Most real estate agents don’t fail because they lack drive. They fail because drive alone isn’t a business.
I’ve watched talented people come into this industry full of energy and genuine ability, and then quietly disappear within a couple of years. Not because the market beats them. Because they never built anything underneath the hustle to hold it up when things got hard.
I recently talked through this in depth with Jaclyn Treinkman, a former top-producing New York City real estate agent turned sought-after real estate coach. Jaclyn went from closing deals at Compass to coaching agents at every level of their careers, from newly licensed to 20-year veterans looking to level up. What she shared is worth paying attention to.
The Real Reason Agents Struggle
When Jaclyn started coaching, she expected the biggest challenge she’d encounter would be something craft-related. Pitching skills, negotiating, reading a market. Those things matter, but they’re not what trips most people up.
The number one issue across her entire client base, from brand new agents to experienced producers, is time management.
That surprised her. It surprised me too when she brought it up.
Real estate attracts self-starters. People who bet on themselves. But there’s no manager checking in on you, no set hours, no one who cares whether you did your prospecting today or spent the morning scrolling. The same independence that makes this career attractive is what exposes the people who haven’t built real structure into their day.
Knowing what you should be doing isn’t the same as doing it. Most agents know exactly where their time should go. The gap is between knowing and executing, and that gap is where businesses stall.
Flying by the Seat of Your Pants Only Works for So Long
The agents who make it through their first few years sometimes do it on pure momentum. A strong referral network, a hot market, a streak of good timing. They close deals without a real system in place and start to believe the momentum will just keep going.
It doesn’t. Eventually a deal falls through, the market shifts, or the referrals dry up for a season, and there’s nothing structural to fall back on.
Jaclyn sees this constantly. Agents who are talented and genuinely hardworking but running entirely on instinct. No CRM, no follow-up system, no documented process for anything. When it works, it works. When it doesn’t, there’s nothing to diagnose or fix because there was never a real system to begin with.
The agents who build lasting businesses create structure before they need it. They document their processes, work from a CRM, and know exactly what happens at every stage of a transaction without having to figure it out fresh each time.
I went through this myself. I run a high transaction volume, a lot of $500,000 deals rather than a handful of large ones, which means I’m running the same process dozens of times a year. Once I built out proper systems for everything from listing agreement to closing, my business got more consistent and a lot less stressful. It also became something my team could run without me being the single point of failure.
Accountability Changes Everything
Here’s something Jaclyn said that stuck with me: she can’t be more invested in your business than you are.
Coaching works when the agent has already decided they want to change. What the coach provides is structure and someone to answer to. That second part is more powerful than it sounds.
I’ll be honest here. I have a prospecting block in my calendar. I don’t always honor it. What actually gets me to do it is knowing Jaclyn’s going to ask about it. That’s it. Not strategy, not motivation. Just accountability.
There’s no shame in that. Most people work better when they know someone’s paying attention. In a business where no one is making you do anything, finding a person to answer to, whether that’s a coach, a peer, or a structured check-in system, is one of the most practical things you can do.
Branding Is Not Optional
This is where agents either separate themselves or stay stuck competing for every deal on equal footing with everyone else.
Before any client sits down with a real estate agent today, they’ve already looked that agent up. They’ve Googled the name, scrolled the Instagram, read the reviews. By the time they’re on the phone, they’ve already formed an opinion.
Jaclyn made a point that’s hard to argue with: if you’re going up for a listing against an agent who has no social presence and you’ve built a recognizable brand in that neighborhood, you’ve already won part of that pitch before you walk in the door.
For me, that brand is #KlimaChange. It’s the Hey Andy video series. It’s 137 Google reviews, each one earned through a system that asks at the right moment after every closing. It’s years of showing up in Battery Park City and Long Island City consistently enough that when someone there thinks about real estate, my name comes up.
None of that happened overnight and none of it happened without a process. The reviews come from a follow-up email Britney sends the day after closing. The videos come from a scheduled block on Wednesday afternoons. The social presence came from years of showing up, starting before I had help and building from there.
Branding isn’t a personality contest. It’s showing up consistently, letting people see who you are, and giving them a reason to choose you before you’ve even met.
How You Show Up Is the Whole Thing
Jaclyn coaches agents on prospecting, systems, lead generation, social media, client communication, and a dozen other things. But underneath all of it is one question: how are you showing up every day?
Not just in terms of effort. In terms of presence. Are you visible in the areas where you want to do business? Do people know your face and your name? When someone in your market decides they need an agent, is your name anywhere near the top of their mind?
The agents who fail aren’t usually lazy. They’re often working hard in the wrong places, or working hard without a system that makes the effort compound over time. The ones who succeed build structure, stay consistent, and make sure the outside world can actually see what they’re doing.
If you’re a buyer or seller in New York City looking for someone who has put that kind of work into this market, I’d love to talk.