Apart from the obvious stresses of the pandemic, the last 18 months will also be remembered as the year that technology developed at record speed.
The property market has been busy with people focusing on their homes, as family and home has never been more important. People have reassessed their careers and work life balance. One area that has received a lot of interest, is that people are keen to develop and progress in their careers and actively seek self-improvement, which in turn has resulted in a significant increase in the amount of estate agents that are seeking additional training and qualifications to enhance their career development. Although we often enter this industry by accident, working in property quickly becomes a vocation, and staff almost always devoted to achieving the best for their clients.
The last 18 months has seen a huge change in the way that companies train their teams. In the midst of furlough and national lockdowns, at Able Agent we signed up over 1500 people onto our online training platform; providing our users with the opportunity to spend their furloughed time developing and progressing their estate agent skills.
In an industry where training has traditionally been face-to-face, in group settings, or on an individual basis, studying from a giant training manual, one of the few positives to come from the 2020-2021 pandemic, is that online learning is now viewed as a viable and often more effective method of training.
Able Agent has had over half a million page views (people looking at our training content) since we launched in March 2020. At any time, there are over a thousand people enrolled on a variety of courses from sales skills to property law. In September,3500 people spent at least 20 minutes training on Able Agent – that’s almost 1000 hours of training!
Have fun with training! We have customers running monthly quizzes, hosting feedback sessions, setting course goals and then implementing changes to their business. We have seen keen staff trailblazing in offices, volunteering to sit the qualification exam. After they pass – we see other members following in their footsteps as qualifications suddenly feel achievable. Feedback from the course is that it is the most practical training many of our agents have received in their careers.
The Future of Estate Agent Training
So, after this period of change, how is training going to continue to evolve? Online training is here to stay. It is a fantastic tool that enables people to work at their own pace, to revisit content and to set their own personal training plan. Despite its flexibility, however, for online training to be successful it needs to be monitored and it needs to be implemented.
As with most industries, we know technology will continue to heavily influence the direction of the real estate industry. Virtual Reality (VR) has recently been a topic of conversation amongst real estate experts, and it is expected that VR will become more widely adopt within real estate in 2022. If this is the case, then we could also see VR being introduced into our estate agent training.
To find out more about our training resources at Able Agent, contact us via our online form, or email on of our specialist at charlotte@theableagent.co.uk.