Being a real estate agent is hard work! Well, funnily enough this statement actually depends on the individual. The average person doesn’t know that being a real estate is very similar to running your own business. Even if you’re employed by a company, much of the onus is on you to pay your dues early, work long hours and “get the word out”.
Those the Director of a company may advise you of certain things they expect from you and may even pay you a retainer (an average wage); the real money comes in via listing and selling a property. Of course there’s other fees that come in too like marketing and property management fees but the real meat and potatoes is made after the sale of a property.
So when you’re starting out, what the best way to do this? There are seven six key steps which I’ve noticed that every successful real estate agent does to build their career. This is by me working closely with agents both from a Vendor and Landlord points of view. How do they do it and tools they use to excel and go beyond the norm.
- Leverage your inner circle of contacts – Reach out to your immediately friends and family; especially with those who have a large network and let them know that you’re in the game. Advise that services you offer and what areas you cover. If they’re a true friend or family member; of course they’ll take the time to help you low. Please remember that this is the low hanging fruit get this step done in the first two or two. After the phone call, send them an email with your details and ask them to like your social media page.
- Marketing at a 10x levels – Part of paying your dues is to allocate some time everyday to drop flyers but there’s a catch. You have to add your own spin to it. Every week, each of us can get up to a dozen flyers in the mail from real estate agents. You have to do something really unique to stand out from the rest. This can not be your standard DL size flyer. Her are a few ideas:
- Write the owner what appears to be a hand written note
- Attach a suitable flyer to their front door instead of dropping it in the letter box
- Along with your contact details, add the valuable information on the flyer such as Contact Details of local and state Emergency services or even a popular recipe to your local demographic (e.g vegan paella). Something that will entice the home owner to keep the flyer on their fridge. Oh yes, make sure the flyer has a magnet on the back.
- Use bright coloured envelops to grab their attention to open and view your marketing material
- Drawing of a famous cartoon character that their children can colour in and with a bit of luck, their parent will hang on the fridge. Obviously this will have your contact detail somewhere in the corner. Here’s a link to some great resources of children’s drawing packs.
- Be omni-represent – In a world where peoples attention is so short and being stretch in so many areas, you need to be the one shinning star which is always hovering. Obscurity will be the death of your real estate business/career. One cavet is that I’m not saying that you need to be on every single social media platform. However, find the platform where your audience is that concentrate on that. If most of your target audience is on Twitter, dominate Twitter. As Grant Cardone says, “I’m going to make twitter my little b**ch”.
- Once you’re consistently producing content for one platform, then you can use the power of technology to expand. Tools such as SocialBee or MissingLettr to syndicate your content from one platform to many. This is by far the most effective way. Even more effective from a cost point of view than hiring a Virtual Assistant let alone Personal Assistant.
- Another leg up would be to create effective sales videos as not many estate agents do this. There’s a powerful tool called Content Samurai which has tailor made templates for real estate agents. You’ll be able to bang out
- Be consistent to compound your results – If you had a choice between working hard and working consistently; which would you think is the better option? Obviously try and do both but if you had to choice one, working consistently will always win due to the law of compounding. Doing call phone calls 1 hour per day would be better than doing 7 hours on a Saturday. To do this, you can continually build your prospect list and maintain it. Keep diligent notes about each prospect such as their name, current situation, something personal you spoke to them about in the previous encounter. To track this, you can use something as a simple spreadsheet or software solution. I personally use a tool called OutPlay which is extremely powerful.
- You control your brands by being pro-active – Control your online reputation by actively seeking out happy buyers and sellers to leave a review. Hopefully these are all positive but ensure you guide them on what needs to be done. From a buyer or sellers point of view, this should be a no brainier if you’ve guided and made the entire journey a pleasant one from your first contact to, signing the contracts and through to settlement. You DO NOT want to be one of those agents who completely forgot about your buyer or seller once the contracts are signed. You should actively be engaged throughout the entire process leasing with the conveyancer and making the process and seamlessly as possible. In term for your efforts, you will receive an unbiased positive review which will compound and make your job easier and easier as the months and years add up.
- Leverage and scale up – last step is for you to start putting in measures for your business to run like a well oiled machine. Optimize to maximize your efforts so you can scale up and create an empire. In fact, you don’t have to wait until the end to do this but doing things initially the manual way will help you make decisions on whether that task should be:
Eliminated – some tasks are done because they’ve always been done. It’s either tradition or has been done for so long but no one has really questioned as to why it’s still being done. I recall a great story told by the late Zig Ziglar which illustrates this point. It’s called The Roast Beef Story. The basic premise of that story is that just because something has been done for generations, or something in your company has been done for years, if not decades, it’s okay to evaluate to see if this task is still worth doing. You may encounter resistance but push forward until you find the truth. I have been told that the truth is out there 🙂
- Automated – The next step is to automate as many of the manual tasks that you currently do so don’t actively need to participate for the task to complete. In the modern era of technology, automation is becoming the norm and should be embraced. As such as paying your bills, rent/mortgage are so easy to automate. You can use tools like https://ifttt.com/ which is putting conditional statements so tasks will execute atomically. Another example is to have automated replies to messages you receive on social media advising your prospect that you’ve received their message and that you’ll get back to them shortly.
Using canned response on your emails to ensure you’re not writing the same emails over and over again. Hopefully this goes without saying but you should be using a professional email service to send out your emails. If you haven’t got this setup, email has a service for businesses called G-suite. You can click here to find out the details.
- Delegated – Lastly, as you scale up by delegating all the menial tasks. The best way to do this is to find out what your hourly rate is. As a real estate agent, this isn’t straight forward but guesstimate. Then determine which tasks can you get someone else to do and still be ahead. As tasks as dropping flyers, cold calling, sending out emails and any other admin related tasks such as getting contract or sale ready etc. Spend your time where you bring the most value to your business. If this is cold calling and connecting with potential prospects; make sure you own this and maybe outsource and delegate putting together a leads list to someone else. Fiverr is a great place for finding affordable freelancers to who can lead generation for you.
Another task which you may want to outsource is creating videos. Remember that sales videos, listing videos and generally property updates has high visibility on social media. You don’t necessarily have create the videos yourself. Much of this can be outsourced; again – to someone on Fiverr. You can even get them to use an application like the one I use called Content Samurai. Use this link to get 25% off. It’s well-worth the investment when you can churn out video after video to dominate your competition and to be omni-present.
Conclusion – So if there’s a key take away from the 6 steps (Hacks) to achieving success as a real estate agent is to take action! Take 10x the action and your hard work will be rewarded, not immediately but over time. Success is exponential, not linear. There needs to be a certain level of deep work in to create the initial work to build up that momentum. If you follow the 6 steps outlined up, your success as a real estate agent is inevitable irrespective of the market conditions. There’ll always be ups and down but as long as you put in the hard yard now but also play smart by utilizing some of the software tools above, you can really thrive. Leverage your efforts