6 No-Fail Ways to Increase Your Annual Income
Filed Under real estate, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Training, Strategy, Time Management | 4 Comments
Would you like to make more money this year than you did last year…and continue that trend for the next ten years? Want to be the top sales professional in your field or find your way on to the Wall Street Journals list of top 400 agents in the nation someday?
You can—but it’s not easy. And it takes a lot more than sitting open houses on Saturday in spring with visions of sales awards dancing in your head.
How do I know? Some of our clients are truly accomplished real estate agents. I’ve seen what they’ve done to set themselves apart. In a few cases I’ve helped, but mostly I’ve marveled at their approach, energy, and most importantly persistence.
If you want to increase your annual income this year, then here are six principles you must embrace.
Understand Your Value Per Hour
Most of us will take any work that comes our way. That’s problematic. Working with just about anybody will drain you of time and energy and, most importantly, of money. So your first step towards earning more income this year is to figure out how much you are worth.
This is easy to figure out: just take your last commission and divide that by the amount of hours you worked. That figure is what you are worth per hour. More than likely it’s on the low side. Now, determine how much you want to make.
If you’re not tracking your time, you need to start doing that today. What separates the superstars from the average agent is a metric mindset. They measure everything. They keep track of the number of hours they work a day. Number of inbound leads they respond to. People they convert.
Tracking your time is just one part of understanding your value and will help you reach that preferred value per hour.
Understand Your Average Commission Check
Your next step toward increasing your annual income is to understand what your average commission check is. This is a simple task, too: Just add up all the commissions you’ve earned over the last fiscal year and then divide that by the number of commissions.
That average commission check will give you an idea of what each transaction is worth to you. But the value of this simple exercise is to see how working with just about anyone is hurting you. You’re not going to make more money each year if you don’t start controlling what you make by selecting who you want to work with and when.
Disqualify Rapidly
This will hurt because you’ll be turning down leads. But hopefully by now you realize that unloanable, unmotivated and high-maintenance people don’t make you money. (Here are four questions you can use to disqualify potentially problematic seller leads.)
In fact, the whole point behind this exercise is so that you can cherry pick your clients, choosing to work with those who agree with your business philosophy and can actually pay you for your time. Do not be afraid to stand by your VPH.
Prospect Daily
Disqualifying rapidly will not be so troublesome when you are prospecting daily. In fact, you can not really expect to gain real momentum unless you are. This means you need to be picking up the phone, responding to buyer ads and hanging out places where you have an opportunity to network.
Here’s a bit of a warning: Do not quit prospecting when you are busy. That is the last thing you want to do.
If you do, you’ll quickly find yourself out of leads and out of work and back to square one. That’s an emotional roller coaster ride you don’t want to get on.
Instead, spend time prospecting by phone, in person, on social media, at apartments or with investors. You can not create a steady stream of income that grows each year without a consistent stream of leads you can cherry pick.
Understand Your Most Profitable Activities–Eliminate the Rest
Delegation is the key to making more money. See, if you’re spending your time copying flyers or hanging signs, then you are not making your VPH. You are making much, much less. You are making minimum wage…and there are easier ways to do that.
What are your most profitable activities? More than likely it’s prospecting, marketing, negotiations, listing presentations and selling. It’s those activities that you actually make money, so you should focus on those and delegate everything else.
Create a Schedule
Finally, you need to prioritize your activities. Perhaps you are a morning person. Then reserve all your high profit activities during that time when you are sharpest. That means don’t schedule a negotiation call for 8 in the evening.
This also means you need to avoid overworking. Be fierce about controlling your time and protecting your life outside of your business. And if your life IS your business, then you need to step back and re-evaluate what you are tyring to accomplish, especially if you have a family.
Sacrificing time with family and friends to make a ten or twenty thousand more dollars a year is a worthless pursuit.
Leave a comment if this post was helpful or if you have anything you’d like to add. And if you like what you read, subscribe to the Real Estate Marketing Blog.
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Is It Really All About Building Relationships?
Filed Under Networking, real estate, Social Media | 8 Comments
If Real Estate Is All About Building Relationships…
Why Do So Many Agents Miss The Most Important Part
And Screw Up the Development of “Real” Relationships
With Social Media and Other Technologies?
Do you agree with this statement?
Real estate is all about building relationships…client relationships…networking relationships…COI relationships…that all lead to a growing real estate practice and more closed business year after year.
If that’s true, then why do so many agents lean so heavily on technology to do their “relationship building” for them? It’s as though they want to “automate” the development of quality relationships.
