Advice for Starting a Real Estate Career in 2018
The start of the New Year may be too late to begin planning for your real estate career. The time is now to sit down and plan so you can hit the ground running in January.
Set Goals
No successful business is successful if you haven’t set goals. Not only do you need long term goals, but you need to set daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly goals. Make your goals specific, measurable and achievable. When you are first starting out, a weekly goal may be to reach out to 10 potential clients. Start small so that you can achieve that goal and once you’ve done that for a month, increase it. Work on one area of your business for each goal.
At the start, it may be awhile before you close on your first home. That may mean a lot of days feeling bored. Take advantage of this extra time by volunteering to do desk duty at your brokerage, or hosting open houses. Getting clients should be your most important goal right now. Think of creative ways to get clients and listings.
Find a Mentor
Hopefully you are planning on working with a broker that has offered you a mentor in your company. Hopefully this person is fairly successful in both listing and selling houses. Yes, you attended over 100 hours in real estate school, but nothing is a better learning experience than on the job training. Follow this person for a few days. Make sure you go to a listing appointment, an appointment where your mentor is meeting with potential buyers, and open houses. You will learn valuable information from this type of shadowing.
Control Your Time
Since you will have plenty of free time at the beginning of your career, you will want to use that time wisely. Don’t sit in your office playing Candy Crush on your phone if you want to build your business. As you become busier, you will want to get into a routine so that nothing is lacking for you to be successful. Think about the daily goals you set, and go about reaching them.
Marketing
You of course are going to want to market yourself, but marketing can be expensive. Use social media to your advantage. It’s the perfect free way to let your friends and acquaintances know that you are now in the real estate business. You may think you want to target a certain demographic (millennials). Make sure that your marketing is geared towards that age group. Don’t spread yourself too wide, in that it is beneficial to you to pick an area and become an expert in it.
Track your Results
Many agents don’t keep track of how they got the client and how the transaction ended. By tracking this data, you are seeing what is working and what is not. Knowing this data will help you with making decisions about your goals, time and marketing.
Start the year and your new career off great by getting a head start now!
