As a real estate agent, it is easy to get stuck in a rut doing the same thing every day without making any real progress on advancing in your career. The result is that you spend long hours working and still find yourself failing to achieve the results that you were hoping for at the end of the year.
It is easy to feel stressed and frustrated when you feel like you are getting nowhere fast despite your best efforts. What can you do to turn things around? The answer lies in creating – and adhering to – real estate goals.
Why Real Estate Goals Are Important
Being a real estate agent is hard work, and that work can wear you down. Generating leads and nurturing those leads is a job that never ends, and it isn’t always a pleasant experience. You may hear more no’s than yes’s. Despite your hardest efforts, some of your deals may not close due to no fault of your own. The reality is that you can easily feel stressed and burned out if you do not focus on the progress that you are making.
Professional goals give you the ability to work toward something specific and to see the progress that you are making toward achieving those goals. Despite facing various objections and closed doors over the course of a typical workday, you are able to focus on the positive. More than that, when you focus on your goals, you will gradually move toward realizing those goals and achieving major milestones that are meaningful to you.
SMART Real Estate Goals
If you are like most real estate agents, you may have set a broad goal for yourself in past years. For example, you may have the goal of making $100,000 over the next year or closing a specific number of deals per month. While these seem like great goals, you have not laid the framework for achieving those goals. You do not have a clear pathway with established milestones necessary to make progress.
For example, what do you need to do on a daily basis to meet your year-end income goal?
Rather than simply setting arbitrary goals, consider setting SMART real estate goals. These are goals that are Smart, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Based. These are actionable goals that you can complete over a short period of time.
By meeting these SMART goals, you may be more likely to hit your broader goals and to advance in your career. What are some SMART real estate goals?
Focus on Important Tasks and Automate the Rest
With a limited amount of time available in each workday, you understandably need to find effective ways to work more efficiently. The answer lies in establishing and optimizing systems in your daily efforts.
You may be thinking to yourself, “How is this an actionable goal?” There are a variety of resources involved in any profession, but the most scarce resource is time.
In fact, we recently asked our Wise Pelican Facebook Group what their goals were for 2022, and the overwhelming majority of them said something along the lines of “sell more, work less.”
Conventional wisdom would suggest that if you want to sell more, you should simply work more. However, when the tipping point of maintaining a work-life balance is reached, the results can lead to increased stress, feeling overwhelmed, and, paradoxically, a dip in production.
Instead of focusing on working harder, a good real estate goal should be to work smarter. Technology is not only good for your clients (Zoom calls, DocuSign, etc.), it can also help you automate some processes.
By doing so, it can help you to save time, reduce stress and eliminate inefficiencies in your workday. In turn, they enable you to concentrate on the activities that require your full attention.
There is a wide range of systems that successful real estate agents use. For example, you could invest in a real estate lead generation system. The system can automatically collect the contact information of visitors to your website who opt to receive your marketing materials. Then, it may automatically incorporate the new leads into automated marketing campaigns.
Another example of a real estate system is one that automatically captures your purchases in electronic format. Manually tracking receipts for end-of-year tax prep can be a nightmare. This type of system enables you to keep up with the task as you go and to keep organized records that are easier to sort through at the end of the year.
If you need a way to verbalize this goal:
“If a task isn’t important, I will delegate, automate, or eliminate.”
Set Daily Contact Goals
If you track your marketing and lead generation efforts, you may notice that a relatively consistent number of contacts turn into leads. There is also consistency in the number of leads that turn into clients. You may be able to increase this percentage by making regular touches in a timely manner.
After all, a contact may easily lose track of your contact information or forget your name if you do not reach out to them for several months. A lead may no longer have a need for your services if you wait too long to reconnect. Regularity is key to optimizing the power of your farm.
Setting a daily contact goal is important, but how can you realistically achieve this goal? First, you must set aside time each day to focus specifically on this goal. Second, you must break up the goal into manageable chunks each day.
Since client contact is the most important aspect of being a real estate agent, top producers make their daily contacts a top priority. They will block off the first 60-90 minutes of their day to focus exclusively on making contacts.
