How agent optimism predicts performance in 2026.

CRE Success Principle: The quality of the questions you ask determines the quality of outcomes you get. Agents who ask, “Why is the market so tough?” perform very differently from agents who ask, “What do I need to do to thrive in this market?”

Confidence and mindset can tell you more about a commercial real estate agent’s likely future performance than any market forecast.

Over the past three months, I have onboarded 45 agents into Agent Accelerator, and one question I ask every time has become incredibly insightful.

I ask new members how they are feeling about their expected performance over the next 12 months. The score they give me is useful, but the real gold is found in the follow-up question: What is driving that score?

The answers given fall into two distinct categories: internal drivers and external drivers.

Internal drivers include effort, momentum, and belief. External drivers include competition, enquiry levels, and market conditions.

What I have noticed is clear: agents who reference internal drivers are generally more optimistic. They ask stronger questions, take ownership of their performance, and create more consistent results.

Agents who lean heavily on external factors tend to feel stuck and expect the market to change before their performance does.

If you’re leading a team of agents, you must recognise that your team takes their cue from you. In fact, I often say that principals should see themselves as the Chief Attitude Officer.

The questions you encourage, the tone you set, and the perspective you model all shape the mindset of your people.

I also share in this week’s episode a transparent breakdown of my recent Black Friday & Cyber Monday promotion. It did not hit the numbers I expected and reviewing the results objectively gave me several important insights that will improve our next campaign.

If you want a deeper look at how mindset influences performance, and how to shape a stronger 2026, tune in to episode 250 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Episode transcript:

In the past three months, I've onboarded 45 commercial real estate agents into Agent Accelerator, and a large portion of those agents have come from seven different companies, which are independent, boutique, and franchised firms that have decided to outsource a layer of sales management to CRE Success.

Now, one of the questions that I ask agents in this onboarding session is: on a scale of one to 10, 1 being terribly pessimistic, 5 being neutral, and 10 being buoyant, optimistic, how are you feeling about your expected performance as an agent over the next 12 months?

What would your answer to that question be?

How are you feeling about your expected performance as an agent over the next 12 months?

Today, I want to talk about what I've learned from the responses that I get to that question, and I'll share a little bit more context around how we follow up to that question.

And I want to share what the answer that you have given and what the answer that you will potentially get from people in your business means for you in 2026.

This is episode 250 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name's Darren Krakowiak. I'm here to help you lead better, grow faster, and stress less.

And we've made it to a milestone of 250 episodes, and I'm very grateful and appreciative of your support to help us get there.

There are so many different options that are available to you when it comes to how you spend your time and so much content out there that you could choose to consume, but you've chosen to spend some time with us, and for that, I am grateful.

And if you do appreciate what we share each and every week here on the podcast, one way that you can show your appreciation is just by letting us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.

I don't use Spotify. I'm more of an Apple Podcast user. But I did jump on Spotify just to see how the podcast is doing in terms of views and in terms of listens.

And they've got some interesting statistics around how many people see the episode versus how many people say they're interested versus how many people actually consume it to give you some benchmarks.

And there are also reviews and ratings just like there are on Apple Podcasts. And I saw that we have some ratings on Spotify, and I want to say a quick shout-out to you if you've left us one of those, because we do appreciate it.

At the top of today's episode, I mentioned the question that I ask at the start of the onboarding sessions that I have with commercial real estate agents inside CRE Success Agent Accelerator. It's about how they are feeling about their expected performance as a commercial real estate agent over the next 12 months.

Now, after I get the score, I then ask a follow-up question. And the follow-up question is: what's driving that score?

Like what is the reason why you've given me a 6 out of 10 in terms of how you're feeling about your performance over the next 12 months? What's the reason why you've given me an 8 or a 9?

And the answer to that question, the reason or what is driving or what is behind that score, I generally put into two buckets — two categories. There are internal factors and there are external factors.

Internal factors can be things like how confident they're feeling in their abilities. It's based on the momentum that they have behind them. It's based on the effort that they're putting in. It's based on their own beliefs.

Now, sometimes their beliefs are shaped by external factors like the environment that they're in and their colleagues, but that's still an internal thing — what they believe.

And then there are people who talk about external factors, things like the market, competitors who perhaps are becoming more aggressive or discounting, or changes in the competitive landscape more generally.

I'll hear about the lack of inquiry and the fact that it is just harder to do deals nowadays.

And those external factors are true. And I'm not going to argue with people's sense of reality.

But I will have a little bit of a point to make about the difference between being optimistic and pessimistic, and why I think it's always optimal to be optimistic.

Because external factors are relevant, but the truth is that agents and businesses are also doing fine right now.

So even if you've got a negative perception about the way the market is at the moment or how difficult it is to do deals; you also would have to accept that there are plenty of examples of agents and agencies who are performing just fine.

So, while we do want to acknowledge reality, and I don't encourage you to bury your head in the sand or to be oblivious to what's going on around you or what is going on within your business or within your team or for yourself, I think a more constructive thing to do when you acknowledge that reality is to ask powerful questions.

Things like: What do I need to be doing in order to thrive in this market? What would be required of me to be a top performer over the next 12 months? Or who do I need to become in order for me to increase my GCI by a hundred thousand dollars over the next 12 months?

If you're asking those types of questions, when somebody like me comes in and asks you about how you are feeling about your expected performance over the next 12 months, you're likely to give a higher score.

