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A Real Estate Trainers 6 Simple Steps for Success

Real estate is one of the easiest businesses you can get into and become successful – but notif you insist on skipping steps.

Every so often I get requests from the agents who have enrolled in The Listing Academy course.

These agents want access to the entire course at one time. Or they want to skip ahead so they can focus on leadgeneration, or some other topic, before they’ve laid their foundation.

I understand. It’s natural to want to focus on the subjects we may be struggling with the most, or that are the “mostfun”.

But if you want to build a successful business, you really need to put some hard thought into it – into your plan, whoyou’re going to serve and why the homeowners should choose to work with you over any other agent.

Here’s the truth about building a successful real estate business – or any business for that matter. . .

You can’t focus on lead generation, or do justice to it, if you don’t have a message.

You can’t develop a meaningful message without knowing who you’re serving and what their unique needs are.

And you can’t know what their needs are if you haven’t identified the niche market you are going to serve.

Maybe you don’t think you need to do all of this work. Maybe there are real estate trainers who tell you “just get outthere and knock on doors”.

Bull butter.

If you’re looking to skip to the head of the line, to become an “overnight success” as a real estate agent without takingthe time to build a solid foundation, you’re reading the wrong blog.

If you try skipping steps, you increase the likelihood that you’ll fail. But if you make sure each step is solid, that yourfoothold is secure before you climb the next step, you’ll eventually get to the top of your career and have a solidfoundation that will keep you, and your business, safe when bad times come – and they always do.

The real estate business really isn’t nearly as difficult as many people make it out to be. There are only six steps youmust master to be successful; Plan, Promote, Build, Sell, Grow and Enjoy.

Let’s take a look at the steps you must follow;

Plan

Before you embark on your journey to becoming a superstar real estate agent, you’d better have a plan.

The components of your real estate business plan should include;

Your personal and business goals – what would you like to achieve, both personally and professionally?

Your household income and savings goals.

Your business expenses, including your broker split.

A business model that reflects what percentage of your business will come from seller listings versus buyers,your average price point and the sources of your leads.

A production model that reflects your required weekly goals for adding contacts and generating leads,appointments, listings, contracts and sales.

The niche market that you want to serve. This could be a geographic niche such as a school district orcommunity, or an interest niche such as investors, homebuilders, or equestrian properties.

A thorough assessment of both the needs of the homeowners, or potential clients in the niche, as well as thedominant agents with whom you will compete for business.

A clearly-defined value proposition. This is simply a statement that identifies what you do, who you do it for andwhat results they can expect to achieve by working with you. It answers the question that you’ll hear frompotential clients, “Why should I do business with you?”. If you don’t have an answer for this question, ananswer that puts the clients’ interests first, you’ll have a difficult time attracting clients. You’ll simply be viewedas “another agent” without anything unique to offer.

Promote

OK, you’ve created a business plan. Now what?

The next step you’ll take it to promote your services to homeowners in your chosen niche market.

But be forewarned. They really don’t care all that much about you.

They care about themselves.

You, and your services, are only important to the extent that you can help them achieve their goals. So, rememberthat when you start to promote your services. Put the interests of the homeowner first.

We’ve all seen the “typical” real estate agent marketing that talks about designations and million-dollar club saleslevels.

More bull butter.

Nobody cares about those achievements unless you can communicate how those designations or sales volumes helpyou provide better service, or better results, for the homeowner who might possibly hire you.

Your goal is to communicate your expertise, but to do it in a way that won’t turn off potential clients. The best way is toeducate your potential clients by providing content that helps them understand the process of selling a home.

Here’s several ways you can do that;

Create a blog where you write about how buyers will evaluate homes – and how the homeowner can maketheir home stand out from the competition.

Write an e-book that answers many of the questions you’ve heard from your previous clients about the homeselling process. Learn more about how to write an e-book for lead generation.

You can ask for the homeowners’ email address in exchange for the e-book you created and use email toprovide additional content. This further demonstrates your expertise, builds your credibility, and provides a wayto stay top-of-mind with the homeowners on your list.

