How do successful real estate agents keep taking their growth to the next level without working themselves to borderline insanity or heavily increasing their marketing spend?
Well, it all comes down to five success principles. These five principles will lead you to where you want to be, no matter where you are.
1. Solve problems for your prospects
As an agent, you’re there to serve your clients interests, needs and desires. Your own agenda of paying the bills and moving up the real estate ladder cannot interfere with the needs of your clients.
When you say the right things to your prospects, they’ll naturally gravitate toward working with you. There’s no need to hard sell or compete on price.
How do you say the right things?
First you have to understand the individual needs of each prospect and then speak to those unique needs on both a business and emotional level. This is one of the most important tools a real estate professional can have in his or her arsenal.
Make a list of all the problems and challenges your ideal prospects have in your market area. Next to each problem, write the solution that is in their best interest — not yours.
You can do it with real examples by documenting how you’ve actually helped a client with the same problem; create an article, report or video, and make it accessible to your targeted audience.
One method that works really well is to post the article or video on your Facebook business page and then boost the post with an ad to your targeted audience.
Instead of trying to sell something, solve something for your prospects, and you’ll immediately see a spike in business.
2. Let everyone know you’re a resource
Once you’re in the habit of saying the right things, you then simply need to rinse and repeat until your reputation proceeds you.
Referrals will come thick and fast, clients will become repeat clients, and soon, you’ll be bringing in a decent clip of business solely from word-of-mouth.
You can demonstrate your local expertise, personality and track record for success in person, on your website and across your social media channels.
Your audience will grow and grow; it will become more engaged with what you say, and before you know it, homeowners won’t even consider working with anyone else.
3. Scale at the right time
If you ask most real estate agents what they need to scale their business, they’ll tell you “more leads!” But that’s only true for those who are already doing six-figures a year and struggling to speak to homeowners outside their network.
Once you have a sales process in place that’s clearly working for you and your clients, then (and only then) do you need to invest in more leads.
Your marketing should be automated and hassle free.
You should develop a system that gives you clear numbers on these three KPIs (key performance indicators):
- Cost to acquire a lead
- Cost to close a lead
- Lifetime value of each client
Once you know exactly how much each lead costs, how many you need to get a client and how much revenue that client will bring you over several moves — you’re now in a position to scale your business freely, and you should never have a problem generating leads ever again.
4. Recognize when you’re plateauing
Every successful real estate agent eventually hits a ceiling.
Agents reach a point where they can’t physically handle any more business without delegating, so their business either stays stagnant, or it grows with the help of a team.
When you reach that stage in your business, you need agents working for you and bringing in money, even when you’re on vacation.
A real estate team will give you the freedom to scale your earnings while you do the same amount of work (or less), and they’ll turn your real estate expertise into a real asset.
5. Commit to finding talent
The better class of agent you can attract, the more residual income you’ll make.
It’s as simple as that.
Attracting top talent that will continually ping you a percentage of their commission checks requires making your office an awesome place to work.
In the short-term, you’ll need to invest time and money into things like training, coaching and lead generation so talent wants to come and work with you.
In the long-term, you’ll see a massive ROI as your army of well-drilled agents does the work you don’t want to do and gives you a share of hundreds of transactions every year.
It’s important to build an ecosystem around your business. With the rapid growth of technology, you need to differentiate yourself. Make the effort to provide value.
Do that by solving problems.
There will always be a need for agents who have the right knowledge to care for their ecosystems and who care about their clients before getting paid.
Afra Sanjari is the owner of THRIVE Listings in Orange County, California. Follow him on Facebook or connect with him on LinkedIn.
