Let’s talk about the difference between a ‘mentor’ and a ‘coach’, especially in the real estate business. You’ll often find that most agents use these terms interchangeably.
But we should talk about them anyway, including two other roles seen less often in our business: ‘consultant’ and ‘strategist.’
Outside our industry, each has a more narrow definition and solves a different problem. If you hire for the wrong problem, you’ll spend money and get stuck.
So let’s go through what each one means, how it applies to you as an agent, and how to decide who to hire.
What Does A Real Estate Coach Do?
You’re most familiar with this term because it’s everywhere in our industry. In fact, you’ll often see agents with a couple of years of solid production who then declare themselves coaches.
A real estate coach is someone who simply helps you do the work consistently. If I had to boil it down to one question that a coach answers for you, it’s: “Am I doing it?”
In our industry, agents usually associate coaches with structure and accountability. You and your coach agree on numbers to reach this week, and your coach checks in to make sure you hit them.
A lot of coaching takes place in groups. This is designed to lower the cost, but it is a massive design flaw. I believe that transformation doesn’t happen in crowds, because group courses are built to cover everyone, so they can’t address your specific challenges. The accountability runs on a system, and you lose the personal attention many agents need.
But if you can work 1:1 with a coach, a typical session will include a review of:
- How many conversations did you have?
- How many appointments did you book?
- What did you say you’d do that you ended up avoiding?
You finish the session with a new set of commitments, and the cycle repeats.
FYI: Outside of real estate, a coach is often defined as someone who asks you questions until you arrive at your own answers. Coaches are valued more for their understanding of the coaching process than for their knowledge of the client’s industry. It’s not uncommon to work with coaches who’ve never actually worked in the business the client needs help with. Some real estate coaches operate this way too, so ask before you sign up.
Coaching helps the most when you already know what to do, and your struggle is doing it consistently.
What Does A Real Estate Mentor Do?
A mentor is someone who has already walked your path, done what you’re doing, and provides guidance based on their time in the business. A mentor answers the question: “How did you do it?”
Let’s say you wanted to start farming a specific neighborhood. A mentor can share their own farming experience: what they mailed, how often they mailed, how to book listing appointments from incoming calls, and how to grow your brand in the area.
Mentoring helps the most when you don’t know what to do yet, or you don’t know how to do it. I’ve written a whole article on what a real estate mentor actually does, so I won’t repeat it all here.
What Does A Consultant Do?
A consultant looks at your business from the outside and tells you what’s wrong with it. The question here is: “What’s broken?”
Consultants are typically reserved for brokerages and associations and are rarely hired by solo agents. But if you hired a consultant, their role would be to go through your last 10 deals to determine where they came from, how you follow up with leads, and how you spend your time in a typical week. From this data, they’ll pinpoint inefficiencies and opportunities.
This seems like something simple enough to do on your own, but in my experience, agents are too close to their business to see their own blind spots.
Consulting helps most when you’re working hard, but the results don’t match the effort. A consultant will help you figure out why.
What Does A Strategist Do?
A strategist helps you decide where your business is going. They answer the question: “Where should I focus?”
Again, as an agent, you’ll likely never hire a strategist, but here’s an example to show what they do.
Imagine you’re doing open houses, cold calling, posting on social media, and sending marketing pieces to a farm area. You’re doing all of this at once, which means you’ll spread your efforts too thin.
A strategist would help you choose one or two as your primary activities for your business based on your time, budget, and market. Think of it as eliminating things from your business instead of adding more things to do.
Strategy works when you’re doing too many things at once, and none of them are producing good results.
Real Estate Coach vs Mentor: What’s The Difference?
A mentor gives you the knowledge. They teach you what to do and how to do it, because they’ve done it themselves. A coach helps you with getting things done. They’ll do this through goal setting and accountability.
What happens when you only have one of them?
If you only have a mentor, you’ll learn the how-to, but you might not follow through with implementation.
If you only have a coach, you’ll be held accountable to a plan, but that plan might not be right for you. You could end up being consistent at the wrong thing. This happens a lot in our business when a coach forces a prospecting method on an agent that doesn’t suit their personality or skill set.
If you want the best shot at success, you really need both what a mentor and a coach provide. This is why real estate agents use these two words interchangeably.
Why Real Estate Is Different From Other Industries
When we’re talking about a large corporation with many employees, these four roles are four different people.
A company could bring in a consultant to fix a department, a coach to help their executive team grow, and a strategist to develop a 5-year plan. The reason this makes sense is because the company is big enough that each problem belongs to a different person.
Now let’s look at your business.
You’re the owner of your real estate business. But you’re also the salesperson, marketing department, admin, and head of the complaints department. There’s no corporate structure. It’s just you, and sometimes a small team if you’re running a team.
I said earlier that you’ll probably never hire a consultant or a strategist, and I meant it. But you’ll still run into the problems they solve. Your results won’t match your effort, or you’ll be doing too many things at once. Since you won’t be hiring a separate person for those, whoever you do hire has to cover them.
This is because all four types of problems land directly on you. That is why I believe a real estate coach or mentor should be able to pivot between all four roles. Sometimes, you won’t even know which of the four you need. You’ll need someone who can diagnose and figure that out first, and then switch into the right role.
