Why Laila Hassan Thinks New Agents Are Hurting Clients — And What She Says Should Change About Real Estate Licensing

There is a conversation happening in real estate that most experienced agents have privately but rarely say out loud: the barrier to entry in this industry is dangerously low, and consumers are paying the price. After 25 years in the Jacksonville market — including a decade in mortgage lending and hard-earned survival through two major market corrections — Laila Hassan is not interested in keeping that conversation private.

As founder of Christie’s International Real Estate First Coast, Laila has watched the agent population swell during boom years and contract during corrections, and she has a clear-eyed view of what separates the professionals who serve their clients well from those who, as she puts it, are actively hurting them.

The Blunt Assessment: Inexperienced Agents Are a Consumer Protection Problem

Laila does not soften her position on this topic. When discussing the wave of agents who entered the market during the pandemic frenzy and are now struggling or exiting, her reaction is not sympathy — it is relief.

“I hope more of them get out. I’m not trying to be ugly, but to me, you need experience in this industry today,” she said. “Raise the bar to get into this business.”

The logic behind that position is not competitive self-interest. It is rooted in a consumer protection argument that Laila finds compellingly simple: if we require appraisers to complete extensive apprenticeship hours before they can operate independently — because the bank needs protection from inaccurate valuations — why do we not require something similar for buyer’s agents and listing agents, when the consumer’s financial wellbeing is equally at stake?

“The appraiser has to go through this mentorship. Who’s protecting that consumer?” she asked. “If the consumer’s protected, then they’re gonna make a wise decision and may not end up in a short sale or foreclosure by having purchased at the right price.”

It is a question the industry has danced around for years. Laila’s answer is direct: the consumer deserves the same institutional protection that lenders currently receive through appraisal standards.

The Competency Gap Is Showing Up in Real Transactions

For Laila, this is not a theoretical concern. She regularly encounters the work of inexperienced agents on the other side of her transactions — and the consequences are concrete.

Contracts filled out incorrectly. Comparable sales analysis that treats a fully upgraded home with a putting green in the backyard as equivalent to a property with an overgrown yard. Repair requests that include a loose outlet socket while ignoring structural issues that actually matter. The kinds of errors that, at best, slow down a transaction and, at worst, expose a buyer or seller to real financial harm.

“There are certain companies where you see the agent and you just automatically know they don’t know what they’re doing,” she said with characteristic directness. “How do you do comps when you’re a new agent? You’re going to see, ‘Oh, well this house sold for this amount. This house is worth that.’ That house was fully upgraded. It had a turf backyard with a putting green. This one has got weeds all in the yard. It’s not the same house.”

Valuation errors alone can cost buyers and sellers tens of thousands of dollars. When compounded by inexperienced negotiation, misunderstood contract language, or poorly managed repair negotiations, the damage compounds quickly.

The Mentorship Prescription

Laila’s proposed solution is not to shut new agents out of the industry. It is to require that they operate alongside experienced practitioners until they have developed genuine competency — and she defines that threshold in specific terms.

“I do not think a new agent should be doing a deal by themselves. Period. You are not doing the customer a service at all. You are hurting them. I don’t care how many courses you’ve taken — you don’t learn until you go through transactions. And I think not just your first transaction needs somebody helping you. You need to have 10 transactions with somebody helping you,” she said.

The economic model she recommends is equally direct: new agents should be willing to share 50% of their commission with a high-producing mentor in exchange for the education that only comes from real transaction experience. In her view, that is not an unfavorable deal — it is one of the most efficient investments a new agent can make.

She speaks from a position of having briefly run a small team herself, and she is candid about what she observed: agents learned more from sitting beside her and listening to her phone calls than from any training curriculum she could have designed.

“They told me, ‘I learned so much just by being next to you,’” she said. “And listening.”

Choosing a Mentor Over More Classes

When asked to choose between additional coursework and finding a high-producing mentor, Laila does not hesitate.

“I would go for a high, high-producing mentor. Go for a high-producing mentor and give them half your money because it’s gonna pay off big,” she said.

