Loving Commercial Real Estate Today
In commercial real estate brokerage, it is easy to get ‘swamped’ with different pressures and priorities that come at you every day. It’s a ‘love and hate’ balance for some agents, so let’s do more of the ‘loving’ in the business, and consider how to do that consistently.
The deals, listings, marketing, and client activities will always pressure you to change your focus. The question will always arise as to what you should do first. Through all of that, you do have choices, and you should rigidly exercise those choices.
What generally happens each day for agents? It is a fact that more listings will create more work, and that is true. That is why working on a smaller number of exclusive listings rather than a vast number of open listings is always preferable for an agent. Wasting time on lots of open listings is not a productive process for any agent.
What is Happening?
Just think about what a listing will do to you and your day. There will be documentation, advertisement creation, outbound telephone calls, client contact, marketing efforts, and inspections or negotiations.
So, a good real estate listing will create plenty of these things. If you have five or more good listings, all these factors will bias your thinking and diary time blocks.
The Highly Effective Agent
So how do you get your brokerage work done reliably and effectively? The secret is in control you create for yourself so that the few essential things are done each day and every day. Focus on just the necessary real estate things, and all other things become less important.
Recognize that you could quickly fill any working day with lots of activity (and many people do that), but most of that activity will not bring you the results you want in your business.
Commercial real estate is all about progress and the actions created around that. So do not swamp your day with low priority ‘stuff’. That ‘stuff’ does not help your real estate business grow.
Too much work or the attempt to do too much work will create ‘stress’, and an agent in ‘stress mode’ will not get the right things done. Forget about saying that you can multi-task, and think that the approach actually works in real estate. It does not. People that claim to be skilled in that way are spinning you a ‘falsehood’.
Real Estate Agent Action Facts
You can only ever get one good thing done at a time as an agent. If you attempt to do otherwise in real estate, the quality and results will not be there.
Sure, personal organization will help you track your real estate progress, but you can only do one thing at a time, and in doing that, you will feel more under control.
When you believe and know you are in control of your agent growth strategies, and consistently so, then your business will start to thrive. When you divert back to your old habits, things start to slide. Learn from your old habits, and build new ones.
Results in commercial real estate are mainly just these things:
- Exclusive listings created
- Client numbers growing in database
- Meetings created each day or week
- Cold calls made each day
- Shorter time on market for listings
- Commissions from transactions
- The size and type of transactions
- Vendor paid marketing money
- Referral business
- Repeat business
How to Boost Your Agent Business
So, there are just two things to divide your real estate day and activities business into. See why simplicity is important here. They are:
- Growth – These are the ‘A’ grade things to do in the first half of each working day and every day on that basis. At the top of that list will be the facts and actions of prospecting for new business. Most agents struggle with this as they lack the systems and attention to organization. How can you create this progress for yourself? There are only two or three things needed here to help you build your prospecting process. Devote the morning hours to those two or three things. Perhaps telephone cold calls are the easiest way to get this done. Talking to lots of people will put you into the process quite well.
- Administration – This essentially is everything that is not in the ‘growth’ category above. Now you can put too much emphasis on these ‘B’ and ‘C’ grade things. Don’t let them get into your morning ‘growth’ activities. Do the ‘B’ grade things in the afternoons or evenings and drop the ‘C’ grade things.
So, this is how you can get more brokerage work done and enjoy the process. First, simplify your brokerage focus and time slots. Second, do not do too much of the ‘low grade’ work and think that you are productive.
Top agents do not do the low-grade work often. You too can choose what you do to improve your real estate business.
