Once you get into the rhythm of things as a Realtor, it becomes easy to get so caught up in your day-to-day tasks that big-picture questions just don’t make it on to your to-do list. That’s a mistake. Take some time to step back and look at your performance, your goals, and areas of opportunity. Make sure you’re on track to actually build the life you were looking for when you chose this vocation. If you find you’re not quite where you want to be, this exercise will help you course correct.

You need more than a career plan – you need a business plan

Let’s think about everything that goes into being a successful Realtor. As a real estate agent, you need a marketing strategy. You may have contractors or staff to pay. You need to make technology decisions like what website provider and CRM to use. You need to collect payments. Depending on your region, you may even be incorporated.

Now consider what goes into a career plan. When career planning, you might think about the job title you aspire to. Then you might express interest within your company and gather data from job listings. You look at how many years of experience such a role requires, what education you need, and how you can try to get some of that experience in your current role. While personal branding and relationship management certainly play a role here, career planning is too limiting. As a real estate agent, you need to think expansively about the services you provide, your positioning within your region, and identify areas of opportunity for yourself.

Solution? You need a real estate business plan. Here’s how to create yours:

1. Use an income calculator.

2. Explore different scenarios.

3. Plan your weekly activities.

4. Consider your edge.

5. Future-proof your business.

Start with an income calculator

Business plans can be daunting. A Google search will bring up jargon-filled templates with dozens of pages, graphs, SWOT analyses, and more. The basic point is to state your goal (i.e. your mission), identify what you can do to make it happen, and then do it.

For real estate agents, the best way to measure how effectively you’re achieving your mission – whether it’s to help first-time home buyers into new homes, or to be the agent with the most deals in your city – is by setting a target income. Once you have this target income for the year in mind, use the income calculator to work backwards (if you don’t have an account already, you can access this on the free-forever plan. Sign up here, and go to the Goals tab).

The income calculator takes the many variables that come into play when determining what your final, take-home pay will be into consideration. It then gives you an estimate of how many deals you’ll need to do to hit your targeted income. While you could do that calculation fairly easily, it breaks things down further to provide you with an estimate of how many clients, or warm leads, you need to be pursuing on average in order to get to your targeted number of closed deals.

Explore different scenarios

Use the income calculator to map out these 3 scenarios:

Status quo – if you stay on your current path, what income level are you on track for?

Level up – if you were already hitting your dream income goals, what would your day-to-day look like? How would your activities be different from what you’re doing now? For instance, would you need more referrals than you currently receive? If so, why aren’t you getting enough right now? What steps can you take to get them? For instance, you could try re-wording your e-mail templates, or ask over the phone. You could ask clients for feedback on their experience, and then ask for a referral. What other strategies could help you hit your activity targets? Repeat the 5 W’s and brainstorm ideas for each of your areas of improvement.

The unexpected – this is a bit tricky because by definition, you’re trying to plan for a scenario you won’t see coming. When thinking about the unexpected, you can adjust the income calculator to a scenario where the average home price is lower, or try entering 30% less deals than the status quo. The idea here is similar to the level up scenario. How would you change your daily activities or client templates to accommodate a disruption? It’s not pleasant thinking of these things, but doing it now will alleviate the stress later on. You won’t have to desperately try to pivot in the middle of a tough time. You’ll already know what changes you need to make to thrive despite the situation.

By using an income calculator to pool all of the information you have together, in just five minutes you’ll get a good sense of what your strategy and goals should look like to protect your income and business.

Translate Strategy to Action: Plan Your Weekly Activities 

Once you have your scenarios, break down the year’s goals. For example: if you need 96 warm leads each year, break this down to 8 warm leads per month, or 2 per week.

Now let’s say it took you 15 calls to your network to get 1 warm lead. That means you need to make 30 calls to people you know a week, or about 6 calls a day. Now time block enough time each day to be on the phone and following up with that many people.

Using our example, let’s say you don’t know enough people to make 6 calls a day every weekday to people you know. This is an area of improvement, and you could use some of that time block building out your network instead. This lays the foundation for you to be able to hit these numbers in the future. Having your actions very clearly connected to outcomes in this manner helps you choose the highest value thing on your to do list each day.

If your scenario changes, use the information from the scenarios you looked at to recalibrate how you allocate your time.

Consider your edge

The easiest way to create a thriving business for yourself is to embrace the things you do best. Real estate agents come from all walks of life. There are tried-and-true sales methodologies that will help you succeed at sales no matter what your background or personality is (for instance, we’re big fans of Ninja).

However as you implement these strategies, don’t forget that you still need to play to your strengths. What sets you apart from the other agents in your market? If you are a numbers person – leverage that in your personal brand. For instance, you could create high value newsletters translating market stats into layman’s terms. Or, if you’re a natural charmer then focus your time on the phone. You might be better-suited outsourcing some of your personal branding to a tech-savvy assistant.

If nothing comes to mind, don’t fret. Your personal edge is something you can create. For example, this real estate agent’s edge is that her notepads can be found everywhere – to the point where they’re locally famous. She has consistently sent out these notepads for decades. People post about them when they see them ‘in the wild’. They became a local fixture because this is something she has kept up for such a long time. The key to edge is consistency and time. It’s easy to default to personality traits when thinking about this because our personalities are fairly consistent through our adult years. If you’re looking to manufacture your edge in a similar manner to Cindy, focus on something you can sustain consistently over a longer timeframe.

By considering your edge you can optimize the return on your time investment. Focus on what sets you apart, and choose tools and resources that will help you with the things that sidetrack you.

Future-proof your business

Change is the only constant in life

– Heraclitus

Real estate agents have an optimistic future – particular those who are flexible, build lasting relationships, and can quickly adapt. You’ll already have a leg up because you’ve planned for the unexpected. The other side of the equation is focusing on building the skills that will help you pivot to provide added value and anticipate your client’s needs.

Final Thoughts

Every Realtor and real estate agent needs a business plan. It’s your roadmap to the future, your contingency plan, and your source of inspiration for those days when it would be easier to hit the snooze button. Creating your business plan is simple. Use the income calculator as a starting point. Looking at the results it gives you, think through the strategies you need to employ to achieve the number of warm leads and referrals it recommends. Leverage your strengths, and strategically upgrade your skills to give yourself an edge.

Between marketing your business, juggling showings, and staying on top of your leads, you need a system to manage your workload in a stress-free and intuitive way. RealOffice360 is an unbelievably simple CRM, business tracker, and daily planner for real estate agents and Realtors®. Rather being just a data dump for client information, RealOffice360 helps you visually build your business plan, cultivate your real estate database towards your goals, and ultimately keeps you focused on what matters most: your clients and your deals. Get started for free - no credit card required!