The reasoning is practical: market knowledge, negotiation instincts, and client communication skills are developed through repetition in real situations — not through lecture-based instruction. A mentor provides access to live transactions, difficult conversations, pricing decisions, and the thousand small judgment calls that define what a great agent actually does.

What Laila Would Tell Young Agents About Confidence and Knowledge

For agents who are early in their careers and working without the benefit of a strong mentorship arrangement, Laila offers a framework for building competency systematically: specialize geographically before trying to cover everything, and invest in knowing the market deeply rather than broadly.

“Don’t try to get to know all of Jacksonville. Get to know that one specific area and work on that. When you have the knowledge, the confidence comes with it,” she said.

This approach mirrors how Laila has operated throughout her own career. Her credibility as a luxury specialist in Jacksonville’s most desirable neighborhoods was built incrementally — through years of transactions in specific zip codes, relationships with agents who had sold in those areas, and an obsessive familiarity with what properties in those markets are actually worth and why.

Confidence, in her view, is not a personality trait you either have or do not have. It is the natural byproduct of genuine expertise. And genuine expertise only comes from doing the work — with proper guidance — over time.

The Knowledge-Confidence-Client Trust Cycle

One of the more nuanced observations Laila makes is about how the public’s growing access to real estate information is actually accelerating the separation between experienced and inexperienced agents. Consumers who do their research online before ever contacting an agent arrive at their first meeting already knowing more than they used to. They ask sharper questions. They notice when an agent equivocates or provides generic answers.

In that environment, the agent who brings deep, specific, conviction-backed knowledge wins the relationship. The agent who cannot answer confidently loses it — often before the conversation is over.

“You have to say it with conviction,” Laila said of communicating market realities to clients. “I know the market well, so because I know the market well, I’m able to tell them, ‘No, this is the way it is,’ and I know I’m right.”

That conviction, she is careful to note, is not arrogance. It is the earned confidence of someone who has watched the Jacksonville market move through multiple full cycles and has the transaction history to back up every assertion she makes.

Setting Boundaries and Managing Client Expectations from Day One

For newer agents navigating the challenge of managing client expectations without the credibility buffer that comes from years of experience, Laila’s advice is deceptively simple: say what you mean, say it clearly, and say it at the beginning of the relationship.

She applies this principle to everything from pricing conversations to how she expects clients to communicate with her. She will not take a listing she believes is overpriced without building a price-reduction trigger directly into the listing agreement. She will not tolerate being called at all hours with requests for feedback that amounts to “they just didn’t like it.”

“Did you tell them it’s not gonna sell for that price? Did you have that conversation? ‘I tried.’ No, it’s not ‘I tried.’ You have to say, ‘This isn’t gonna happen,’” she said. “You have to say it, and you have to say it with confidence.”

For newer agents who have not yet developed that level of market authority, the path to those conversations runs directly through the mentorship she advocates: sit beside someone who has them every week, listen to how they are structured, and understand the knowledge base that makes them credible.

The Bigger Picture: What an Industry Shift Could Mean for Consumers

Laila’s argument ultimately extends beyond individual agent development to a structural critique of how the real estate industry is designed. The current model — low barriers to entry, commission-based compensation, and minimal required supervised experience — creates incentives that do not always align with consumer protection.

The post-NAR settlement landscape has brought new attention to how agents are compensated and how buyer representation agreements work. But Laila believes that conversation misses the more fundamental issue: the consumer is best protected not by adjusting commission structures, but by ensuring that the agent across the table from them — regardless of which side they represent — actually knows what they are doing.

“The consumer is going to save or make more money by having an experienced agent,” she said simply. “One hundred percent.”

It is the kind of statement that is easy to say and hard to argue with — especially coming from someone who has spent 25 years proving it.

For anyone entering the real estate industry, or hiring an agent for the first time, the questions worth asking are not about commission rates or brokerage brands. They are about how many transactions an agent has actually completed, what markets they have survived, and whether the person across from you has done this enough times to tell you the truth — even when it is not what you want to hear.