Every new agent makes mistakes. That’s not a controversial statement — it’s just the reality of learning any profession. But there is a big difference between a personal mistake and a professional one, and when you are a Realtor, your professional mistakes don’t just affect you. They affect your buyers and sellers in very real, very costly ways. In this episode of the Hustle Humbly Podcast, Katy and Alissa break down the most common mistakes new realtors make during actual client transactions — not the business setup stuff, but the errors that happen right in the middle of a deal when someone is counting on you to know what you’re doing.

Not Understanding Financing (Or Being Afraid to Talk About Money)

One of the biggest mistakes new realtors make is avoiding the money conversation altogether. If you are not comfortable asking your buyer about their loan type, their closing costs, their monthly payment, and their down payment situation, you are not ready to write an offer on their behalf. Leaving the financing section of a purchase agreement blank is not a minor oversight — it can cause a seller to reject your offer, or worse, cost your buyer thousands of dollars when the wrong loan type is submitted for a property that can’t qualify.

Katy and Alissa walk through the loan types you will encounter most often — conventional, FHA, VA, RD, and cash — and explain why knowing the requirements of each is non-negotiable. FHA loans, for example, have property condition requirements. If you are showing a buyer distressed homes on an FHA budget without knowing this, you are setting everyone up for heartbreak. One story shared in this episode involved a buyer with very little money who paid for a home inspection and an appraisal on a property that never could have gone FHA. The appraisal came back with required repairs the seller refused to make. The buyer lost over $1,000 they couldn’t afford, and the deal fell through. The agent simply didn’t know.

Alissa also shares a tip for when a buyer comes to you already pre-approved through a lender you weren’t involved with. She emails the lender directly, copies the buyer, introduces herself, and asks two simple questions: what are the estimated closing costs and prepaids, and what is the estimated monthly payment at their approved amount? It takes five minutes and it has saved countless clients from showing up to closing shocked by numbers they didn’t expect.

Not Asking for Help

The second of the major mistakes new realtors make is winging it instead of asking for help. Your broker exists for a reason. If you don’t have a broker you feel comfortable calling with questions, you are in the wrong brokerage — full stop. This is not optional. When you are new, you do not know what you do not know, and the only way to fill those gaps is to ask someone who does.

This does not mean posting your transaction questions in a local Realtor Facebook group. It means calling your broker, sitting with a mentor, attending your office’s weekly meeting, and treating every situation you haven’t encountered before as an opportunity to learn before you act. Alissa’s own first purchase agreement had her buyers’ initials in the seller’s signature lines and a completely open-ended request for closing costs with no dollar figure attached. Her mentor caught it before it went out. That kind of safety net is only available when you have built a real support system around yourself.

Letting the Buyer Run the Show During Due Diligence

Home inspections are one of the areas where new agents most often step back when they should be stepping up. Your job is to guide your buyer through what the inspection period is actually for — not to make an old house into new construction, but to check for safety concerns, structural issues, and major system problems. Katy and Alissa use the “3 S’s” as their framework: safety, structure, and systems. If you walk out of an inspection without having set those expectations, you should not be surprised when your buyer wants to ask the seller to fix the blinds.

Setting expectations also means helping your buyer understand what the inspection period is and is not. If your buyer asks “what if it fails inspection,” they do not understand the process — and that is on you, not them. Alissa’s free Make Sure You’re Sure template (available at hustlehumblypodcast.com/makesure) is an email sent to buyers before the inspection period ends that walks them through everything they should be reviewing and confirming. It is a simple tool that prevents a lot of last-minute panic.

HOA due diligence is another area that catches new agents off guard. With insurance challenges affecting HOAs nationwide, it is more important than ever to research the financial health of any HOA involved in your transaction — whether you are the buyer’s agent or the listing agent. Upcoming assessments, condo questionnaires, and loan qualification requirements for attached units are all things you need to know before you write or accept an offer, not after.

