3 Tips for Project Management for Real Estate Agents using Processes & Templates

I touch and that's just part of your day to day verbal conversations or emailed conversations. If you're thinking, oh that sounds great, I'd love to do that, but I always forget to tell people this when I send off those emails or shoot a quick text, you might want to check out the sponsor of today's video. I'm going to jump in with a quick word of the sponsor of today's video. Textexpander. If you find yourself retyping information or having templates across a ton of different software that you use, you might want to check out textexpander both for yourself and and for your team. For example, here I've defined an example email to kick off a client engagement. Inside my textexpander account, I've defined variables that are fill in the blank here, dropdown fields, and even optional sections that I include or not include based on my preferences. This is like a super sized template creation thing and it follows me everywhere whether I'm inside my work management software or inside my email or just in a notepad. If I type the command in this case example right here you can see that defined if I hit a spacebar after this bam, a pop up appears prompting me to fill in the customized information in this case John Doe's name, which service it is, and whether or not I want to add that reminder. And then we'll have that added right into my email or notepad or wherever else I'm normally typing. Whether you're working by yourself or with a team, standardizing this kind of communication can be a huge time saver to ensure you're not constantly checking for typos or repeating yourself. And of course, this is really just the beginning if you want to spend less time typing and more time actually getting things done. Check out the link in the description below for more information about textexpander. With that, back to the video. All right, so the second tip I have for how to systemize that real estate agent workflow would be to reuse your work. Basically, we want to explore different ways to turn our time expenses, the things we're spending time on, and turn them into time investments. If I could make some kind of stretch of a real estate analogy here, which is we wanna make sure we're paying the principal and not the interest. Bit of a reach of a metaphor there, but let's just imagine we are in a situation where a client is a first time home buyer. I'm using that just because it's an easy example. They have never bought a house before they're completely new, they're asking you so many questions, blowing up your phone and you're like oh boy, here we go. First time home buyers, let's do this. You have two choices. You could go ahead and write detailed text messages back to this customer. You could have more meetings with them. You could guide them through everything they need to know about buying a home. The first time doing so would be a one time spend of your time that you're not going to get back and that customer would be delighted. Or, or you could do option two. Option two would be the same situation, but rather than that customer blowing up your phone and you giving them as much information as you can as they ask it, option two would be you choosing to invest your time in a reusable resource that's unique to you. In this example, you want to take every question that new first time home buyer is going to ask you. Things like what kind of loan should I have, what my bud budget should be, how do I figure out what I can afford? Whatever those questions are and put them in a document word for word. Use their words as much as you can, but try to make them coherent thoughts and then write out answers. Same amount of work as texting that person back. But you're gonna put this in something like a PDF or website page or a blog post and then you are gonna send this published resource to your client. You made it just for them, but it's now published so you can reuse it hundreds of times to come. This first time home buyers Guide built by Jill's Real Estate is something you could then reuse for every new first time home buyer you're working with as an additional value add. It's actually one of the examples I talk about up in this video about using process to actually raise your prices or to deliver a more premium experience. Beyond the first time home buyers example, you could also create reusable resources like what to expect when you list with me FAQ articles like this to help people understand your value add. The creation of these reusable resources, even if they're just shared amongst your current and future clients, is an investment because you're spending the time once and getting value, generating value, delivering value from these resources every single time they're used. In fact, that's actually how this YouTube channel started. In case you didn't know, I started creating YouTube tutorials for my clients unlisted. Just publish them up here because I thought it would be faster and an easier way to get file hosting and look what happened it does not only help my clients on a reusable basis, but has now become a marketing channel for us, which it's a little bonus nugget. And actually we could just call that a secondary pro tip for this video. If you do this well enough of investing your time, not only can it help with fulfillment, making it go smoother, save you time in that journey, but also recycle the content, it can become marketing to help you differentiate yourself and add value to your existing audience, whether that's just the people in your neighborhood, your networking group, friends, whomever. By having these resources, you're positioning yourself in a positive way and also teasing what it's like to actually work with you. Now for our third and final way to inject some process goodness into your real estate agent workflow. I'm just going to call this process your mistakes because I'm not really sure what else to call it. Basically, remember in step one where we created that process chart and we were like, here's our map of what's happening. This is our process map. How to go from becoming a client to leaving as a client. Remember that? Yeah. Well, when I use this exercise with clients or on workshops, you know, I've done that same model with thousands of people now and 90 some percent of them do that and they're like, wow, I'm learning something. This, this helps me understand what all I need to do. And then they never touch it again. Boggles them to me. For this final step, I want you to be the 10% that doesn't do that. Look at that piece of paper. And the next time you make a mistake or you learn something new, go back to that piece of paper. That's it. I'm going to give you three examples, in fact, of how to do this, because I feel like it's just a skill of process improvement that folks just aren't practicing for some silly reason. Example number one