If you're an agent who's been in the business for awhile you understand the value in continually finding solid new prospects to work with. And if you're relatively new in the business, finding new prospects probably occupies a fair amount of your time right now.

But oftentimes when agents get busy working on transactions, they drop out doing the very activities that led them to obtaining these transactions in the first place. In situations like these, agents can get wrapped-up in being busy rather than proactively doing what will have them maximize their income.

Once you're busy working on a number of transactions, continuing with your prospecting is important because:

1. There is a lag time between doing your prospecting, locating qualified prospects to work with, and successfully closing transactions with them. So if you drop out your prospecting and/or your follow-up with new prospects, you'll experience a gap in commissions in the weeks and months ahead.

2. The more successful you are at continually locating great new prospects to work with, the less time you'll have for working on marginal transactions, and the more money you'll make on the transactions that you close.

What happens here is when you continue your prospecting when you're already busy, you'll identify new leads that represent even better opportunities than some of the ones you're currently working on. So you can now choose to work on these new opportunities, or have them replace some of the less desirable opportunities you're spending your time on.

Don't allow yourself to get wrapped-up in the myth that you're now too busy to prospect and continue identifying great new people to work with. If you knew of every lead that existed in your territory right now, you'd be replacing some of the people you're currently working with some of these other people you'd really prefer to be working with. When you're continually prospecting no matter how busy you are, you'll be working with the best prospects and opportunities in your area, and you'll continually be increasing the amount of commissions you earn every single year.

Published: January 5, 2005

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Jim Gillespie, Ph.D., is America's Premier Real Estate Coach℠. He has over 20 years of experience in real estate sales and is a past president of three different real estate companies. His FREE real estate E-newsletter with tips and creative ideas to help agents make more money is now read by over 35,000 agents nationwide. You can subscribe to his FREE E-newsletter by visiting RealEstateSalesCoach.com or contact him at Jim@RealEstateSalesCoach.com.