It’s hard to get where you’re going if you don’t know how to get there. Century 21 Real Estate Corporation has designed an easy click-through new tool that it hopes will help their agents and brokers plan household and business budgets and the steps for prospecting to achieve success in real estate.

The Agent Financial Tools platform is a proprietary Web-based application that is free to Century 21 affiliates (sorry, Coldwell and ERA agents,) through the company’s intranet. If you can click a mouse, you can input information into your own private financial spreadsheet (oops, that sounds intimidating, but it’s really easy) so you can figure out exactly how many homes (sides) you have to sell to make your monthly nut. This is especially important for independent contractors who often fluctuate between feast and famine, according to local market performance and other factors.

If you aren’t a Century 21 affiliate, the concept behind the financial tools is valid – using a written (even virtual) business plan will help keep agents on track so they know what they have to earn (expenses) and do (prospecting) to stay in business.

John Sagrillo, director of products and initiatives for Century 21 Real Estate Corporation, says that the probability of success increases by as much as 50 percent with the power of written goalsetting.

“Many agents let things happen by chance,” says Sagrillo. “If they have clear written goals for production, prospecting, and budgeting, we can help them raise the bar of consciousness in achieving their goals by giving them a way to set crystal clear budgeting and production goals, and to give them a guide on prospecting also.”

The plan was derived and then put into HTML format from examining “best practices” by leading brokers across the Century 21 system and synchronizing them with Cendant’s CREST technology platform which allows the agent to put seasonality for an office and local market and “lay it on top of the agent’s aspirations to do their strategic planning.”

The system is composed of an assortment of categories that spin by in a fool-proof, can’t-skip-ahead format that includes default and fill-in household and business categories of expenses, production figures (past production, or for new agents, realistic default production goals courtesy of the local office) and charts and graphs of prospecting steps they will need to follow in order to achieve their financial goals. Agents choose a six or 12 month plan, which can be reviewed via e-mail (with an option to show or not show personal financial data) by a broker or coach.

Better yet, the company eliminated the boredom factor even for people who hate to make budgets and business plans. You can choose from detailed default lists to populate your spreadsheet, that include everything you would have forgotten, putting you between “oh, yeah, …” and awe-struck. If you don’t pay child support, for example, just don’t highlight that expense, but your spouse’s income is there to include, if you need it.

”It’s linear in concept,” says Sagrillo. A typical 30-minute financial planning session might go something like this:

• Step one: create household expense categories. Some are mandatory like house payments or rents, and others are “disposable” like movies. Click on car insurance it will autopopulate your personal chart of accounts.
• Do the same thing for business expenses. You are Agent, Inc., so you should keep these expenses separate.
• Do a timeline six or twelve months by choosing a start month.
• Load your existing spreadsheet or add new expenses (3 to 5 percent of agents use Quicken, but agents will have the ability to save their expenses to an Excel spreadsheet on their computers. By the way, Century21 will not save your data on their servers.) “We don’t want to be subpoenaed in a divorce,” jokes Sagrillo.
• Figure your anticipated income tax (from an easy drop-down menu) for state and federal taxes. There are also deductions like social security, figured for independent contractors.
• Put in your last year’s take-home commission (Form 1099). Put in total units closed. (60 closed sides is outstanding, a “Centurian agent.”) Sales are logged in by month to give you a handy graphic illustration of when your peak and slow seasons are.
• What do you have to do to get where you want to go? Divided into listing and selling, you can your own prospecting steps, and how much time you should spend on expireds, fsbos, telemarketing, direct mail, etc.
• Now you have an action plan, that you can update with your actual production for an even easier business planning session next year.

”We believe this will be a huge homerun,” says Sagrillo. “In our research, we’ve found it isn’t the software that takes the commission agent to a new level. It is the whole process of production, financial planning and prospecting that will help our 80,000 agents stay in this business. We want to keep them in the system.”

Published: May 23, 2003

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