is, let's say you're in a real estate investor meetup. Maybe you are a commercial focused real estate agent. You're always networking with investors. You love that demographic. And you hear some other agent in that networking group say how they have had so much luck abandoning the whole concept of pop buys and replacing them with video messages using a software like Dubb. And if you guys don't know about that, we'll have the link in the description below. And this Dubb tool, they say, is just such a great way for them to stay engaged with their customers in a more modern and scalable format. Well, if you hear this information and it's something that agrees with your view of how you want your business to run. You should go back to that process map and look for any time you you have pop buys in your sales or fulfillment process. Replace one instead of doing pop buys three times. Sounds like Popeye, but pop buys three times a year. Maybe you only do it twice a year and once a year you send a video instead and watch the results. That would be one way to take something that you've learned or seen or observed. Not just consuming it, but actually practicing it. Same thing goes for YouTube for that matter. Let's just say you're watching a YouTube video like this one and you hear some words. Weird person with too many cowlicks on YouTube say that you should be telling your customers what is going to happen next at every touch point. I can think of maybe one time recently you've heard that. Well, if you want to practice that and implement that into your process, go back to step one, that first piece, and add a step that says at the end of this meeting, tell them what happens next. Send an email and tell them what happens next. Send them a text of what happens next. Add steps that prompt you to do this action into your actual process. In fact, one great way to do that would actually be to use the software that's the sponsor of today's video, textexpander. Textexpander is fabulous to make sure that you never forget these pieces because you could actually have it prompt you to add them anytime you use a snippet. It's why I like the tool so much. So if you haven't checked that out again, description below for that link, that would be yet another way that you could practice the the mistake or the gap that you identified and actually fix it moving forward. Let's just say that you just finished a particular transaction that was a nightmare. I think we've all had a nightmare client in our time and you know, that was just the hardest seller you've ever worked with. Everything that could have went wrong went wrong. But the thing that really screwed you over is the loan officer. They went out on vacation for weeks, didn't tell you, and things were just held up. Well, from that experience, I want you to reflect and think, how can we make sure that this doesn't happen again? Could we have a step back in our process to check in with the loan officer? If we don't hear back within 48 hours, could we have a step in our process where you call up the loan officer before you refer them out just to make sure they're actually going to be able to give the quality of service that your client deserves. These are all different ways that you could go back to that first step and build your process so that it's bulletproof and that it can actually handle any kind of curveballs life throws at it. Because if our process is good enough, we shouldn't have many, or hopefully any moments where we're derailed. We've built such a solid, proactive process that we know that if someone's going to work with us, we're going to make sure their house gets sold quickly, efficiently, and with no hiccups along the way. Anything that comes up, we're going to take care of it because we have a process and we know what needs to happen. Speaking of which, actually, that brings me to my third and final pro tip of this video. When it comes to project management in general, even if the ball is not in your court, if you are working as the project manager and as a real estate agent, you are indeed coordinating this transaction, it is always going to be the ball in your court. Even if it's not, it is because ultimately you are the one the client is looking at. Whether your loan officer is out on vacation or your inspector is not answering the phone, or the person who's supposed to be scoping out the property during due diligence just can't make it or got the wrong address. Whatever comes up as the project coordinator, when the ball is in someone's else's court, meaning you're asking them to do something, you still need to watch that ball, make sure they kick it back, right? Follow up, ping. Be prepared. That's the project management skill that I think real estate agents are naturally going to be quite good at. But so many folks don't realize that's part of the job description. Whether you're an agent, an investor, a broker, whatever other title you have, if you are coordinating a portion of the process, that responsibility and stewardship relies on you chasing that ball and making sure you're not just leaving it in the client's court and waiting for them to call you back. No, anything you're giving out to somebody else should have a reminder on your end to follow up if they don't get back to you in a certain number of days. So back to Juan's original question. When you're going to automate a real estate workflow, the first steps are what you see in this video. Once you've defined a rock solid process and have a process for improving the process that makes sense. You can start looking at all opportunities to take segments of that journey and put them on autopilot, have a technology do them for you. But you can't do any of that until this step has been so, so so optimized. The last thing we want to do is automate a crappy process and have more junk happen faster. So we want to get a solid process, do it manually a dozen times, a hundred times, getting it 1% better each time, and once it is there, start automating those steps that are wasting your time. And for more about automations, check out some of the videos on this channel if this topic is interesting to you. If you'd like to see more on this, please do write Part two in the comments below to let me know that you'd like to see a Part two about how to automate this workflow that we talked about here. And if you'd like to go further into this kind of process method of thinking, check out the description of this video. Not only does it have all the links I've mentioned today, but it also has the link to our Process Driven membership, which is how I actually work with clients on documenting what their business does and actually systemizing it within their work management software. That was a weird way to say management, but check that out if you're interested, like and subscribe if you haven't already. And until next time, enjoy the process.