Evaluate, Plan, Repeat

I’ve written before about business planning and how important it is to establish goals and objectives and to have a structure to your business. However, there is a step that is just as important to take before you get to the planning stage: evaluation. We all know the income roller coaster that’s comes with working…

Do These Five Things

So, your real estate license is sitting crisply in your wallet, you just set up your laptop on you assigned desk in your new office, and you are about to announce to your friends and family that you are a real estate agent and open for business! Good for you. Okay, but, where do you…

Confidence

Real estate mogul and business expert, Barbara Corcoran, once said: “Don’t be afraid to…take on clients just outside of your knowledge base. Confidence is overrated. It’s when we’re uncomfortable and looking for answers that we learn and grow the most.” To all you real estate agents out there who wish you were selling in higher…

Turn Frustrations into Opportunities

I met with an agent this morning—let’s call him John. John is relatively new to the real estate industry, and he was feeling discouraged after having one of those weeks we’ve all had. First, a buyer he’d been courting for weeks made an offer on a FSBO over the weekend. Then the building owner he’d…

Comfort Zone

It was Eleanor Roosevelt who said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” I love this quotation, I love its message. It’s a reminder to all of us to push ourselves, to test our limits, and move outside of our comfortable place, every day if possible, but certainly on a frequent basis. I use…

Be Like the Aerobics Instructor

I have much to write about confidence. It’s a topic that comes up very often with my agents. Confidence underpins success for any real estate professional. This came up again for me just this morning when I was at my barre class. I take the early class most mornings of the week and there are…

Call Me Old Fashioned

Technology has its merits, of course, for any real estate professional’s business development activities. But, and you can call me old fashioned, it shouldn’t ever become a substitute for real life, in-person interactions. As real estate professionals, we deal in emotions, life events, intangible reasons for making huge financial decisions. In essence, we deal with…

Always Be Learning

I was humbled today by an agent I met with who is interested in joining my firm. Let’s call him Bill. Bill has been selling real estate for 25 years. He’s had a great career so far, is in the top 30 agents in his marketplace, consistently sells between $20M and $30M in volume a…

Business Plan

Everyone wants to be successful. Certainly, every real estate agent I’ve ever met wants to be successful. And they expend enormous amounts of energy pursuing success. They hurry from prospecting activity to prospecting activity in search of their next success. What they often don’t do is define exactly what success might mean for them. This…

Accountability

When you work for yourself, often alone, getting done what you need to get done can sometimes be challenging. Stuff gets in the way, you get busy, distracted, there is always something else to do. Having a method for accountability can help enormously. Someone or something to hold you to your task can be the…