Real Estate Business Plan

We are thrilled to help you build a plan for your real estate goals! We know a good plan of attack will greatly improve your chances of making progress towards your goals, and it will also help you develop yourself as a real estate professional.

The practices you’ll implement in this Business Plan are proven to be successful and we’re excited for you to experience them.

One very important piece of the puzzle is your way of thinking… please pay attention to your mindset. No one is a “born real estate agent.”

Those excelling in the real estate industry have developed a set of practices & habits that enable them to perform at higher levels, and that’s what we want to help you start developing.

Step #1: Goal Setting

Before we can begin setting goals, you must assess your performance last year. Assessing performance helps you understand what transpired over the course of the year. It also helps you focus on lessons learned and where you might want to improve.

Writing down the lessons you’ve learned will help embed these lessons into your memory. That way, you’re less likely to repeat your mistakes or overlook what has worked well for you in the past. 

Even if you’ve never sold any homes before, you’ll want to take this step so you can appreciate the transition you are going through to become a productive, real estate professional.

Use the questions below to help guide you to creating sustainable, measurable, and timely goals.

1. What were your biggest achievements and successes in the last year? If you’re struggling to think of any, pull up your calendar and review your appointments, activities, and notes starting in January.
2. As you look at your calendar, think about what was happening during that period of your life. What were you working on? Who were you meeting with? What appointments did you go on? As you review each month, note any successes or outcomes that happened. Compile this list of accomplishments and successes.
3. What setbacks and obstacles did you encounter? Again, pull up your calendar to identify anything that prevented you from achieving your goals last year. Did you try something new that didn’t work? Why didn’t it work? What were you hoping to achieve last year that you didn’t make progress on?
4. Depending on your personality, you may find it easier or harder to develop this list. Take a break for an hour and come back to this activity. The more thorough you are, the better your overall assessment will be.
5. What lessons did you learn in this past year? What worked well? Why do you speculate that it worked well? What didn’t work so well, and why do you think it didn’t work out?

Now ask yourself what do I want to achieve?

Now we can start setting intentions for our goals. These are preliminary goals! One of the biggest causes of breakdowns is not setting the right goals to start with. If you set goals without using a process to validate and support them, you are relying on “gumption” and willpower. These will work for a short while, but they don’t work over an extended period. 

In this step, we’re going to write down what we THINK we want to achieve. As you write these goals, consider what happened during and how you performed last year. Since this program focuses on real estate goals, the questions for you to answer are about your sales goals. 

Please take a moment to write down what you would like to achieve by answering the following 9 questions.

1. How many transaction sides do you want to complete in the next year? 
2. What is your transaction volume goal? 
3. What is your average sales price goal? 
4. What is your GCI goal? 
5. What percentage of your business do you want to come from buyers versus sellers? 
6. What goals do you have in terms of building up your reputation online and offline? (According to NAR, the number 1 thing clients use to choose their agent is reputation) 
7. What do you want to or need to learn, and how do you want to develop yourself professionally? 
8. How much time off do you want to take? 
9. How many days or hours a week do you want to work? (This question and the previous one are important to identify potential conflict in what we want. We’ll address conflicts later during this program). 

Now that you've made your goals and plans, you need a way to track your progress towards them. Schedule time in your calendar to review your goals and business plan on the 1st and 16th day of each month. When reviewing, update the document and adjust your plans and activities as necessary to achieve your business objectives. 

Step # 2: What's Your Gap Between Your Goals? 

Improving performance requires you identify the gap between the current state and the desired state. Once you’ve measured the distance between the two, you can create plans to close the gap.

In the chart below, put your performance from last year in the Last Year’s Performance Column and intended goals for this year in 2022 Goals & Objectives Column.

Table for Last Year’s Performance and 2022 Goals & Objectives

Now that you can see the gap between where you’ve been and where you want to go, take a moment to reflect on the following questions (write in the space provided):

Have you have identified the skills, resources, systems and people needed to address the gaps between your goals? What are they? List them out specifically here.

