Realty Times April 7, 2003

Is Your 2003 Strategy On Target?
by Joeann Fossland

As the first quarter of the year concludes, it’s a good time to do a reality check with your business plan. Are you on target? Are you ahead? Are you behind?

World events have impacted the strong markets of 2002 in many areas, and people have become more cautious. Many who don’t “need” to move are holding off. If your business plan for 2003 didn’t take into consideration the changing climate, you may want to do some research and, if necessary, some re-strategizing.

One of the reasons the great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, had an edge over his competition, was because he looked to the future: "Some people skate to the puck. I skate to where the puck is going to be."

Where is your market going? What changes are needed for you to be positioned to hit your target this year?

Block two to three hours on your calendar to work on your business in the coming days. If you do this every quarter of the year, you will find you can make course corrections and be more powerful in achieving your goals.

Here are three steps to take:

  • Review the first quarter numbers - If you’ll take the time to do an in depth view of this, you’ll discover information to make and keep you profitable.

    Numbers to track:

    • Your Gross Production
    • Your Net Proceeds
    • The Number of Listings Taken
    • The Number of Buyers Sold
    • Average List Price/Average Sales Price
    • Where each transaction came from
    • Where your advertising dollars were spent

  • Compare To Your Plan - If you are right on target, congratulations! Keep up the momentum and take a look to see if there is any fine-tuning that can leverage where this year’s business is being generated from to enable you to maximize what is already working.

    If you are behind: What is the gap? What will it take to get on target by the end of the 2nd quarter? What actions need to be increased? Take a look at where you have gotten business this year. Is your marketing plan aligned with the results you are getting? In other words, is where you are spending your money where you are getting business from? If the Internet is generating 20 percent of your income and print ads are generating 5 percent, is your marketing reflective of this? Where can you tweak your actions and dollars to be more effective?

    If you are ahead, great job! I like to see my coaching clients have their financial objectives met by the end of October so they can relax towards the end of the year, if they want to (or just get real picky about working with the perfect clients, instead of the high maintenance whiners). What IS working? Can you go deeper with your impact in these areas to take advantage of the trend?

  • Strategizing For the Future - Regardless of which category your numbers fell into, perhaps the most important action you can take from this business planning session is to look for the trends.
    • Are the niches you are focusing on the ones where the activity is occurring? Look at the MLS data to see what trends emerge. If you do geographical farming, review last year’s numbers vs. this years.
    • What new areas are emerging? A young new home subdivision (3-5 years old) is a great place to establish a foothold as a guru before anyone else does.
    • What changes in consumer buying trends should you be taking into consideration? A need for homes with offices could be an opportunity, if you target that market. With consumers hungry for information and learning they educate themselves before they call you, would call for using good content on your website like informative reports or using a hotline such as Automatic Response Technologies.
    • It is now possible to have real estate in an IRA and this could be a great opportunity to generate sales that weren’t going to happen anyway by contacting your clients to share this opportunity with them
    • With the low interest rates and refinancing frenzy, if prices do soften in some areas, we may see more repossessions. Building some alliances with lenders and banks now could yield new business in the coming months and years.

    Wayne Gretsky also said, "You'll always miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take." And "The fundamentals of the game are never going to change, but the things you're going to do, that changes."

    Every marketplace offers individual and unique opportunities. The agents that are aware and awake to shifting before others see the trends will have an edge! Will you be there?


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