Real estate agents without specific goals don't have a planned out road to take to reach personal and business success. The start of a new year is a great time to review and set goals.
Make sure your written goals are specific and closely tied to the things you need to or you’re most passionate about accomplishing. Make sure your written goals are specific and closely tied to the things in your life you’re most passionate about accomplishing.
In the big picture about the upcoming year, you should visit them each quarter to tweak your goals and see where you stand with them. If you fall behind, make sure your goals are realistic and still in reach. Before we get into specifics about your real estate goals, here are some tips to help set great goals.
They need to be measurable.
If you have a goal of making a lot of money, you need to lay this out in tangible dollar amounts. If it's how many leads you want, shoot for a number.
You need to know the specific time period you want to achieve it by. Now that’s a goal.
Make it clear and very specific.
The goals you desire must be specific, not vague. Well-thought-out and well-written goals are going to drive you harder to meet them.
Fuzzy goals are forgotten. This also means writing down a detailed plan on how these are achievable.
The deadline or timeframe is very big.
This is part of being measurable, but having an impossible timeline or pushing it back only hurts your chase to succeed these goals.
Make sure they are balanced and factor in every part of your life.
Each goal needs to factor in and even include your family life and all other facets. You should even include some time off and family goals in it as well.
They have to challenge you and expand your current comfort zone.
What would be the point of planning your year out if you just wanted your goals to continue with the exact same pace as last year?
You should always be able to improve yourself as an agent. Set all your goals outside of the most successful numbers you ever made.
We suggest you get into real detail for your goals. Something along the lines of "Gaining 75 cold leads a month." or even more specific, "contact 15 expired leads per month."
Planning out each niche you want to target is important as well. Plan out which niches you want to attack the most.
The next step is to set goals for how many listings you add from your leads.
Contact eight former clients every month is an example of your referral goal.
This is another goal that it is great to work toward. Having a specific number in a certain timeframe holds you accountable for meeting it, and makes it easy to track your progress and modify your goal if necessary.
Don’t overthink and mess up your business plan. Just expand on the type of things you are used to doing and then add the necessary aspects you need to expand on with.
This plan is a document that you are going to be reviewing and changing up every month or two, so if you are easily contacting eight clients but not getting enough referrals, you would change it to 10 or 12 in this example.
Really, don’t be afraid to adapt your plan to fit changing business conditions.
Update Your Email Lists, Mailing List and Everything Else
Having your email lists updated and fully segmented is a crucial part of your lead/client communication.
Now is the time to clean up any of these lists so they are fully ready for your new campaigns.
Set Your Marketing Budget and Clean Up Your Online Presence
Planning out your spending patterns and total marketing budget will make sure you really utilize each dollar to the best of your ability.
Having a monthly budget is a smart way to go, along with allocating what platforms they will be going to. Then do a check on all your social media profiles and make any clean-ups and answer any people who have reached out to you.
Even if you are fortunate enough to have built a real estate business strictly from past clients, you will need to include some form of advertising in your marketing strategy to grow your business further.
When planning this out, ex. "run at least 4 Facebook ads a month for 30 bucks a piece ", the platform is usually going to depend on if you're advertising listings or prospecting. You need to plan this out.
Advertising yourself on all the platforms available to you is the best way to do it, so draw out a map of budgeting for each of them.
While the internet is seen by billions of viewers every day and has fundamentally changed how businesses distribute their messages, it’s important to consider all your advertising options and put your dollars into those that prove most effective for you.
Study Up On This Coming Year
This is where you really find out what new tools and technology to use.
Finding out where the market may be heading and any local trends will really end up helping you.
If you find out what works best for agents and what tools they are using to be successful, teach them to yourself and get ready to utilize them yourself. Then on the flipside, find out things that haven’t worked as well and phase out what hasn’t been the best for you.
Consider some of these methods to expand your understanding and knowledge outside of the continuing education classroom setting.
Read A Business Book
Read a business-related book that can expand your horizons in ways that are still relevant to your career. Something like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Business books and books about relations or customer relations will do more for you than real estate books since they will translate to other parts of your life as well.
Attend A Training
Learning more about your industry will help you become an expert in your field, the thing we keep stressing. It will then naturally separate you from competing agents in your area and niche.
Other professionals may not be as knowledgeable or up-to-date about the latest industry trends, rules and standards.
Join a "Mastermind" Group
Learning and working with your peers can help you a lot.
These groups can have a small focus, like short sales or expireds or they can cover a giant topic, such as how to improve your marketing and prospecting ways. Mastermind groups are a terrific way to learn new things as well as add some accountability into your continuing education.
Add New Aspects to Your Business
If you want to start building a pipeline by generating leads online, do some research and find a system that’s right for your business needs. There are automated ways you can respond to any leads.
If you already have this, check out new ways to use technology. You need to always be improving and expanding like the internet does itself.
The beginning of a new year is a time to ponder and plan for what lies ahead. Sit down and plan out your year, but STICK to it.
The most successful agents follow a strict daily schedule. Rather than dealing with everything when it comes at you, set your day up to deal with certain things at certain times. Resolutions are a great idea but are often not followed through yet.
Learning should be a process that never stops, and the internet makes resources so much more accessible than they used to be. So keep learning and adding things into your business plans each year and quarter.