Success is not an accident.
I have been speaking with a lot of real estate agents recently, and the most successful ones in any market I have walked into share something specific that almost nobody talks about. It is not what you think. They do not have the biggest teams. They are not the smartest people in the room. They are not even the quickest. The variable that separates the agents who pull ahead from the agents who stall has almost nothing to do with raw talent.
What they are is willing.
Willing to take a chance. Willing to try anything and everything. Willing to think outside the box. Willing to walk into the unknown without waiting for somebody else to lay out the path. That is the trait. That is the entire game.
I always tell them, you are successful. It is not an accident. It is because you are willing to try and step into the unknown.
The data confirms what I have been seeing
The data confirms exactly what I have been seeing on the ground.
JLL released its 2025 Global Real Estate Technology Survey late last year, drawing on responses from more than 1,500 senior real estate investor and occupier decision-makers across 16 markets. The headline finding is the kind of number that should stop the entire industry in its tracks. Today, 92 percent of commercial real estate occupiers and 88 percent of investors have started piloting AI in their operations. As recently as July 2023, fewer than 5 percent of real estate companies were doing the same thing.
So the trying is happening. The experimentation is happening. The willingness to start something new is showing up in the data.
But here is the part of the JLL report that should land hardest on anyone reading this. Despite the near-universal experimentation, only 5 percent of those companies have actually achieved all of their AI program goals. Forty-seven percent have hit two to three of their goals. The rest are still stuck somewhere between starting and finishing. Most of the experimentation is sitting in the middle, never quite reaching the outcome it was supposed to produce.
The gap between trying and finishing
That gap, between trying and finishing, is where the entire competitive advantage of real estate is going to be built over the next two years.
The agents who are pulling ahead in my conversations are the ones who do not stop at trying. They try, they refine, they try again, they push the experiment all the way through to a result they can use, and then they move on to the next thing. They are not waiting for permission. They are not waiting for the perfect tool. They are not waiting for someone else to validate the experiment. They are running the play and finishing it.
The agents who are stuck are stuck for predictable reasons. Some of them tried something once, ran into a small obstacle, and stopped. Some of them set up a pilot, never gave it real attention, and watched it die quietly. Some of them never started in the first place because they were waiting for the certainty that this technology was the right one. None of those agents are going to make up the gap. The agents who are already finishing experiments today are compounding capability faster than the agents who have not started, and the gap widens every quarter.
The experimentation equation
This is the part of the success equation that almost nobody wants to discuss. Success is not the result of a single grand decision or a unique advantage that the lucky few were born with. Success is the result of a long sequence of small experiments executed all the way through to completion. Most of the experiments do not work. That is the point. The experiments that do work compound on top of each other into capability that the people who never tried cannot match.
Tina Seelig, a professor at Stanford's d.school and one of the most respected voices on entrepreneurship in the country, has put it more cleanly than I can. She has said that Stanford's culture encourages students to explore and take risks without fear of failure. The most successful entrepreneurs the school produces are not the smartest. They are the ones most willing to try, fail, learn, and try again. The mindset is the variable. The willingness is the variable. The experimentation is the variable.
The mindset research
The academic case for this goes back even further. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, has spent her career studying why some people pull ahead and others stall. Her research, captured in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, identified a single variable that predicts long-term achievement better than raw intelligence. That variable is mindset. People with a growth mindset, who believe their abilities can be developed through effort and learning, consistently outperform people with a fixed mindset, who believe their abilities are set at birth. The growth-mindset cohort is willing to take on challenges, willing to put in effort, willing to try strategies that might not work, and willing to learn from setbacks. The fixed-mindset cohort avoids challenges to protect their image of themselves. Over time, the growth cohort wins. Not by a small margin. By a wide one.
Dweck's research is not about real estate. It is about people. The same pattern she identified in students, athletes, and executives shows up in every market I have ever worked in, including the ones I am working in now.
How this applies in real estate
That same lesson applies in real estate.
The agents I see winning in my market conversations are the ones who treat their business as a series of experiments. They try a new outreach approach. They try a new tool. They try a new way of communicating with clients. They try a new pricing approach. They try a new marketing channel. Most of those experiments do not pan out. That is not the point. The point is that the experiments that do work give them a structural advantage that compounds over time.
The agents who never run experiments are not avoiding failure. They are guaranteeing it. They are slowly losing market share to the experimenters in their own zip code, and they cannot see it happening because the loss is gradual and the experimenters are not advertising what is working for them.
The willingness gap is the actual gap
Here is the thing I would tell any real estate agent reading this. The agents you are competing against are not your peers from the office down the street. The agents you are competing against in 2026 and beyond are the experimenters from anywhere in your market who are willing to try things faster than you are willing to try them. The willingness gap is the actual gap. Everything else, talent, intelligence, network, budget, is downstream of the willingness gap.
What willingness looks like in practice
I want to be specific about what willingness looks like in practice. Willingness does not mean recklessness. It does not mean adopting every new tool that hits the market. It does not mean spending money on every shiny technology that someone tries to sell you. Willingness means being open to running a small experiment, with a clear hypothesis, on a real piece of your workflow, and committing to seeing it through long enough to know whether it worked.
That is the muscle the JLL survey shows the industry has not yet built. Most companies are starting experiments and never finishing them. Most agents who try a new tool give up after the first hiccup. Most teams who pilot a new process abandon it before the data comes in. The experimentation is happening at the surface level. The completion is not happening at the depth that produces real outcomes.
Your opportunity
That is your opportunity, if you choose to take it.
The agents who learn how to finish experiments are going to define the next decade of real estate. They will not be the ones with the most followers, the biggest teams, or the most polished pitch decks. They will be the ones who quietly ran 50 experiments in a year, kept the 5 that worked, and built a business around them.
Success is not an accident. It is the natural outcome of a willingness to try, learn, and finish, applied consistently over a long enough period of time.
If you are not seeing the success you want in your business right now, the first question to ask yourself is not whether you have the right tools, the right team, or the right market. The first question is whether you have been willing to try things and finish what you started.
If the answer is no, that is not a failure. That is information. It is the most useful information you can have, because it points directly at the next move. Pick one experiment. Run it. Finish it. Learn from it. Pick another one. That is the entire path.
There is no shortcut around that path. The agents who are winning right now are not on a shortcut. They are simply running the path faster than anyone around them.
You are successful, or you are going to be successful, because you are willing to try and step into the unknown. Not because you are the smartest. Not because you have the biggest team. Not because you got lucky.
Because you tried.
Judd Hoffman is CEO and Co-Founder of Ethica AI, building AI-powered tools for real estate transaction workflows.