The Rested & Rich Real Estate Agent
A podcast for real estate agents who are burnt out and tired of grinding, and want to find a better way to take care of their clients, themselves all while building a rich life. Say 'no' to hustle culture, and find a better way to work. Helping agents get from chaos to clarity.
Hosted by Sumina, a real estate agent with 18 years of experience in the Austin, TX area.
The Rested & Rich Real Estate Agent
Hitting Burnout? Here's How You Overcome It!
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Unlock the secrets to thriving in the demanding world of real estate without sacrificing your health or happiness. Join me, Sumina, as I draw from my 17 years of experience in Austin, Texas, to tackle the pervasive issue of burnout among real estate professionals. We confront the glorified hustle culture that pressures us to always be on the go and discuss how it can drain our enthusiasm and clarity. This episode is your roadmap to recognizing those personal burnout signals and reclaiming your well-being while continuing to deliver top-notch service to your clients.
Our journey doesn't stop at identifying the problem—we equip you with practical strategies to maintain equilibrium in your work and personal life. From setting boundaries and managing client expectations to the art of saying no, you'll learn how to handle the unique demands of the real estate industry with grace and resilience. Insights from mentor agents offer valuable lessons on leveraging support systems, delegating non-essential tasks, and taking intentional breaks to recharge. This isn't just about surviving in real estate; it's about thriving with a balanced, fulfilling career that leaves room for joy and rest.
You can find me on instagram @rested.real.estate.agent, and you can sign up for my newsletter to keep up with upcoming workshops and other offerings on my website www.suminabhatti.com.
Navigating Burnout in Real Estate
Speaker 1Welcome to the Rested Real Estate Agent , a podcast that helps you navigate life as a real estate professional , while finding some rest and balance along the way . I'm your host , sumina , an agent with 17 years of experience in the Austin , texas area , and I believe there's a better way to do our business serve our clients and not get burnt out . I help agents get from chaos to clarity . In this episode , we are going to talk about being tired in our industry , burnout , how it affects us , why it affects us and , of course , most importantly , what we can do about it . How we can find and seek rest in our industry , specifically as real estate agents , so that we can show up better for our clients , our families and ourselves .
Speaker 1I know that , as people in the real estate field who have a non-traditional career path with non-traditional hours , there are so many demands on our time , our attention , our energy . This is from buyers that are active and sellers that are active . Buyers that are coming in , managing your warm clients , keeping in touch with people , planning events , doing the marketing for your business , social media , accounting , paperwork and let's not forget the recent NAR lawsuit settlement and all the changes coming around with that . So , talking about why , why are we like this ? So , just like every industry has people it attracts , so does real estate . When you think of an accountant , you likely have a specific kind of person in mind who would be attracted to that field with a particular set of characteristics that make them great at their job . Same when someone tells you they're a chef or a dog walker or an engineer . In real estate we have particular personality types that are drawn to this career and of course I'm making generalizations here , but these are traits that I've noticed that show up a lot in the 17 years that I've gotten to know other real estate professionals and , of course , myself as well .
Speaker 1You know we get a lot of client requests that I for one can never seem to get a handle on . An inbox that's overflowing , people that need comps to fight property appraisals , things that are maybe not directly related to the day-to-day running of your business , but you know past client calls and wants a plumber recommendation . I definitely want my clients to do that , and so there is some way where I have a process to get back to them on that . Needless to say , the to-do list goes on and on and on . I've realized a couple different things that yes , there are things that we can change out there . There are some external circumstances we can change delegating things and we'll get into some of the external things here in just a bit and there's also some things we have control over in here , right . So there's stuff out there and there's stuff kind of in here in my head , in my mind , in my viewpoint , that I also have control over and that maybe through talking it through or thinking about it , I can have a different lens on how I see these demands that are being put on my time and we as a group of real estate agents like to hustle .
