Blog Posts

Jun
27
7 Habits Of Top Real Estate Agents
By Sharmila_CML

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Working for yourself as a real estate agent presents many benefits and challenges.



If you are anything like most people, working for yourself can have you wondering if you have what it takes to be successful.



You may sometimes question if you have the know-how, the skill-set, and the dedication that today’s top real estate agents use to propel them to the top. Especially if your current sales are not meeting your production goals.


Well, let me be the first to tell you that even if you don’t currently practice any of the 7 habits I am about to share with you, that doesn’t mean you can’t develop them one at a time. Studies show that it only takes 21 days to effectively develop a new habit in your life so please use this list as a guide to help you grow.


If you are ready to increase your confidence, production, and efficiency as a real estate agent, this post is for you!


1. A Morning Routine


Working for yourself as a real estate agent means having a rather irregular schedule which is completely dictated by you and the demands of your clients. This can cause many real estate agents to go about life and work in a random way which can negatively impact their productivity.


One of the best ways to make sure that you start off every day energized, focused, and deliberate is by implementing a morning routine. The best routines combine an element of your business self with your personal self.


Here are some of the most common components of a successful real estate agent’s morning routine:




  • Meditation and/or prayer




  • Practicing visualizations and affirmations




  • Listening to a podcast to learn something new




  • Exercising




  • Reviewing, setting, and adjusting daily goals as needed




I strongly encourage you to customize your morning routine in a way that works for you and figure out how long it takes you to complete it from start to finish each day. That way you will know exactly what time you will need to get up on the morning that you have appointments that you need to make. Once you have your morning routine established, it is very important that you complete it everyday rain or shine even if you are taking the day off.


2. Regularly Scheduled Prospecting & Follow-Up


One of the most common reasons that real estate agents find themselves stuck on the real estate rollercoaster which means going through periods of extreme business and lack of business is that they aren’t consistently prospecting. In most cases, this is because the agent slacks off on prospecting once they start working a few deals.


Even if you are actively working 100 deals, that is no excuse to slack off and stop trying to drum up new business. All that means is that you need to implement systems into your business to be able to handle that volume AND continue to attract new clients.


If you are anything like most real estate agents, prospecting is one of your least favorite activities. Therefore, you may want to include this in your morning routine so that you don’t procrastinate to the point where it never gets done. Plus, by tackling these tasks first thing in the morning you will be able to go through the rest of your day with a stronger sense of accomplishment.


I strongly urge you to treat your daily prospecting and follow-up activities as though they are a listing appointment or client appointment that can’t be broken. For example, let’s say you make prospecting and follow-up part of your morning routine and schedule yourself to do this every day from 8am-9am. This means that you never, ever, ever, schedule anything that won’t allow you to be able to prospect and follow-up from 8am-9am.


3. Automated Marketing & Follow-Up


Marketing, like prospecting, is one of those activities that many real estate agents do at random, without a strategy, and when they are desperate for more business. The fact is that you should be automating and outsourcing as much of your marketing and follow-up to cut down on your responsibilities and ability to make excuses why you can’t do them at all.


Social media is one of my favorite examples of something that you can automate. Using tools like Buffer and Tailwind you can automate all of your social media posts for weeks or months in advance in an hour or two. Honestly, there is no way that I would be able to regularly post fresh content to all of my social media accounts on a daily basis at the optimal time without using these tools.


Your real estate blog and newsletter are also something that you should time block and automate. Since I spend most of my days writing for my clients, I would never have time to write this blog if I didn’t time block it. Typically, I will take two days per quarter to write all of my blogs for the coming quarter and then schedule them to publish automatically and then I do the same for the corresponding newsletter.


As for following up automatically, I suggest you automatically schedule reminders for yourself about who to follow-up with when and use tools like ringless voicemails, text messages, and auto-drip email campaigns.


4. Constantly Creating Content


Any experienced and successful agent will be the first tot ell you that you must be constantly filling your pipeline with people that will be ready to buy or sell in both the short and long term. They will also tell you that people will only hire you are their real estate agent if they feel as though they know, like, and trust you. There is no better way to do both of those things than to consistently create and publish original content.