What will happen if you achieve your goals? What will be different about your career or your life? Take the time to visualize what life is like when you close the gap between your desired state and current state.

Step #3: Your Plan of Action 

Your chances of achieving your goals will be greatly multiplied if you have a specific plan to address each one. Ideally, you’ll have specific plans to address the gap between your desired and current levels of performance. But you’ll also have plans to address other aspects of your career, such development and learning. 

In this activity, you’ll want to include your plans for marketing, systems development, what you are going to develop, and any other plans you have that will help you achieve your goals. The plans you write here will be your initial drafts. You’ll come back to your plans frequently to update and adjust them. 

In the following table, list out each goal you have and draft a quick plan on how you’re going to achieve the goal. Reflect on whether your plan of attack will be effective… meaning will the plan produce the outcome you want? 

Step #4: Accountability

It’s much easier to stop pursuing a goal or objective if you’re the only person who knows about it. You can increase your commitment to your business goals simply by telling people you know about what you want to achieve. You can get even further accountability by make a public declaration to a group of people you know who are working towards similar outcomes.  

Take a moment right now to share your commitment with everyone in your real estate community. After you’ve shared your goals, read through your colleagues goals and see if there’s an opportunity for you to connect with someone. Does anyone share a similar goal? Ask them their plans for achieving their goals. How does their plan differ from yours? What you can learn from the exchange? 

Step #5: Discover How You're Spending Your Time 

In a typical day or week, do you know how much time you spend working towards your business goals and objectives? If you were to take inventory of how you spent your time, you will likely find opportunities to refocus your energies towards activities that produce results. One way to get tremendous perspective on yourself is to conduct a time study.  

Peter Drucker, the father of management sciences, said one must keep track of one’s time to make sure it’s being spent on the right things. Drucker said there wasn’t value spending time trying to do something right, but rather in spending time on the Right Thing. It’s the lack of time invested in doing the right things that is one of the biggest culprits of falling short on our goals. Time must be spent on the right things… not just doing things right.  

The best way to see how much time you’re spending on the right things is to conduct a Time Study. A time study is simply keeping an inventory of everything you did and for how long in a day. You can do it in 30-minute increments. You’ll want to do it for at least two or three days. Don’t wait for the ideal day to do it. Start now. 

Write down what you’re doing or use apps like Toggl to track your time. Either way, if you keep track of what you do, you’ll see that you can organize your days better and spend more time working on what matters to you. Another interesting dynamic is you’ll find yourself getting more done in less time. This is a form of self-accountability that high achievers use to do more in less time. 

Check out our example below:

Step #6: Turn Your Time Study & Your Goals into Daily Action Steps

Any professional responsible for finding their own business must take proactive steps to organize how they are going to spend their day and their week.

Now that you’ve gone through the Time Study and the Goal Setting process, you likely have found opportunities to improve how you spend your time in order to achieve your goals.  If you want to spend more time on the activities that truly produce results in your business, you must organize your day and week to achieve them.

The best way to do this is to review each day before it starts and schedule activities when you know you can accomplish them. Keep in mind, just because you schedule the time doesn’t mean you’ll do it. If you schedule a hard activity (such as prospecting) at the end of your day when you’re already tired, you will lower the chance of completing the activity. With your fresh insights from the time study, take a look at your calendar and ask yourself the following questions.

• How much time do I need to invest each week in the pursuit of my goals?
  
• Have I scheduled enough time to work on the activities associated with achieving my goals?
  
• What will be my energy levels during the times that I’ve schedule the activities to achieve my goals?
  
• Have I overcommitted myself on too many activities?
  
  

What will I do as a backup plan if I miss a time block of activities? Is there buffer time built into my schedule to make adjustments?

Review your calendar each day and look forward at least one week.

Step #7: Start Right Now 

There’s no time like the present to take action on your goals. The longer you wait to take the first step, the more likely you’ll lose some of the momentum you’ve worked so hard to create by working through this business plan.

Write down 5 steps you’re going to take in the next 24 hours to make progress on your goals.