Work On Your Real Estate Business, Not In It Part 1

October 12, 2009

If you look at most real estate professionals and how they run their business, they’re not really business owners.  It’d be more accurate calling them any of a variety of other lesser but indispensable job titles associated with their business:  buyer rep, administrator, receptionist, lead coordinator, transaction coordinator, data entry rep, home tour guide, telemarketer, and so on.  These reps personally handle most or all the tasks involved in making their business tick.  These are the reps who work IN their business, and do so at the great expense of working ON their business.

So in this article series  I’ll take a close look at real estate professionals who mostly work in their business, not on it, and understand why this is the key distinction between them and top producers who work on their business and truly “own” it in more ways than one.

Let’s consider a typical sales rep who’s been in the business for 5 years.  They’ve come from a university background, or have recently switched from a successful career elsewhere, so they’re very confident in their learning and abilities.  They’ve made it through those critical first two years in the real estate business where 70% of new reps fail and leave the business, which is just further proof to them that they’ve “got what it takes”.  In their first two years they went through their entire Rolodex and stack of business cards and contacted virtually every person they’ve met in the past 20 years once or twice per year.  They love going out to lunch with these people.  Occasionally, some of them become clients.

They’re currently making a decent income, and they like their job, but they often feel parts of it sap their time, ambition and motivation.  The more dismal, repetitive aspects of their business regularly drain their overall resources, often keeping them from wanting to work on the business more.  They figure it’s better spending their time working hard on the tasks at hand for their current clients and saving money on paying an assistant since they can do these tasks in stride with the leads they have trickling in.

This rep considers referrals the cornerstone of any successful real estate business.  The reason they think this is they don’t have any formal lead generation systems in place steadily and reliably generating leads for them, so they’ve come to rely primarily on referrals since hitting up their contacts for business has worked for them.  They’ll take any referral they get.

Filed under: Inspiration,Marketing Tips

Tags: administration, branding, marketing, prospect, prospecting, real estate course, real estate education, real estate educators, time management