In my article 50 Reasons Realtors, Brokers, Coaches, Investors & Lenders MUST Create Content, I revealed some compelling statistics that help reveal just how important content is to your business:




  • With leads, long-form posts are 9X more effective than short-form posts.




  • 60 percent of marketers publish one piece of content per day. (Source: eMarketer)




  • Content marketing offers three times the leads of traditional marketing while costing around 62 percent less. (Source: Content Marketing Institute).




If you are anything like most real estate agents, the very idea of creating and posting all of this content is daunting, to say the least, which is why most people outsource the task to a real estate content expert like myself or time block a few month’s worth of content at a time.


5. Practicing Self-Care


Everything that happens in your business is ultimately your responsibility.


You are the captain of the ship. If you go down, so does the ship.


Therefore, it is very, very, very important that you are actively taking care of yourself as much as you are your business.


Let me be the first to tell you that I understand COMPLETELY how hard it can be to make yourself a priority when you see your business as number one. In the first 18 months of my business, I ate, slept, and breathed real estate writing and media. I didn’t watch television, I didn’t go out with friends, I didn’t do anything but work an average of 18 hours a day, seven days a week.


That is a recipe for DISASTER.


As I’m sure you can imagine, I eventually burned out and became sick with a pile of orders stacked up and clients eagerly awaiting their content.


It was then that I realized how big of a deal it is that we as business owners take care of ourselves properly so that we can take care of our businesses properly.


Self-care is different for everyone. You just need to find out what works for you to feel refreshed, renewed, healthy, happy, and confident.


Here are some of the most common ways of practicing self-care as a business owner:




  • Daily exercise and eating well




  • Meditation and affirmations




  • Journaling




  • Frequent small vacations




  • Regular recreational time




  • Reading self-help books or listening to self-help podcasts




Again, there is no right or wrong here. All that matters is that you make your health, happiness, and mindset are a paramount priority in your life and business.


6. Smart Goal Setting


The way that you set your goals will either set you up to succeed or to fail in a very big way. Therefore, it is obvious that you are mindful and strategic when setting goals for yourself as a real estate agent or broker.


S.M.A.R.T. is actually an acronym that breaks down exactly what every goal should be and include in order to help your progress. Here is the breakdown:


S - Specific


M - Measurable


A - Attainable


R - Relevant


T - Time-based


I always push my clients to start by setting a 5-year goal of where they would like their business to be. From there, you can create benchmarks for each year. Breaking things down further, you can assign yourself monthly, weekly, and even daily goals to make sure you are constantly moving the needle forward.


Don’t hesitate to align yourself with an accountability partner to check and balance one another’s goals and help you stay motivated to stay on track with your goals.


7. Staying Ahead Of The Game


There are few things more deflating or discouraging than constantly playing catch-up in your real estate business. Nobody wants to be a few steps behind the competition at every turn. Not only is it expensive but it costs you clients.


The first thing you need to do to get ahead of the competition is to resolve to be open-minded and accepting of the swift changes in technology.


For example, I have been begging agents for two years to develop their own Alexa Skill. While most people thought that leads would never come from Alexa, those that invested early are already enjoying the benefits of their skills and paid FAR less than you would have to now to get those gains.


There are many ways that you can stay on top of what’s coming but one of the easiest ways is to subscribe to tech-heavy podcasts or Alexa Flash Briefing skills.


Of course, you can also follow me on social and subscribe to my newsletter as well because I am deeply dedicated to providing the most cutting-edge strategies to help you become the best real estate agent in your market.


Don’t Forget To Check Out These Tips:


How to Attract Millenial Homebuyers Using Social Media


Are You Losing Real Estate Clients Due To Your Lame Social Media Presence?


How To Prevent Your Social Media Followers From Tuning You Out


The Secret To Becoming Stalkable On Social Media


How To Convert Your Real Estate Blog Posts Into Videos