An Example: “Teach Me A Prospecting System”
Let’s use an example to illustrate my point.
An agent comes to me and says, “I need you to teach me a prospecting system.” That’s a mentor request. They want me to show them how it’s done.
So I ask a few questions:
Me: Have you tried a prospecting system before?
Agent: Yeah, I tried cold calling last year.
Me: How long did you stick with it?
Agent: About three weeks.
Me: And before that?
Agent: Door knocking, for maybe two weeks. Then I sent out some mailers.
You can see where this is going. If I introduce this agent to another prospecting system, it’ll end up in the failure pile like the first three.
Even though the agent believes they need a prospecting system, the real problem actually lies underneath that. This is how I would use all four roles to help this agent:
- Consultant: I look at the agent’s history and notice the pattern of starting and stopping.
- Strategist: We decide which prospecting method suits this agent’s situation.
- Mentor: I teach that method from my own experience.
- Coach: I follow up every week so that it doesn’t get dropped by week three.
If I only acted as a mentor here, I would teach the system, and in my experience the agent would drop it again within a few weeks. If I only acted as a coach, I would be holding the agent accountable to a system that might not be the right one for them.
I see this same pattern happening with leads.
An agent says, “I need more leads,” so they go and buy them from a lead generation company. The company delivers exactly what was asked for. But if the real problem is that the agent doesn’t follow up, more leads won’t fix it. That’s like buying more groceries and, instead of cooking, letting the food spoil in the fridge.
The problem you show up with is usually the surface problem. What you want to do is work with someone who finds your core problem.
Why It’s Hard To Find One Person Who Does All Four
In our industry, it’s hard to find one person who can do all four, and I believe the reason is that each role comes from a different kind of experience.
- Mentoring requires that you’ve actually sold real estate yourself.
- Consulting requires that you’ve seen a lot of agents. A successful agent knows their own path really well, but to spot what’s wrong in someone else’s business, you need to have watched many agents succeed and fail.
- Coaching requires working closely with one agent, week after week, until you understand how they operate.
- Strategy draws on all three of the above.
These types of experience usually come from different careers. You’ll find top producing agents who can mentor because they’ve sold a lot of homes, but they really only know the path that worked for them. You’ll find brokerage managers who have watched hundreds of agents come and go, but who have never worked with one agent week after week. And you’ll find professional coaches who are great at accountability, but who may not have sold a home themselves.
I was fortunate to go through all three in my career, in that order.
I started out as an agent and did everything myself. I designed my own postcards, learned SEO and built my own website, wrote my own scripts, and farmed my own areas.
After that, I spent years in brokerage management, where I led and trained over 2,000 agents across three brokerages. Today I work with agents 1:1 every week.
How To Choose: Questions To Ask
So how do you decide who to hire? Whatever title they use, here are the questions I would ask:
- Have you sold real estate yourself?
- How many agents have you worked with, and what goes wrong for them most often?
- How will you find out what my real problem is before you recommend anything?
- What happens between sessions, and how do you follow up on what I said I would do?
- Will I be working with you directly, 1:1?
How My Mentorship Fits
I call my program a mentorship, but in practice, it covers all four of the roles we’ve talked about.
You work 1:1 with me every week. We always start by figuring out what your real problem is, and from there I’ll mentor, coach, consult, or strategize depending on what that problem requires.
So if you landed here because you were searching for a real estate coach, you’re in the right place. You can read the details on my real estate mentorship page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a real estate coach and a mentor?
A real estate mentor has already done the job you’re doing and teaches you from that experience. A real estate coach helps you follow through consistently, using goal setting and accountability. In my experience, most agents need both.
How do I know if my problem is knowing or doing?
Here’s a simple test.
Sit down and write out exactly what you should be doing this week to get your next client.
If you can write that list but you aren’t doing what’s on it, then you have a doing problem. If you can’t write the list at all, then you have a knowing problem.
In my experience, a lot of agents who go looking for a new system actually know what to do already. They simply haven’t stuck with anything long enough for it to work.
Isn’t my brokerage or team leader supposed to be my mentor?
In a perfect world, yes, and I would encourage you to take every bit of help they offer.
But I was a brokerage manager for many years, and I can tell you what gets in the way. When you’re responsible for hundreds of agents, it’s impossible to sit down with each one every week. Team leaders run into the same issue because they’re busy running their own business.
As a result, you’ll get training that’s designed for the whole office, and you’ll get answers when you ask questions. What you usually won’t get is someone who looks at your specific business every week. I wrote more about this in why your brokerage training sucks.
Do I need a coach or a mentor as a new agent?
As a new agent, you’ll usually need the mentor side first, because your biggest gap is knowing what to do. The coach side becomes important once you know what to do and you have to keep doing it consistently. In my experience, most new agents end up needing both.
Is a real estate coach worth it?
I believe a real estate coach is worth it when the help actually matches your problem. If you already know what to do and you struggle to do it consistently, coaching is money well spent. But if your problem is the wrong plan or a missing skill, accountability on its own won’t fix it. I make the bigger case for getting outside help in what a real estate mentor actually does.