How Do You Know If You’re On The Right Track?

This is a typical scene in real estate brokerages all around the world.

Real estate agents dressed up, with nowhere to go.

The coffee flows freely, the laughter is contagious, but the bank accounts are shrinking with each hour that passes as agents do everything except what is productive for their business.

So if you’re playing solitaire at the office, printing out listings to pretend your busy, or showing pet pictures to the front desk staff, you definitely need to continue reading.

Lets start by understand that there are four types of activities that you could be working on during the course of your day.

1. Feeding Your Pipeline

These are activities that have one purpose – to bring in more prospects into your business. This category of activities is the one that you should be prioritizing every day because it directly correlates to your business survival. In other words, every day that you don’t do any of the following tasks, your business has shrunk.

• Direct prospecting through phone calls, door knocking, or meeting strangers face-to-face.
• Using your other lead generation tools to speak with new prospects – these include your flyers and postcards, social media posts, online ads, email campaigns, and organic online leads.
• Networking with potential clients at community events, industry gatherings, and social functions.
• Collaborating with local businesses and other real estate professionals to cross-promote services.

2. Taking Care Of Current Business

This category of activities will keep you busy, but won’t necessarily contribute to bringing in new business. Be careful not to spend extra time here for the sake of feeling productive. It’s important to take care of your current client base and partnerships without stagnating your growth.

• Responding promptly to client inquiries and communications.
• Scheduling and conducting property showings, photo sessions for listings, and open houses.
• Managing property listings on multiple real estate platforms.
• Negotiating deals and managing the transaction process, including paperwork and contracts.
• Maintaining ongoing communication with past clients to foster relationships and encourage referrals.

3. Business Development

These activities are ones that you will visit every so often and are related on growing and scaling your business as an entity. One of the most important tasks every real estate agent should complete is a business plan for the upcoming year. This will give you a visual road map for the year ahead, otherwise you’ll just be chasing sales wildly. Your Broker should be able to assist you with creating a solid business plan.

• Setting annual and quarterly business goals based on market analysis and past performance.
• Developing a business budget and financial plan to manage expenses and investments effectively.
• Exploring opportunities for expansion, such as selling pre-construction condos or working towards specializing in something.
• Assessing and integrating new technology tools and platforms that can enhance business efficiency.
• Conducting SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to strategically position the business.

4. Learning & Personal Development

This category is an important one because staying informed on changes in the marketplace and the industry are vital to bringing enhanced value to your clients. However, learning should be intentional and deliberate. It’s easy to get lost in learning so much that you don’t have time to take any action.

• Attending real estate seminars, workshops, and conferences to stay updated on industry trends and legal changes.
• Enrolling in courses for new real estate certifications or specializations (e.g., residential, commercial, luxury properties).
• Participating in mentorship programs or joining real estate professional groups for networking and learning.
• Reading industry publications, books, and news to deepen understanding of the market and sales techniques.
• Engaging in soft skills development, such as sales, negotiation, and customer service training.
• Roleplaying and practicing your client interactions until it becomes natural

What are things you are doing that are not-productive but feel like they are?

In every brokerage I’ve run in the past, the computer room was always the company hot spot. At any time of day, you’d find several agents in there on computers, printing materials, and chatting about their businesses.

Some agents make it a routine to come into the office in the morning and find ways to pretend-work until it was time to go home. This behavior could be driven by a number of factors: laziness, fear of rejection, confusion, lack of time management or structure, or shiny object syndrome. Whatever the case, real estate agents don’t make money in the office – they make it out in the field being next to buyers and sellers.

Here’s how you identify that you’re off track in your business:

1. You go into the office every day with no planned tasks to work on.
2. You spend an inordinate amount of time sharing stories with the brokerage staff or other agents.
3. You endlessly search for new listings on the MLS system even though you have no new leads.
4. You regularly think about redesigning your logo, business cards, website, or branding.
5. You read real estate or business books for more than an hour a day and apply nothing you learn.
6. You endlessly scroll on social media with the purpose of finding clients, keeping tabs on your competition, or reading the news.
7. You spend unreasonable amounts of time brainstorming, planning, and almost-filming video for your epic Youtube or Tiktok channel (but it never happens).
8. You regularly meet with your Broker, manager, or mentor for feel-good talks but then take no action.
9. You attend every office training session with the hope of finally finding something that will work for you.
10. You operate with no calendar, no system, no CRM, and are completely praying for clients to magically find you.

Real estate is all about systems, routines, and tasks. It is NOT about simply chasing deals. If you treat it like a business, you will start making more money immediately. Good luck!