Is that even possible? Maybe with two robots that are syncing up…but humans are a little bit different than that, aren’t they?
Can you really develop a good quality client relationship with an email drip campaign?
Can you build a relationship with auto-posted tweets to your Twitter account?
Can you “outsource” your social media and expect it to be perceived as “authentic?”
Don’t get me wrong. I love all these things.
I love high-quality marketing that drives people to call your recorded info hotline or land on your “squeeze page” to opt-in to your email drip campaign. I love it when our clients generate two or three hundred leads a month with call capture marketing. I think technology is amazing. I’m in awe of it all.
Then there’s “social media.” I love the social media movement. I think it’s the next great frontier of real “relationship building.”
The issue I have with all of it is that so many are chasing hopes and dreams with a plan that leaves out the most crucial elements…the true fundamental underpinnings of success in real estate.
What is that foundation?
Again, it’s all about relationships. And relationships are with those people (human beings) who KNOW, LIKE AND TRUST YOU!
All the tools, all this technology, all these amazing social media outlets…they all do one thing and one thing only. They speed your ability to communicate.
Quality marketing makes your phone ring…giving you the ability to what?
Communicate.
Squeeze pages that get people to opt-in to your email drip campaigns do what?
They give you the ability to communicate.
Your Facebook page with 5,000 “friends” does what?
(5,000 friends…whatever! No one has 5,000 friends. BUT…where else would you go to exchange messages with people you didn’t like in high school?)
So what do Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
and all the various other platforms do?
They all speed your ability to communicate.
Call Capture lead generation that brings in hundreds of warm inbound calls every month…what does it do?
I think you get the idea. It speeds your ability to connect and communicate.
The point I’m making is that the key is not the technology. Yes. They’re great. In fact they’re amazing and powerful tools. But that’s all they are…tools.
YOU…are the message.
I like the way Scott Stratten (social media guru and viral marketing genius) puts it, he says, “You are your company’s CRO (Chief Relationship Officer). You are the one who has to take all this ‘technology’ and all these amazing platforms and take it to the next level.”
If you’ve got 5,000 friends on Facebook…how many times have you connected with someone of influence and invited them out for coffee?
If you’re a Twitter fanatic…how many times have you reached out to someone you knew could influence greater reach for you in your community?
If you’re on LinkedIn with 500+ “connections”…how many of those relationships are you nurturing, building and developing?
Worse yet, if you’re using call capture and generating 100-200-300 warm leads a month…how many of those people (human beings) have you called back, initiated a warm, easy-going dialog with and began building relationships with?
Bottom line is real estate is all about building
relationships…and it all starts with YOU!
With the various social media platforms…be authentic, be real and take it to the next level. Relationships are not digital. They’re one or more real live human beings having a conversation or meeting for coffee. Take it there.
With your lead generation, polish and perfect your scripts. Internalize them and make them a part of you so they are natural. When you engage a call capture lead you’ve got to know what to say and how to say it. Then, you need to bring more value to the table for that person. Be a value creator. Be a servant. No. Be a Super-Servant with a true and genuine servant’s heart.
Bottom line?
Again, it’s all about building relationships. And relationships start with real live conversations. Start having them. Perfect your skills and read books on communication. These are core fundamentals.
Lastly, I’d like to recommend a book that was first published back in 1937. It’s a book that is even more applicable today. It’s a book that can and will change your life. It’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie.
Get it. Read it. No…read it 2-3 times and then apply it to all that you’re doing as an agent…marketing, prospecting, lead generating, your social media platforms. Then, once you’ve seen its impact, shoot me an email telling me how much it’s meant to you.
It’s time to get back to the basics. And you can’t get more basic than people do business with those they KNOW, LIKE AND TRUST. That’s a relationship!
My word (or words) for the day!
Real Estate Gets the Shaft
Filed Under real estate | 1 Comment
I found this article on Inman News Blog very interesting:
The housing market drops, the number of consumer complaints against real estate professionals rises.
It seems like a logical premise: when people are making money on housing then all is well, but when home prices decline and people lose equity — or worse, lose their homes — then there’s a problem. Lots of problems, actually.
Read Falling markets, rising complaints.
Does it seem fair to you? Do you think consumers give agents and real estate industry the shaft when times are tough?
I believe this is really just part of a nation of people who refuse to take responsibility. Every one wants to point the finger. Everyone wants a bail out. Our legal system makes it to easy to fall into such a trap.
Do you have a horror story like this to share?