During this first hour, all notifications should be turned off, and your full attention should be focused on making connections with your sphere of influence. Ideally, you will have a quiet place to make these calls and avoid any distractions.
Here is a positive statement to use as a guideline for setting this goal:
“I will dedicate the first hour to meeting my daily client touch goal.”
Be Consistent with Marketing
Consistent marketing helps you to build name recognition and to establish your brand. Most of the contacts in your farm will not be ready to buy or sell real estate today, but you want to be the professional they think about when they are ready to act. By making regular touches, you will stay at the front of their minds. They learn what services you offer, and they may see you as an expert in the market.
Developing an effective marketing calendar is a smart starting point because it can help you to stay on track with your goals. However, keeping up with the items on the marketing calendar can be a challenge as your business grows. You need to nurture leads, but you also have a limited number of hours in the day to work with new or established contacts.
One solution is to hire an administrator or marketing manager to help you stay on top of your efforts. After all, while some of your marketing activities can be automated, others will require manual actions. While these activities require regular attention, you do not necessarily need to be the person to focus on them.
Since your postcard marketing campaign plays a crucial role in generating listings, our system makes it easy to schedule out your mailings for 12 months, or even more. Then, over time, once people start reaching out to you for listing appointments, you won’t have to worry about whether or not the next batch of postcards gets sent out.
Need an actionable statement? Try:
“I will create a marketing schedule one month in advance and automate it. If my schedule does not allow me to do so, I will empower a member of the admin staff to assist, or hire someone to assist.”
Work Toward Work-Life Balance
Successful real estate agents do not spend every waking minute of the day working on professional goals. They find time in the day to focus on what matters most to them, and that often is spending meaningful time with family and friends, working on a hobby or spending time in other enjoyable ways. With so many essential goals and activities to focus on each day, however, how can you set aside time to find a healthy work-life balance?
The good news is that setting SMART goals can help you to find the balance that you seek. Once your goals for the day are met, you know that you are done working for the day. This enables you to push work out of your mind and to truly enjoy your downtime. You may feel less stressed, and this can enable you to sleep more restfully at night. Quality sleep feeds into improved productivity during the day.
Another idea is to take advantage of your flexible work schedule. You may have a long list of goals to achieve today, but that does not mean that they all need to be achieved on a 9-to-5 schedule. You can set aside an hour in the middle of the day to enjoy a movie or time with your spouse, or block out extra time to attend your child’s sporting event or dance recital.
“I will schedule time to focus on enjoying my life with friends and family”
Become An Expert in Your Area
One of the more important and more easily overlooked responsibilities of a successful real estate agent is to demonstrate expertise within your geo farm. Staying up to date on the current market conditions will ensure that you are the most informed Realtor in the area.
There are a variety of reasons why this is a crucial goal. Most importantly, being a real estate agent is all about providing value to your prospective clients, and the more info you can provide in a conversational manner, the more you look like the expert.
Becoming an expert real estate agent in your area shouldn’t be super time-consuming. For example, if you send Market Update postcards with year-to-date results, keep track of the key data points (average time on market, average closing price, etc.) If you do this weekly or monthly, you will some interesting data to share with your target audience.
To make the goal of becoming an expert an actionable statement, a good example is:
“I will spend 30 minutes a week on understanding the current market trends within my real estate farm.”
Focus on Self-Improvement
Your ability to grow and succeed as a real estate agent is directly correlated with your ability to grow as a person. While the majority of your workdays may be spent focusing on achieving professional goals and managing active deals in the pipeline, it is important to set some time aside each day for self-improvement.
You can find an extensive list of self-improvement books that focus on matters like self-confidence, improving your people skills, time management and more. Simply reading a chapter a day can pave the way for a better you down the road. You can also find various webinars, video tutorials and even live sessions that focus on helping people be the best version of themselves. Keep in mind that there is always room for improvement.
“I will dedicate some time twice a week to self-improvement.”
What Are Your Real Estate Goals?
These are SMART goals that could benefit all real estate agents. They cover all of the bases to deliver well-rounded results. However, you may have a few other specific goals that you want to add to the list. Now is the perfect time to establish your specific goals and to start meeting your goals consistently.
