Establishing a clear real estate agent schedule is the best way to jumpstart your real estate business, regardless of whether you just got your license or are closing 20+ transactions a year.
Seriously—the quicker you get clarity on your schedule, prioritize your schedule, and execute on it every single week…well, the quicker your business will grow!
So, let’s break down HOW to establish a clear real estate agent schedule and follow it to get the most out of your business.
Define Your Work Time
Just as you would expect a work schedule with a typical w2 employment, you should expect to follow one as an entrepreneur. Treat your business as what it is—a BUSINESS!
Define your work days and the hours you’re going to work. For example, are you working Monday? Okay, from when to when? 9am-3pm? Perfect! Note it in your calendar with reminders set for 15 minutes before work starts. Seriously…you don’t want to be late for work.
Now, schedule your entire week and add up all your hours to determine how many you’ll be working in total. This will obviously depend on your business strategy, what brokerage you’re with, how many clients and appointments you have, etc. Some of you will have 20 hours, some 30 hours, some 50 hours—it all depends.
Pro Tip:
Now, hundreds of agents have joined my team with Agent First Group and we work one on one to create this schedule. So, I have a pro tip gained from tons of experience here, and this is it:
Cut your time by 20%. That means if you schedule 50 hours, you’re actually going to plan on working 40. If you schedule 20 hours, plan on working 16.
The truth is, when you go through this initial exercise, you’re going to overestimate how much you’ll be able to actually work in the short term. This can be discouraging when you get out there and start working fewer hours than you’d planned! I’d much rather you put in less time initially and actually hit your goal than miss it by a mile, get discouraged, and quit.
Ultimately, if you can do this one thing—set your real estate agent schedule for the week—you’re 80% of the way to achieving anything. Seriously, defining a schedule for your business week is a HUGE step in making progress toward your goals because now you know WHEN you’re going to work toward them.
Now, the follow-up question that I get all the time is this: “Okay, I scheduled time to work…but what do I actually do?” If that’s what you’re wondering too, well, great question!
The answer ultimately is this: the majority of your time should be spent on helping more people get to know you. But how? Well, let’s dig into that.
1. Work Your Sphere of Influence (SOI)
This tip is so simple, yet many real estate agents neglect it. However, scheduling this step daily will help you get so much business! Start with the people you know! Get together your list of family, friends, and acquaintances (old coworkers, your dentist, your doctor, etc.) and follow up with them!
First, reach out and check in with them…how are they doing? Have they made any big changes in their lives lately? With answers to those questions, it should be easy enough to turn the subject to real estate and check if they have any needs there.
I have so much more on this SOI strategy but will hold off writing about it unless you’d like me to. Just let me know if you’d like our full SOI strategy.
2. Work 1 Active Lead Generation Strategy
During your ‘work hours’ you need to be working on at least one ACTIVE lead generation strategy. Get to the point of mastery with this one ACTIVE lead generation strategy:
…open houses, cold calling (FSBOs, expireds, non owner occupied homes), door knocking, etc
You get the idea. The main thing is to be out there prospecting actively and not sitting back waiting for leads to come to you. You might not be there yet…so you must be proactive in your business from the start.
Now in the future, you will get leads coming to you if you follow the next step.
3. Build 1 Passive Lead Generation Strategy
In addition to establishing some sort of active lead generation strategy, it’s also important to set up something PASSIVE. Passively generating business is simple—this is a lead generation strategy that you need to create only once and then it builds and with time starts producing clients for you.
….YouTube videos, blogs, Pinterest, etc.
Now the reason we want to add this into your workweek is because every single week you’re building something that scales with time. If you do this right, you’ll soon have your passive lead generation strategy super cede your active lead generation strategy.
4. Post on Social Media
You need to be active on social media, but you don’t need to post on all the social channels every day. Select the social media platform you’re going to live in daily (Monday through Friday), constantly posting updates, responding to comments, sharing stories, etc.
Summary
So, in summary, here is how you’re going to almost instantly build up your lead generation business:
- Define Your Work Time
- The majority of your time should be spent on helping more people get to know you.
- Set Time within your work time to:
- Work Your SOI
- Work 1 Active Lead Generation Strategy
- Build 1 Passive Lead Generation Strategy
- Leverage 1 Social Media Platform
With this simple strategy, you’re going to be raking in those leads in no time!