Speaker 1We don't like to be tied to a desk job . You know , we're kind of in love with the non-traditional aspect of the freedom we have from this work . I use the word freedom loosely because , as most agents will tell you , working on contracts when you're on vacation doesn't exactly feel like freedom . Or working on the weekends or late at night Now that sometimes means on a Tuesday afternoon I have time free to go grocery shopping and go to the bank . So it is a trade-off and most of us who of you who are listening to this podcast have chosen this career and are in it for an extended amount of time .
Speaker 1This is not just a flash in the pan career choice for you . Then there are also the societal expectations . These are some of the kind of I'd say these are both internal and external factors , right ? This idea of being crazy busy or work hard , play hard or I'll rest when I'm dead , and these things that we're told a lot in our culture . Uh , no , thank you , I'd rather not rest when I'm dead , I'd rather rest now .
Speaker 1I think so many of us are feeling the burn of these messages of working hard , and it's showing up , right , showing up in our lives with poor attention spans , with our phones . We escape into our phones when we need a dopamine hit because we're just so stressed with what's going on in our world . It's showing up with high stress levels , which translate into health issues , lack of sleep , et cetera . So a question I want you to contemplate and which I assume , if you're listening to this podcast , you already know the answer to , and which I assume , if you're listening to this podcast , you already know the answer to which is do you think you are better able to serve your clients when you are well rested , have a calm and steady mind , or when you're scattered and harried and disorganized and in a rush . Obviously , I have my leanings on this question , so let's talk about how do you even know when you're tired and burned out . Right , the signs for you may look different than the signs for me .
Speaker 1One thing that I'll share with you that is a little bit embarrassing but also kind of funny is that I can tell when I'm reaching the stage of burnout and just beyond being tired , when , for example , a new buyer comes to me and they , you know , like , hey , we got your number from so-and-so , we are looking to buy a home in the Austin area , and my first thought is , oh God , and I just feel depleted and not what I want to feel , which is excited and engaged and whatever . And that is kind of a big flag to me to be like hey , pay attention , you need to assess what's going on in your life right now so that you can show up for these clients well , so that you can be excited for their joy . And generally , working with clients I am excited about , but it's when I find myself feeling really worn down , when someone comes to me , that I know that it's time to reassess what's going on . So it's one of the little flags that I'm like huh , okay , it's time for me to stop , take a breath and see what's going on here . But what is it for you ? Do you have issues sleeping ? Do you feel tension in your shoulders and your jaw and your eyes and your neck in a way that never seems to go away ? How do you know that you're reaching that point of burnout in your business
Balancing Work and Well-Being
Speaker 1?
Speaker 1The other thing that happens with me , too , is that I start missing little details . Is this the client who wanted that shed gone before closing , or was it the other one ? Did I just forget that somewhere , or what happened ? So missing those details is another cue to me that there's something going on with my level of work and that I'm not at a good place with balancing that out . So once you know what your signs are , which are going to be different than mine and different than your other colleagues and different than your partners what do we do about that ? So , if we're looking at some of the , what do I do out there in the external world ? Here are some things that I've come up with over my time in this industry . So one of them is if a new client comes in , do I have the place in my business where I can just say no , maybe of the client load . I currently have this client who is far away from where I live or is looking for a type of product that is not my specialty like . Maybe they're looking for farm and ranch or they're looking for downtown condos and that's not my area of expertise . Could I hand them off to an experienced colleague , collect a referral fee and get some of my time back ?
Speaker 1Can you plan a vacation ? When's the last time you went on a vacation ? When you go on a vacation , do you leave more tired when you come back ? If so , you may need a type of trip that is free of agendas and to-dos and more hustling and running around . And , to be clear , I don't think going on vacation solves the problems . If you don't , if you're not intentional about what you plan to do with your time on vacation , and do you set boundaries for yourself with your clients , how do you do that ? Do you let clients know that you're typically not responding to work messages , whether that's text or email , after a certain time ? Do they know that you are off on Sundays ? If so , how and where and when is that communicated ? Do they also know that someone is in place to help take care of them . If they do need something on a Sunday , is there a colleague you can partner with , or a junior agent in your office who doesn't mind working Sundays that could let someone into a house or whatever if that were the case . So that's another way to know what to do once you figure out that you are burnt out or are just beyond tired with how work life balance is going .
