With the arrival of fall and winter comes an important milestone for your real estate business: The time to step back, take in your results for this year thus far, and focus on what you’d like to accomplish come 2022. “Right now is the perfect time to start pulling your numbers for the year,” shares Kent Temple, KW MREA: Business Planning Clinic instructor, operating principal, and leader of North Carolina team The Temple Team. “You’re at a nice break – three quarters of the way through the year – and it is easy to figure out ‘OK, based on where I am today, these should be my yearly numbers.’”
In anticipation of the new year, here are nine questions to ask yourself in order to build a stronger business.
Three Questions That Will Get You Started
- What is my average commission amount so far this year?
- What percentage of my business is buyers and what percentage of my business is sellers?
- What are my conversion rates from appointment to agreement and from agreement to closing on the buyer side? What about on the seller side?
“If you know these numbers, you can start building a business plan,” says Temple. “The vast majority of us never ran a business before we went into real estate, so we have to teach ourselves how to act like one.”
Temple suggests looking at a large business, such as Target. They must know how many people walk through their door (the real estate equivalent being your number of appointments), the amount of people that walked in and bought something (how many of those appointments led to a buyer or listing agreement), and the average amount of money a person spends within their store (your average commission amount).
Two Questions to Ask Your Leadership
Whether you are a newer agent, or just someone who hasn’t previously afforded much attention to data, now is the time to gain well-rounded knowledge about what is going on around you. Temple recommends connecting with a leader within your office (if you are a Keller Williams agent within a market center, a productivity coach would be able to help), and ask questions that will help you better understand your office:
- What is the average commission amount in our office?
- In our office, what percentage of agents with my level of expertise work with buyers and what percentage work with sellers?
Four More Questions to Consider
- What lead generation am I currently doing and what is my success rate?
- What am I going to do in the future to generate appointments?
- How am I going to track so that I know when I am being efficient and when I am not, so I can duplicate my successes and minimize my failures?
- How much money do I want to make next year?
Keep the MREA on Hand
As you think through how your business has fared over the past year, and what strategies you can employ for the upcoming year, keep a copy of The Millionaire Real Estate Agent on hand. “Too many people treat the MREA like a novel, but it’s actually a manual,” Temple says. “It should be open on your desk at all times. What I like to do is put the MREA on one side, and The ONE Thing on the other. The ONE Thing helps me figure out what type of life by design I want to have. Then, I go to the MREA to figure out how I’m going to fund it.”
Additional Resources
The Organizational Model: Leverage Your Way to Limitless Success
The Budget Model: Your Path to Profitability
The Lead Generation Model: Your Ultimate Guide to Business Growth