Barbara Corcoran's Secret Shortcut for Success If You're Starting a Career in Real Estate

Starting a new career later in life and looking for some advice? Businesswoman extraordinaire and "Shark" Barbara Corcoran knows a thing or two about that.  

"I reinvented myself when I was 55 and left real estate, sold my firm, and thought I'd be good in media; I'd talk real estate—it will be a snap. I'm comfortable on camera...It wasn't a snap," says Barbara.  

She found that, in fact, in order to get ahead and achieve success in a new career, sometimes you have to work twice as hard.  

"As hard as I worked when I was 23, at 54 I was working time and a half for three years to get my feet on the ground. I knew nothing about the media business, I found out. My contacts were no good. My influence was not felt, and I really felt like a loser that had to come up from the dead all over again. It wasn't easy, but I pursued and I got to where I wanted to go," Barbara explains. 

Our viewer, Kathryn, is making the career change from being a business owner to a real estate agent—something Barbara Corcoran definitely knows a little bit about.   

"In real estate, specifically, it takes a year and a half to get your feet under your body because you have to find customers and you have to know your listing territory. So, in spending all that time you don't have success for about a year and a half sometimes two years," says Barbara.  

With that said, Barbara has a shortcut to finding success in real estate that can speed up the process of gaining your footing.  

"The shortcut to success is to work for a broker who's phenomenal at what they do. Beg, steal or borrow to get that position. Work for them for six months. Being next to someone who's a superstar, you breathe it in, you get the best training of your life. And then the other thing is, they always have more business than they can handle and they hand you their exhaustive business." 

If you ask us, that doesn't just work for real estate—that can be the key to finding success in any industry. Having a mentor is everything!