Use social media to provide useful content. With over 73 percent of American adults on Facebook (PewResearch Center), there’s a good bet that homeowners in your niche market are there as well. Create aFacebook group for your community, or niche, and provide a mix of content so that it’s not all real estate orpeople will get bored pretty quickly.

Build

The next step is to grow your inventory of salable listings.

Notice I said salable listings. There’s a difference.

Overpriced listings, or those where the seller won’t take the necessary steps to ensure the home shows well, won’t doanything to help your reputation. And it’s your reputation that future clients will hire you on.

So make it count.

Qualify your leads as to their timing, motivation and ability to sell. If those three criteria don’t meet your requirements,don’t take the listing. Focus on finding sellers who are sufficiently motivated.

Once you have an appointment with a motivated seller, you must be able to convert the appointment to a signed,salable, listing. The most efficient way I’ve ever found to do this is to use a pre-listing presentation. If you don’t have agreat pre-listing presentation, create one. Here’s a free guide that will show you how.

A pre-listing presentation enables you to educate the homeowner about the selling process, how buyers will evaluatetheir home, your track record of results – along with your testimonials – and more.

The homeowner can review the information before your appointment, reducing the amount of time necessary toconvert the appointment to a signed listing.

You will also need to sharpen your objection-handling skills.

Sellers use objections, stalls and conditions to avoid making a commitment. The more adept you are at addressingand overcoming these, the more appointments you will convert to signed listings.

Sell

This is the easiest step in the process of building your business – as long as you understand this simple rule;

There are only three things that influence the sale of your listings:

1. Marketing

2. Price

3. Condition

Nothing else matters. Here’s why;

Marketing has one job, and only one job, and that is to increase awareness among potential buyers, and their agents,driving traffic to the front door of your listing. Once that has happened, the job of marketing is over, there’s nothingmore it can do. No amount of marketing is going to sell an overpriced home.

OK, so they’re at the front door. What happens next?

Now your listing must compete on the balance of two criteria with every other available home; price and condition.How well your listing competes will determine how fast it sells. The typical buyer will have seen many, many homesand has gotten a pretty good idea of what their money will enable them to buy.

At this point, about 80% of the buyers’ criteria has already been met; they know the price of the home, theneighborhood, the architectural style, the number of bedrooms and baths, the amenities and so on.

What they are looking for now is validation; could this be the right house for me?

Of the remaining 20% of the buyer’s criteria that hasn’t been met, you have the ability to control about 70% throughrepairs and staging. This means that you, and your seller client, have the ability to influence roughly 94% of thebuyer’s impression of the home.

The remaining factors, such as the floor plan, the room sizes and the orientation of the home on the lot are beyondyour control.

If your listing shows well and is viewed as the best value out of the available homes on the market, you will likely sellquickly.

If not, if your condition is substandard to the competing homes, your only option is to compete on price. This assumesyour seller isn’t willing to make the necessary repairs and upgrades to bring the condition of their home to the level ofcompeting homes – or better. Or that those repairs and upgrades would be too expensive to be cost-effective.

Grow

As you complete a sale, you must leverage your recent success to gain more listings.

Document your success by comparing these stats about your recent sale to the market averages;

Total days on market

Original list price to final sales price – the amount of the price reductions before the home sold.

Number of price reductions before the home sold.

Then ask your seller client to provide a testimonial. Avoid the meaningless testimonials such as “Jane was a great

agent. We highly recommend her.”

Instead, ask them three questions;

1. What were your goals when you decided to sell your home? Or, what challenges did you face when selling yourhome?

2. How did I, your agent, help you to reach your goals – or overcome the obstacles?

3. What were the results that you achieved by virtue of following my advice?

Let’s look at an example; Suppose a homeowner hadn’t sold a home in over 20 years and was anxious about whereto begin. You helped them to focus their time, energy and budget on making the repairs that would have the greatestimpact. The result was consistent traffic, great feedback and an accepted offer in 17 days.

