The 30 Best Real Estate Agent Books For Leveling Up In 2023 & Beyond
I love reading books about real estate because it always gives me a glimpse of how someone else is doing business. In fact, real estate agents are professionals who continuously need to stay up-to-date with the industry’s latest trends and strategies.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is by reading books authored by experienced professionals and experts in the field. In this article, we have curated a list of the top 30 books that will help you improve your skills, expand your knowledge, and thrive as a real estate agent.
Each book is linked for easy access to purchase or learn more about the title.
1. Real Estate Prospecting
by Tristan Ahumada (that’s me)
Our real estate world has changed over the last few years and I bring that change into this book. In this book, I lay out a good chunk of what I’ve done in my career to succeed. You’ll find some tech, some processes, and a lot of actual things you can immediately do to get your business going. You will definitely have to bookmark a lot of pages and also take lots of notes.
2. The Millionaire Real Estate Agent
by Gary Keller, Dave Jenks, and Jay Papasan
This book provides a comprehensive guide for real estate agents to build a successful business. The authors share time-tested strategies and techniques to help you generate leads, expand your client base, and maximize profits.
3. Ninja Selling
by Larry Kendall
This book should be required reading for all Real Estate Agents. It lays out what brokers and team leaders should be teaching. I still recommend this one and sometimes go back to certain chapters in this book just to get outlines for listing processes.
4. Too Nice for Sales
by Barry Jenkins
This one is a must-have for your library. Barry goes over how you should approach the current consumer both in follow-up and tonality. It’s a book you will definitely gift to others and go back to often.
5. 7L: The Seven Levels of Communication: Go From Relationships to Referrals
by Michael J. Maher
The Seven Levels of Communication tells the entertaining and educational story of Rick Masters, who is suffering from a down economy when he meets a mortgage professional who has built a successful business without advertising or personal promotion. Skeptical, he agrees to accompany her to a conference to learn more about her mysterious methods.
If you are looking for a way to build your business on love, generosity, and appreciation you must read this book.
7. Fanatical Prospecting
by Jeb Blount
This is one of our team’s favorite books because of the details involved in the book. The scripts and dialogue are very good and this book 100% focuses on prospecting by picking up the phone and doing a lot of the things that many agents no longer do or have never done. It’s a great book.
8. The Conversion Code: Capture Internet Leads, Create Quality Appointments, Close More Sales
by Chris Smith
In today’s digital age, online leads are crucial for real estate agents. This book provides a step-by-step guide to capturing, nurturing, and converting internet leads into successful transactions.
9. How To Become A Power Agent in Real Estate
by Darryl Davis
This is an oldie but a goodie, in fact, it was the first real estate book I read that helped guide my career. The book is still very relevant today and gives the right strategies to approach prospecting.
10. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
Although not specifically tailored to real estate, this book offers valuable negotiation techniques that can be applied to any industry. Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator in Kansas, shares negotiating principles he learned during a career that saw him become an award-winning teacher in prestigious business schools.
11. Sell It Like Serhant – How to Sell More, Earn More, and Become the Ultimate Sales Machine
by Ryan Serhant
Serhant is a real estate broker and entrepreneur and compacts all of his experience into this helpful book of personal stories. It’s great because each chapter includes one big principle and lots of useful tips, and it’s personal and easy to read, but without being overly anecdotal.
12. Exactly What to Say: For Real Estate Agents
by Phil M. Jones, Chris Smith, and Jimmy Mackin
The authors provide 30 Magic Words to help with the most common and difficult conversations real estate agents will come across. I loved the formatting of this book, with each chapter introducing a new phrase and explaining in what situations you might use it, and then providing a clear glossary of all the phrases and where they could be used to increase sales.
13. The $100,000 Part-Time Real Estate Agent: How I Consistently Make Full-Time Income in Real Estate While Keeping My Day Job
by Cici Carter
Cici covers topics such as setting goals, developing a business plan, building a network, finding clients, and negotiating deals. It also provides tips on how to balance a part-time real estate career with other responsibilities such as a full-time job or family.
14. SHIFT: How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times
by Gary Keller
Keller and co introduce their 12 proven strategies for achieving success in real estate including techniques like creating urgency, expense management, and generating quality leads. We love SHIFT because it helps you refocus your priorities and encourages changing your mindset, going back to basics, and then adapting your strategy to an ever-changing market.
15. SOLD: Every Real Estate Agent’s Guide to Building a Profitable Business
by David Greene et al
SOLD is expert agent David Greene exploring how successful real estate agents build businesses, and he shares everything he wishes someone had shared with him. I wish I had this book when I first became a realtor myself – I would have done a better job, gotten more business, and enjoyed the job more from day one.
16. Your First 365 Days in Real Estate: How to Build a Successful Real Estate Business: Starting with Nothing
by Shelley Zavitz
Author and real estate agent Shelley Zavitz shares her own story as a New York real estate agent and reveals lessons she learned the hard way, including what to expect in your first year, how to build a digital marketing plan, and how mindset can benefit your business. This is great as a reference book – it makes some great points, and it’s a quick and easy read. Just the kind of book you want to reread and underline.
17. Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
by Donald Miller
Miller teaches real estate agents and sales professionals to use the seven universal elements of powerful stories to improve how they connect with their customers and grow their businesses. This book was great – it cuts to the quick and shows you how to be disciplined in your message, and explains why you need to trim the fat from your branding. It gives you a basis for writing great copy that speaks to your customer’s pain points and leads to sales.
18. The E-Myth Real Estate Agent: Why Most Real Estate Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
by Michael E. Gerber
The E-Myth Real Estate Agent gives anyone in sales a road map to establishing businesses that are self-sufficient and profitable. This book could go down as one of the Real Estate industry bibles – it’s easy to read and understand and emphasizes the importance of managing your business properly. If you’re struggling to break through your natural ceiling, this is the book for you!
19. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
by Simon Sinek
Start with Why can be summarized as this: people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. Sinek tells stories from across the business world, detailing the fates of different companies, some successful, and others not. The successful ones were led by individuals who really believed in a core principle (they had a Why), which then formed the core of the business. The less successful ones started out doing well, but when they lost their Why, or if the person who had that vision left, the business started to falter.
20. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
by Carol S. Dweck
Mindset is a titan of modern psychology and personal growth. Following decades of research, Stanford psychologist Carol S. Dweck, uncovered the groundbreaking idea of fixed vs growth mindsets. Those with a fixed mindset believe that abilities are fixed, whereas a growth mindset puts more emphasis on growth, and that people can change and improve their abilities over time. It’s become common knowledge due to the book’s huge success. I love the simplicity of the idea, and the book teases out more practical steps that we can all take to put these ideas to work for self-improvement. Essential reading.
21. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
by Jim Collins and Jerry Porros
Jim Collins is a student and teacher on what makes great companies great, and this book, written with Jerry Porras, details their findings on the subject of why companies thrive. Based on research into ‘visionary’ companies, it shows the reasons for their success. I loved this book – several times I felt like I was reading thoughts that I have been struggling to articulate for years. This is a great read for anyone looking to improve a company from the ground up.
22. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
by Jim Collins
Another book by Collins and another showing how good companies become great. We found this book an incredibly valuable and easy-to-read piece of work and an illuminating study of winners and losers. It’s easy reading and will refuel your determination. There are still bad companies in the states that aren’t properly run – this book is a blueprint on how to do it right.
23. Big Money Energy: How to Rule at Work, Dominate at Life, and Make Millions
by Ryan Serhant
Another book by Serhant, this time exploring how he tapped into the energy of success to achieve his goals, earning his first million before thirty. This book is a great guide to human psychology and deals with the fears and doubts that we all have through interesting anecdotes. It gives real practical solutions with an added touch of Ryan’s well-known sense of humor. It was so good I took notes and then read it again.
24. Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert Cialdini
Another titan of modern popular psychology, Influence first brought to the world’s attention ideas that went on to become mainstream – perceived value, social proof, and scarcity. These are all ideas now embedded in digital marketing, and they began here. Your ability to win in this world is all about your capacity to influence, and this book is the Bible. It’s a must-read for anyone in business wanting to use psychology to succeed.
25. The ONE Thing – The Surprisingly Simple Truth about Extraordinary Results
by Gary Keller
The One Thing is all about the power of minimizing distractions and focusing on one thing at a time. It’s a simple idea but I found it really powerful, and sticking to it improved my productivity and the quality of my work. To quote the book, “Until my ONE Thing is done—everything else is a distraction.”
26. The Little Red Book of Selling – 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
by Jeffrey Gitomer
Back to pure sales with this book by Gitomer, who has written a quirky, illustrated book about how to sell better. We loved it because it was straightforward, and used real-life techniques to close sales. If you don’t have sales experience, or you’re new to the games, this book contains invaluable information to absorb and put into practice.
27. The Psychology of Money – Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
by Morgan Housel
“Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.” This is the book in a nutshell – it details the skills behind the management of money and your own relationship with it. In truth, I wish I’d read this book 20 years ago – it’s not a book about investments, but rather your mind and how you think about money, savings, expenditure, and investments. You need to read this today.
28. Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact
by Phil M. Jones
Jones discusses his “Magic Words”, with examples of how you can use them to help you win business, increase your influence, and improve your persuasiveness. This was a great, easy read – providing simple information on what to say and when to say it. Take out your notebook and adapt Jones’ magic words for your industry, then keep them handy when talking to prospects – they’re invaluable.
29. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others
by Daniel H Pink
Pink’s hypothesis is that we’re all in sales – whether it’s persuading our spouse to go out, our boss to see the value of our report, or making online dating profiles. It’s all sales and influence. This book is all about attuning yourself to others, discovering empathy, and finding problems that other people didn’t even realize they had. I found this book interesting and unique in this genre, as well as empowering – we can all sell, whether we think we have the skills to or not.
30. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear
Atomic Habits makes the claim that if you’re having trouble changing your daily habits, the problem isn’t you, but rather the systems you are using. Bad habits resurface time and again, not because you don’t want to change, but because you are using the wrong systems. Success is not skill or talent but programmable consistency in the form of habits. This book was an interesting read and had great insights into changing habits for the better, by moving more toward conscious, mindful decision-making.
Time to get reading! (or listening)
This is our most updated list for the 30 best books for real estate agents. How many of these titles have you read and which ones do you plan to read?
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Richard Steele
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