Missing Occupancy and Other Contract Details

Purchase agreements are written to transfer occupancy at closing. If your seller needs a few days after closing to move out, that has to be negotiated upfront — not two weeks before closing when you suddenly remember to mention it. Once an offer is accepted and the inspection period has closed, you have missed your window to ask for things that weren’t in the contract. Closing dates, occupancy terms, personal property, termite inspections — all of these need to be thought through before you hit send, not after.

This episode includes the story of a new agent who forgot to include the refrigerator, washer, and dryer in the purchase agreement. Their clients sold their house, and neither the agent nor the buyers noticed the appliances were gone until after closing. The broker required that agent to purchase all three appliances out of their commission. The commission didn’t cover the full cost. That agent paid to make a sale. A careful read-through of the contract before submission would have prevented all of it.

Panic Canceling Instead of Problem Solving

One of the most important skills a real estate agent can develop is the ability to pause before canceling. Unless something is truly catastrophic — a foundation that is beyond repair, a structural issue that changes everything — your buyer should be coming out of an inspection with a list of requests, not a cancellation. Cancellations affect sellers, affect the home’s marketability, and often reflect an agent who didn’t prepare their buyer for what the process was going to look like.

When a buyer wants to cancel, Katy and Alissa recommend asking questions before doing anything. Why do they want to cancel? What would need to be different about the next house? Is there a way to address what’s bothering them through a repair request or a price reduction? Sometimes cancellation is the right call. But it should never be the first call.

Saying Yes to Every Client

New agents often take every client who comes their way out of fear that no clients means no income. But saying yes to a seller who wants to list 30,000 over market value, or taking on a buyer with no pre-approval who wants to see 47 homes across three counties, is not a strategy — it’s a setup for disappointment. You cannot want to sell the house more than your seller does. And you cannot manufacture commitment in a buyer who is not ready to buy. The mindset shift that separates experienced agents from new ones is learning to ask: is this person a real buyer or a real seller, and are they ready to do what it takes?

Hiding Behind Technology

Texts and emails are efficient. They are not always appropriate. There are moments in a transaction — a difficult inspection report, a tense negotiation, a client who is spiraling — that require your voice. Picking up the phone and saying “I want you to hear from me directly” does more to restore confidence than any perfectly worded text ever could. New agents who hide behind technology miss opportunities to demonstrate exactly the kind of reassuring, professional presence that builds a referral-based business.

Taking Everything Personally

This one is a learned skill, and it takes time. When you are new, every lost listing feels like rejection, every client who chooses another agent feels like betrayal. But your broker is right when they tell you that how you handle a loss determines whether that person uses you in the future. Alissa can point to people who didn’t hire her in her first five years who have since sent her some of her most significant business — because she didn’t burn the bridge. She dealt with it professionally, kept showing up, got better, and built the kind of reputation that eventually brought them back.

Your Mistakes Have Real Consequences — And So Does Learning from Them

This episode closes with one of the most powerful stories Alissa shares on the podcast: a newer agent who discovered, months after closing, that his buyer’s post-flood renovation had hidden mold the agent’s due diligence hadn’t caught. He went to his broker, admitted he had been negligent, and then walked into his clients’ home and told them they needed to sue him. He knew he had E&O insurance. He knew he couldn’t write them a check. But he also knew he owed them accountability. They filed a claim. They received $56,000 to renovate. And that agent learned a lesson he will carry for the rest of his career.

The point is not to scare you. The point is that the mistakes new realtors make have real financial consequences for real people — and the best thing you can do is learn everything you can before those situations arise, ask for help when you are uncertain, and own it completely when you get something wrong. You are already ahead just by listening.

Grab the free Make Sure You’re Sure template at hustlehumblypodcast.com/makesure and listen to Episode 356 of the Hustle Humbly Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Alissa Jenkins and Katy Caldwell are top-producing Realtors from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with over 1,200 homes sold between them. They host the Hustle Humbly Podcast, where they help real estate agents build sustainable, relationship-based businesses — without the 24/7 hustle.

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