Let’s talk about your first year in real estate.
If you are a brand new agent, or even if you’re a seasoned agent, these tips can help you have an amazing year in real estate.
Look, it doesn’t even matter what market you’re in. This will work. Here are four things you could do to make it big in your first year in real estate.
We all have a whole bunch of contacts on our phones. I’m not going to have you go through all of them and cold call each one of your contacts. No, there is a little bit of a tactic when it comes to it.
It involves two things:
One is an app called MCBackup Pro. That one allows you to extract everyone from your phone, (iPhone or Android) and it costs around $3 to $4; it’s not very expensive. There are other choices, but that’s the one I use.
When you extract all your contacts you can now go through it on an Excel sheet, and make sure you start categorizing. That’s number two, and the part that all of us miss.
Once you have your contacts on the Excel sheet, your first job is to sort the ones you probably won’t ever put in your CRM. If you are looking for a CRM, I always suggest either starting with the one that your brokerage uses so it is free or at a lower cost. Or look for something inexpensive but great like Follow Up Boss.
Now, here’s how you are going to categorize them: A, B, C, and D.
You probably aren’t going to have any As and Bs in the beginning because most of us are jumping into real estate, coming in from outside of sales or outside of any type of business that requires selling something.
If you are coming from some type of service that requires selling, then you might be able to categorize some of your contacts under As or Bs.
What do these categories mean?
That’s a simple way to categorize your phone contacts.
For the contacts under C, you’re going to pick up the phone and start dialing and say - “Hey, I just got into real estate, and I’m loving this business…” or if you want to put it in a less sales-y manner, ask them how they are doing, and ask “What are you up to?” as a segue to your new real estate business.
Once that gets going, you can ask, “If you ever come across anybody, would you be willing to send them my way if they have any questions about real estate?”
If they say YES, you move them to category B.
This is what you start doing with your Excel sheet. Everything that was exported on your phone using MCBackup Pro, you’re going to be dialing all of the Cs and trying to convert them to Bs.
And between there, you’re going to find somebody that’s going to say they know someone interested in real estate or have questions about real estate, that would be an A.
Many real estate businesses will encourage you to go hard on cold-calling expired leads and FSBOs, or to go door-knocking, and so on.
Nothing is wrong with that.
The thing is, I want you to focus on your strength. You already have a strength coming into this business, and whatever that is, the more you dig into it, the more you can showcase it on social media.
Let me give you an example. One of our new agents has a background in real estate investing. I told them that it is good and we can play into their investing experience by creating a strategy or plan around creating content about something they are already good at, then tying it to real estate, and blasting it on social media.
Now I am talking to you. What are you great at?
Think about it.
What are you good at that people will want to listen to you, want to get to know you, and start trusting your expertise?
That’s the key there.
We’re playing into the social media world. The top five most visited websites in the world are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Tiktok, as of May 2022, is at number 18.
When you create content for social media, you want it to bring value to your audience. And, you want to put new information out consistently, whether that is weekly or daily.
Because you are training your audience to stop and look at what you put out there. It is the same in a newsletter. If you want to take this to the next level and create a newsletter. Take a look at Mailchimp as it is free.
My team put together a great slide for this one a few days ago.
When I’m talking about referrals, I’m talking about companies that can give you online leads. If you close them, all you do is pay the referral companies a percentage, typically 30-40%, but at least it gets you going.
The companies in the picture above are just some of the ones you can go to. There are others you join as well. Do your homework to find referral companies.
Open houses go way back. But after COVID eased out, people wanted to see homes again and the lines went out the door.
If you don’t have a house you have for sale, where can you get open houses?
Check with your brokerage before doing this one: One thing you can try is to look at the MLS to determine which vacant homes are represented by agents who are out of your area. Contact that agent and ask them if you can hold an open house for them.
If you want to go “all in” remember - You are a real estate agent, and you’re new to the business. Do you want to make it big? Then, this is your only job. If you have part-time jobs, awesome. When you are not doing your part-time job this is your only job.
So you have no excuse. If you need to do back-to-back open houses over the weekend, go do it.
Make sure to plan the open house by door knocking around the homes and all the tasks and duties that are required to prepare for an open house.
I want you to do a little bit more than what you’re used to. Because, if you want to succeed in this business where a lot of agents don’t, you have to be proactive. I want you to take action.
This is why I outlined these four things as this is the fastest way to get business.
This is only Part One, we’re gonna dive deeper into this in Part Two.
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