And when I ask you what is driving that score, you're likely to talk about internal factors that are within your control.

Because the quality of the questions that you and your team are asking determines the quality of the answers they get.

And commercial real estate principles have a big influence over the types of questions their teams are asking and also the types of answers that they get.

So, I want you to think about: If I came into your business and I was asking questions to your team like, how are you expecting your performance to be over the next 12 months? Where do you think people would land on a score between 1 and 10? And what answers would they give in terms of what's driving that score?

Because while some commercial real estate principals call themselves CEOs, one way that you can think of yourself is as a CAO, and that is the Chief Attitude Officer. Because your attitude is reflected in your business.

And when I see businesses that are giving me scores that aren't so positive, I do wonder what messages they are getting from the leadership.

And if they are blaming external factors rather than giving me reasons that are within their control, then I also wonder if the leaders in the business are equipping them to take responsibility for and to be in control of their own performance.

Speaking of being in control of your own performance, I did have a Black Friday Cyber Monday sale for Agent Accelerator, which I did a whole episode on, and I went all in on the marketing of it. And I thought it would be appropriate to share the results from that promotion.

When I say I went all in, I not only did a whole episode of this program on it, we did plenty of email marketing. I shared a number of posts on platforms like LinkedIn. I even went and spent money on meta ads, which I don't usually do — hundreds of dollars in ads. We did a text message campaign to active members of our email list.

And I can report that we got five new members to join the program as a result of those efforts, and I'm very grateful to each and every one of those five people for joining the program.

Now, I did expect that we would have 10 to 20 people join the program, and that's based on industry averages for running this type of promotion to that many people — the number of people who are on my email list.

So, when we didn't hit that target — in fact, we were below the lower band — I've got to assess what didn't go according to plan. Like why didn't we hit that level of performance?

And I want to do that in an objective way. I don't want to make this a pity party, and I don't want to make the results be a reflection of me.

It's just the fact that I tried something new — because I did try something new. It was weekly pricing. I'd never done weekly pricing before. So, I thought I would try that. And as it happens, I tried it and it didn't work as well as I thought it would.

I was actually a little bit skeptical of weekly pricing, and I've been surrounded by other business coaches for a while who swear by weekly pricing.

I know a very successful business coach who's in a similar vertical to me — he coaches engineers — and he does weekly pricing in his business. And his business is way bigger than my business. But I thought that if he can do it, then I should do it, and I should give it a go, even though I'm a little bit skeptical of it.

But as it turns out, maybe I was right to be skeptical of it, because it didn't seem to resonate with my audience.

But it might not just be the weekly pricing. Maybe the weekly pricing was great, and those people who joined wouldn't have joined without the weekly pricing. Maybe it's my messaging. Maybe the messaging that I'm putting out there isn't resonating with agents.

Maybe I need more proof. We need to speak to more of our members about how they're finding the program and to get some of those testimonials documented.

So, I'm just going through and I'm trying to systematically understand what it is about the promotion that didn't resonate so I can learn from that, and so I can provide a better offering in our next promotion.

So, if you've run a promotion, if you've run a campaign that hasn't gone as well as you would've liked, there are some learnings in that.

We don't often learn much from our wins. We learn more lessons from things that didn't quite go as we expected.

So, I just wanted to be transparent and share the results of that, because you might have noticed the noise and it didn't go as well as I would've liked. But as I said, I'm very grateful and happy for those agents who joined.

And you know, I'm not giving up. We're definitely going to continue to build that program. We've got people in it who are getting great results, and I want to help more commercial real estate agents to join.

Before we wrap up this 250th episode, I've got a short invitation for you. We are going to be running a 2026 game plan workshop next week, the week after the release of this episode — on Tuesday, 16th of December at 10:00 AM Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

We're testing something new. Usually, I run the workshops on Thursdays at 11:00 AM. We're going to do Tuesdays at 10:00 AM just to see how this goes.

I do have a reason for it, because I thought that this close to the end of the year, Monday night Christmas parties aren't very common, right? So, I think most people should be able to get out of bed for a 10:00 AM workshop the week before Christmas, on a Tuesday. So that's the rationale behind it, but it's also a test.

This workshop is really for commercial real estate agents who are stuck below half a million dollars of GCI, who want to create a breakthrough plan in 2026.

Because I think that can be the difference between breaking through or plateauing. It's about having a plan that connects you with what you want to earn, the ways that you need to develop yourself, and what freedom looks like for you.

So, this workshop is really a no-fluff, no-vibrations, or anything like that. It's just the framework that's helping our Agent Accelerator members add more revenue to their pipeline.

It's the 2026 game plan workshop that's happening on Tuesday, the 16th of December at 10:00 AM Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time. Why don't I just say 10:00 AM Melbourne/Sydney time? That's easier.

If you want to join us for that, go to cresuccess.co/gameplan. It's $50 to attend, but I'm putting a CRE Success guarantee that if you don't walk away from the live workshop with complete clarity around what it is that you need to do to improve your performance and increase your earnings in 2026, I'll give you your money back.

Alright, so give it a go. $50 to join us for this 2026 game plan workshop — the same framework that I use to onboard our agents into the Agent Accelerator program. You can experience it for yourself by going to cresuccess.co/gameplan. All the details are there.

For our 250th episode, that's all we've got for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.