Speaker 1The other thing that I would offer is talking to a mentor agent . So one of the most helpful things I did when my career was starting to grow quite a bit and I was feeling just completely overwhelmed every moment of the day and had no idea how I would ever get a grasp on anything , is I met with a couple of my mentor agents who had the kind of business that , who did more business than I did , whose work styles I appreciated because they seem like they . When they came to the office they didn't seem frazzled and harried and just running around . They seemed like there was some calm and some steadiness there , and so I reached out to them and said hey , can I take you out for coffee ? I'd love to pick your brain on where you're at with your business and if there's some blind spots I'm missing in my business at the stage that I'm at , that you might be able to see . And it's like seeing a therapist or just talking to someone who's outside of a situation , a friend or somebody who can kind of look at some of the gaps you may have in your business and say , hmm , based on what you're telling me , have you tried X , y or Z ? And that was super helpful to me In the before times in BC , before COVID , in the before times , probably back around 2016 , when I talked to my mentor , one of the pieces of advice she gave me was to stop taking buyers in my car when we went out and looked at property .
Speaker 1Now , this was antithetical to everything I had been taught in my real estate career up until that point . I had been taught you always take the buyers in your car , right , it helps build rapport , you can point out the parks and the schools and you can chat with them , et cetera . So this idea that I wouldn't take buyers in my car just seemed kind of crazy to me and it took me a little while to wrap my head around it . And her point was um , knowing also that I'm an introvert was that you can get a little bit of quiet time in the car . When your clients are not with you , you can allow your brain to just sort of . You can allow your brain to relax a little bit because you're not kind of on in the sense of pointing things out or whatever . If somebody calls , you have some space to call somebody back , you can return calls , check text messages etc . And it saves you time because you're not having to go back and take your client back to their car . So once I started implementing that , I was like oh , I see this , I see this makes a lot more sense Now , obviously in this , in the COVID era , we weren't doing that anyways , but it was helpful to get someone else's viewpoint on my business in that way . I maybe not I wouldn't have realized that ever and I certainly probably wouldn't have realized it at that moment in time .
Speaker 1The other piece of advice I got was to start delegating some of the tasks that other people can do . There are tasks that only you can do , that are specific to you , right , like they're only tasks that I can do , because my clients expect that relationship from me . I want to be in charge of those things things like buyer appointments and listing appointments and talking through negotiations and things like that but there are a lot of things that somebody else can do for me . I remember a point in my career where I would be going to Target and getting closing basket supplies and assembling those closing baskets in my home office . And figuring out that I could have a courier go do that for me or a door dash person or something like that saved me a huge amount of time . Some of the people who worked with me would also just put the baskets together . I had pictures from when I'd done them before . They would just assemble them , so they're pretty much ready to go at my house Now . There are probably a lot of examples . If you don't do closing baskets , of things that you do in your world that easily somebody else could do .
Speaker 1Now are you having to pay for this ? Yes , but you know what . You're already paying for it . You're paying for it with not just your money but also your time . I don't want you to hire someone to go do these things and then fill your schedule with more stuff . What I want you to do at that time is rest or go for a walk or yoga class or just something that has no agenda attached to it Play with your dog or your kiddos . It's not another to-do list . It is the opposite of a to-do list , a not to-do list . It's just it's free time . Don't fill it with more work .
Speaker 1And then the other sort of point I would offer you is see where you can find many moments of rest in your day already . So , as I mentioned at the intro of this episode , I am also a meditation teacher and I think a lot of people get caught up in thinking that you have to meditate in a certain way and you have to sit on a cushion and it has to be 20 minutes and all these kinds of things . And I'm here to tell you , as a certified meditation teacher , that is not true . You can meditate whenever you want . 30 seconds of mindfulness is 30 seconds of mindfulness . That is a totally valid amount of time to spend focusing your attention .
