Imagine Your Real Estate Business Five Years from Now

Written by Realty Times Staff Posted On Thursday, 12 March 2020 05:00

My business as a real estate speaker, trainer, and coach primarily involves working with people who are seasoned, successful veterans in our industry. Most of the people I work with have at least seven years of experience in our business, and many of them have 15-30 years or more of their time invested in our industry.

So what can happen then sometimes is a person who has 10-20 or more years of experience in real estate can sometimes be mulling over questions and issues that are really more appropriate ones for someone with far less experience in the business. This is a common result from people learning our business a particular way when they're brand new in it, and then not updating their approaches many years later when they're far more successful.

As an example, a number of my clients have told me recently that they need to stop working on smaller transactions -- and that they find themselves sometimes working on transactions where the commission they'll be paid is far less than what their time is now worth. But they somehow constantly have an abundance of smaller transactions coming their way, and they find it difficult to say "No" to people.

Because of the nature of our business, it's very easy to get wrapped-up in the activity that's right in front of our faces, and cost ourselves a lot of money in the process, too. But being busy doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing the activities that will maximize your income, but sometimes we can delude ourselves into thinking that this is the case. Despite the fact that most agents in a real estate office will look busy throughout the day, the ones making the most money year-after-year are busy doing far more productive activities than everyone else. And these activities normally don't involve wasting their time working on smaller transactions.

With this in mind, an exercise that I've given to a number of my coaching clients recently is asking them to describe what they want their life to be like five years from now. I suggest that they ask themselves questions like, "What will you be doing with your time?" And, "What activities will you be focused on doing in your business?"

While an exercise like this may sound simple, the results it can lead one to can be quite profound. In summary, it can lead you to easily identifying the activities you're now doing that are completely wasting your time.

When you see yourself five years from now doing business at a much higher level, the activities you're now doing that are incompatible with this new higher level become very apparent to you, and you realize that you really need to stop doing these activities NOW.

Sometimes this will involve no longer working with people on a nonexclusive basis, sometimes it involves no longer working with people you don't enjoy working with, and sometimes it means from now on you'll only work on transactions that meet a new minimum level of anticipated commission for you.

Whatever the case, moving to the next level of production in your business involves letting go of your less productive activities and embracing new activities that will make you more money. And with this in mind I recommend that you spend 15 minutes to an hour describing what you want your business to be like five years from now. Consider asking yourself questions like:

 

  • What kind of clients will I be working with?

     

  • What kind of transactions will I be working on?

     

  • What will the minimum or average commission amount be on the transactions I'm closing?

     

  • Will I only be working with people on an exclusive basis?

 

And if your game plan in five years involves investing in and/or developing properties, ask what you'll now be doing in this arena also.

If we don't watch out for ourselves, we can get wrapped-up in doing activities and working on transactions that served us well in our early days in the business, but continuing to do so now is no longer appropriate. And if we don't recognize this and implement the appropriate changes, we can end up paying for it dearly.

But when we clearly identify the person we want to become in our industry and how we envision spending our time and energy five years from now, the unproductive activities that are holding us back from this new level will often jump right out at us, making it easier to remove them and replace them with new activities that will propel us forward in the direction of the agent we really want to become.

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