ENDING THE CYCLE OF FEAST OR FAMINE (ESPECIALLY OVER THE HOLIDAYS)

Use these tested and proven methods to keep your real estate business thriving all year-long. End the uncertainty of seasonal market-dependent income and replace it with predictable income you can control.

Everyone desires a consistent income but as a real estate professional, you might feel like having a predictable income isn’t in the cards for you.

It’s simply not the nature of the business, right?…Wrong!

You can have a more stable and predictable income as a real estate professional, even in the off-season. All you have to do is start by doing these four things.

1. Focus on Increasing Lead Activity

The first step in ensuring a more consistent income in real estate is to increase your lead activity; but don’t make the mistake of simply increasing your lead generation budget and calling it quits.

You need to go deeper than that. Try to create a team vision focused on “farming” or nurturing the hand raisers and leads you already have instead of having your team vision focused on “hunting” or constantly seeking out fresh new leads by putting older leads on the back burner.

The best way to shift your focus is to start by reviewing your database to find ways to maximize its value and bring any hidden opportunities to the surface.

One great way to maximize your database’s value, especially for larger databases, is to have a remarketing service engaging your leads. Remarketing automatically touches each of your leads, no matter how old they are, through a variety of channels to drum up any hidden opportunities. This is a surefire way to create more business instantly, and best of all, you’ve already paid for the leads.

Make sure that you separate out any past buyer clients and possible seller leads before submitting your leads for remarketing. These people should all be enrolled into a seller experience for more customized nurturing instead.

The next thing you can do to increase lead activity is create a multi-touch process for lead follow-up. This means that you need to get in front of your leads in multiple ways and through multiple people and channels.

We’re talking texts, phone calls, emails, video messages, and social ads. These touches can come from you, your agents, your team assistant, your AI tool, in-house or outsourced ISA’s, or from all these people combined.

If it seems like too much communication, rest assured it’s not. You’ll win more business this way than you’ll ever lose.

2. Start Managing your Agents and Yourself Better

Managing a team is hard but it is even harder to hold yourself accountable as a team leader or single agent. The first thing you need to do to manage more effectively is decide what activities are really worth your time and your team’s time and start being proactive about these things instead of reactive. With that in mind, remember that there are only four things in real estate that actually make you money:

1. Prospecting

2. Listing homes

3. Selling homes

4. Negotiating contracts

In order to better manage yourself and your agents you need to do some good old-fashioned time management. Ultimately the goal is to make sure you have enough time set aside in your schedule to do your money-making activities and you can do so by embracing time blocking.

Next, do some goal setting. Compare your business goals with your agent’s goals and determine how many (if any) new agents you need to hire and train in order to achieve your annual business goals. This step requires some planning ahead, tracking, and putting your agents through the process of goal setting.

When doing goal setting ensure that each agent sets these three goals:

1. Baseline Goal: The minimum amount of transactions needed to maintain their current standard of living.

2. “Like To Sell” Goal: The amount of transactions needed to level up and improve their standard of living so they can be better off than they are now.

3. Dream Goal: The number of transactions that would be amazing, almost unimaginable, to sell.

Finally, as a team leader a big part of your job is to create opportunity for your agents, give them training, and enforce accountability. Be especially careful to make sure that you’re not enforcing accountability in the form of punishment.

If you have agents on your team who aren’t keeping up with their prospecting responsibilities, don’t do something like take them off lead rotation to punish them for not calling their leads. This negative action simply encourages the agent to fail even further. Instead, try to understand why they aren’t making their calls in the first place and have a process in place to enforce your lead follow-up expectations.

One great way to enforce accountability is to have a three strike process like the one outlined in this video:

3. Focus on Organizing and Tracking your Lead Activity

The next thing you have to do to work towards a more predictable income is get yourself organized, specifically when it comes to tracking your lead activity.

The first step to getting you and your team organized is getting the right tools and systems in place. Next, you need to get an idea of where all the people are in your business pipeline and decide on a plan of action for how to follow-up with each of them.

Get started by creating standardized lead stages for all the people coming through your funnel. Then establish clearly written follow-up expectations that are associated with each lead stage. Once you have these standards in place, make sure everyone on your team knows them and understands exactly what is expected of them.

The last really important step to getting organized is all about prioritizing.

Focus first on your inbound leads and prioritize those who are already in your system and are raising their hands. Any brand new leads should be a second priority.

Here’s a great example of how you can better prioritize your leads:

• Priority 1: Hand raisers already in your database

• Priority 2: Anyone engaging in your seller experience (Homebot)

• Priority 3: Leads ISA’s had a good conversation with but haven’t converted.

• Priority 4: Any leads engaging with AI (RAIYA)

• Priority 5: Any new incoming leads

4. Implement A Lead Conversion Process

Finally, to be successful you have to know what to do and be able to replicate it over and over again. You also have to understand what your blockers are that prevent you from converting leads and find a way to overcome them.

The hardest part of lead conversion is jumping in and getting started.

If you’re feeling anxious about making phone calls and talking to leads, remember that you know real estate better than they do, so be ready to meet them where they are in their real estate journey and be flexible enough to pivot when necessary.

Another great thing to do to make your conversations go more smoothly is to focus on being genuinely curious when talking to your leads. Try to understand why they are interested in real estate, what their needs are, what their story is, and then use this information to decide if you want them as a client.

Here are some helpful conversation starters:

Buyer Approaches:

• Understand their timeline: “How soon are you hoping to begin seeing the inside of homes?”

• Understand their motivation: “Have you been able to tour other homes in the area?” and “What has you looking?”

• Understand if they’re qualified to buy:  “Do you have a friend or family member that will be assisting you in the financing?” and  “Will the down payment of the new home be coming from the sale of another home?”

Seller Approaches

• Understand their timeline: “Are you hoping to stick to a specific timeline?” and “Are there specific dates you are looking to stay within?”

• Understand their motivation: “Are you interested in finding out your current equity? Or curious about how this market affects the value of your home?”

Next, take a moment after your conversation to learn from yourself. Write down what you think you did well and what you wish you had done differently. This will only make you a better real estate agent over time.

Finally, don’t be afraid to set the appointments. You will always have to ask for the appointment so be prepared to do so. You can help make this step go more smoothly if you focus on keeping the prospect’s experience with you as upbeat and positive as possible from start to finish. The goal of your initial conversations is all about showcasing your value.