Speaker 1So my encouragement would be to try to find these many moments of time in your day already . So when you're getting in your car to get ready to go meet with the buyer , you put your seat , buckle your seatbelt in pause , take three deep breaths Off , you go . That's it . That's your mini moment of mindfulness . Let's say your client texts you and says they're running five or 10 minutes late . You get to the property . Do not get on your phone or on social media . Instead , walk around the neighborhood or sit in your car and do some deep breathing , or just look outside and look at the trees .
Speaker 1I mean it's trying to work in these moments of mindfulness where you can find them , rather than saying , oh , there's yet another thing I have to find time to do which is only going to stress you out more . I'm trying to get you to do less . Where can you squeeze in those many moments of mindfulness ? How can you build them into the routine you already have going ? I got some of those tips from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear . He talked about , I believe that's called habit stacking , where you are already doing a particular thing and you stack a little habit along with it . That sort of flows seamlessly into what you're already doing .
Speaker 1Now I'm going to give you a little bonus one here too , a little bonus one I learned I can't remember from where probably about 10 years ago , and around the end of the year , usually in the week after Christmas and before the new year . It's kind of dead time , those four or five days no one's really doing much . It's a time I kind of go into like planning in for 2025 , the next year , etc . And one of the practices I started doing around that time was to take everything off my calendar all my appointments , all my recurring , you know , gym things , meetings , etc . And really assessing why each one is there , what purpose they serve , why each one is there , what purpose they serve and what my intention is with them .
Speaker 1So you know , if I have a recurring workout appointment on my calendar for two or three times a week and I look at that and I'm like , hmm , am I still committed to this activity ? Does this still fit with my goals for the coming year ? Do I still have the time and the capacity and the money to spend toward this ? Because often for me when I start looking at it , you know door to door for me to go leave my house , get to workout class , do the workout and come back can be two , two and a half hours between traffic and everything else . That's a fair chunk out of a day , right , an hour for the class , 30 minutes on either end to get there , 30 or 40 minutes to get there , stretch , get set up , et cetera . So does that still fit with your life in the coming year ? Is that going to be a goal of yours ?
Speaker 1Take everything off and reassess each thing Now . A lot of them might go back on like , yes , that is important to me , I feel connected to that . Yes , that thing stays . And yes , that is important to me , I feel connected to that . Yes , that thing stays . And same thing with team meetings and work meetings . Do these still fulfill the purpose that they were intended for ? And , if not , is that something you're able to discuss with your team lead or your manager to say , hey , you know , instead of coming to these meetings every week , I may be coming every other week and just make sure that's okay with whoever your manager is and if they're open to feedback , maybe letting them know why that's the case . Right , like , hey , I don't find that I'm getting the value out of this . I'd rather be out in the field or , honestly , you don't have to tell them this but resting , because resting allows your mind to think more creatively , to have more space to just rest and be so .
Speaker 1That's our episode for today . Thank you for joining me . Today we covered what we know about what makes us , as real estate professionals , feel stress , what are the signs of feeling that and burnout . What does that feel like for you in your body and in your mind ? And then some practical tips for what we do about that your body and in your mind . And then some practical tips for what we do about that , how we can use some external tools to use that , and I may do a future episode where we talk a little bit more about our internal tools , which is things like our mindset , realizing that we are in a system that pushes us to work all the time , and what we can do about those kinds of things , and what we can do about those kinds of things finding some mini moments of rest as well .
Speaker 1I hope you found this podcast useful and , if you'd like a list , I also do have a list of the mini moments specifically for real estate professionals . If you want that list , just shoot me an email and I will get that over to you , and if you have any additional thoughts or comments , you can find me on all the socials . I will link everything in the show notes . I appreciate you joining me on this call and we look forward to the next time . Thank you again so much for joining me on this episode of the Rested Real Estate Agent . If you found this episode useful , it would mean a lot to me if you would share it with colleagues in your office . And if you're interested in diving deeper on this work , you can set up a one-on-one session with me . Just send me a message and we can chat . If your office or your local board of realtors are looking for speakers for team meetings , group coaching et cetera , I am available and happy to travel . Please have them reach out . Thanks again and until next time be well .
