invest in digital mastery from day one build foundations for careers that their technology-averse peers can’t match.

The fundamentals of real estate—relationships, knowledge, service, persistence—remain essential. But executing those fundamentals today requires digital fluency that wasn’t previously needed.

Embrace that reality. Build those skills. The combination of traditional excellence and digital competence creates agents who thrive in 2025 and beyond.

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Linda Powers consults with real estate agencies on talent development and technology adoption. Her observations of new agent success patterns inform her perspective on essential contemporary skills.