The testimonial might read, “We hadn’t sold a home in over 20 years and weren’t sure where to begin. Jane helpedus focus our efforts on those repairs that would have the greatest impact. As a result, we spent far less than wethought we would have to and still made a positive impression on the agents and buyers who came to see our home.With her guidance, we were able to sell for nearly our full asking price in less than three weeks.”

That’s a testimonial that will get you more listings!

Keep your pre-listing presentation updated with recent testimonials as well as your track record compared to themarket averages.

As you begin to dominate your niche market you should look at additional growth opportunities. These come in threeflavors;

Tracking your numbers to identify opportunities for increased sales through your existing efforts.

Identifying expansion opportunities into new niche markets

Attracting and hiring the right people to support your growth.

Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of agents who expand their services to a new sub-market or niche without firstexamining whether they are achieving the best return on their current efforts and lead generation dollars.

Before you consider expanding your business, look at your current conversion rates.

Is there room for improvement? Are you converting well over 90% of your leads to appointments, appointments tolistings, listings to contracts and contracts to closed sales? If not, examine where your business is leaking money.

Take a hard look at your processes and see where you could improve. It’s certainly easier to improve your currentoperations than to attempt to convince homeowners who’ve never heard of you to do business with you!

Once your conversion rates are where you’d like for them to be, you can start looking for expansion opportunities. Irecommend looking at neighborhoods that are immediately adjacent to those you already serve – provided thehousing stock and the homeowner profiles are similar to your current customer base.

This makes it easier to promote your services to people are similar to your current clients. Be sure that the area hasadequate turnover to make your expansion worth the effort.

Before your business grows to the extent that you need to hire an assistant or other agents, take the time to documentyour processes and systems.

What is the step-by-step process you follow when you get a new listing?

Make a checklist and provide the resources, such as your stager, your photographer and sign company, so that anassistant could easily follow your plan without you standing over his or her shoulder.

When your business is demanding all of your time and there is still opportunity, it’s time to hire help. I recommendstarting off by hiring a virtual assistant or sharing an assistant with another agent until you have a good idea of howmuch you’ll need them and what tasks they can perform to help you focus on what you do best.

By having the systems in place, it will be much easier for a new hire to understand how you want your business run.I’ve heard of far too many situations where hiring an assistant led to more work on the part of the agent as theyattempted to explain every decision to the new assistant.

Assistants, too, can become frustrated if they don’t understand what they are supposed to do, and how you want itdone, so that they can lighten your workload.

When hiring an assistant, a buyer’s agent or a listing specialist, look at their track record – what they’ve already done.Most any potential hire will tell you what they will do, but sometimes it doesn’t happen that way. The best indicator offuture performance and work ethic is their past behavior.

Enjoy!

This is a step that many agents skip. To be truly successful, you must enjoy what you do.

You must recognize that the journey is part of the process.

You will not be successful overnight. It takes time.

You will make mistakes. It’s OK. Nobody expects you to be perfect – to know everything.

But as long as you’re learning, and applying what you learn, you will get better – you will make more money and enjoymore financial freedom.

But be sure to take time to enjoy your life – kids grow up very quickly, friendships dissolve if they’re not nurtured. Thesame with marriages.

Your real estate business should fuel your lifestyle – not be your lifestyle.

It’s OK to tell a client, “No”.

It’s OK to not answer your phone while you’re at your kids sports event or dance recital. If the call was truly important,they’ll leave a message.

It’s OK to take a few days off now and then.

Conclusion

As I stated at the beginning of this article, the real estate business is really not that difficult. If you break the businessdown into these six steps, and focus on improving your skill set within each of these steps, you can build a successfulbusiness and have a balanced, enjoyable life.

But it will take time. The best advice I can offer is to establish goals for your business and give yourself a reasonableamount of time to achieve them. Then, instead of falling into the trap of comparing yourself to other agents, onlycompare where you are in your business to the goals you set.

As long as you are making progress, you are winning.