The 4 Things To Make Money and Grow Sales in Real Estate

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you. The good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results. Let's grow together. Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Heddenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Today we're going to dig into the four things you can do to grow your real estate sales. I'm not sure that you know, but 10,000 agents are leaving the business every month and it's not because they don't know what to do necessarily. I believe that they're spending time doing things that aren't moving the needle when it comes to growing your income as a real estate agent. So I'm going to go deep on these four things. And the beauty of it is that there are only four things. There's actually probably 20, 30, 40 things you could do every day as a real estate agent, but only four that will make you the kind of money that I know you want to make. And this is market independent, right? So I grew up in the great recession years. This is 2008 is when it really kicked in in like September, October. That was my first full year in real estate. I sold 44 homes that year. The part time turned full time administrator. Launched my team late in 2009, went on to Five years later, 10x the number of transactions, 453 in a single year. I had 10 producing agents at the time and I was able to work one day a week when I was in town, which is about 40 or 42 days. So the reason for me telling you that is that the way I was able to get productive as a solo agent and the way I was able to get agents on my team selling at a minimum three to four transactions per month. Some of our agents were selling over a hundred transactions per month. It came down to structuring my time around these four things. Literally time blocking in my calendar that these are the only four things I'm going to focus on. And then when I scaled my team, I didn't let them do all the things that real estate agents do that aren't dollar productive. Right. Think of all the things you could do as a real estate agent. You know, you can get lost in social media. You can run business errands and, you know, attend closings and show homes and design brochures and spend time on social media designing an Instagram post or whatever. There's all these things you could get involved in, but very, very few will make you the kind of money that I know you want to make. There's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt right now in the real estate market. We call this fud. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. The headlines will have you believe that the market is imploding, that foreclosures are up 400% compared to this month last year. Right. The challenge is, is that there were like four foreclosures, you know, this year, last month or last year, this month. And they're comparing it to like a statistic that is meaningless. We're still way, way, way lower than what a normal amount of foreclosures are. So you'll read these headlines that are meant to get eyeballs glued on them and if you let them, they will impact you in the great recession years. And I want to tee this up properly because this is a squirrely time in real estate right now. In my market we went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents. I was able to out produce the first firm I was with, I sold 27 homes in 10 months. I was the top producing agents out of agent, out of 20 agents in my first 10 months in real estate. I went on to go to ReMax and then ReMax, Keller Williams Independent and then Exp. But I was able to ignore what was going on in the market and decide for myself the kind of results that I wanted to have in my real estate business. So don't let the headlines get you down. That is the key. So in terms of why this topic matters and the topic broadly is like, what are the things you can do to grow your real estate sales despite the real estate market? Like I said, there's only four. It matters because I want you to kick the crap out of this real estate market. Right? There are agents getting out of the business, There are agents that are going to survive. And we want you, I want you to be in a group of agents that absolutely thrive and dominate their respective markets. Right? That's what I want from you. That's why I do what I do at this point. I'm a self proclaimed, I'm not even sure it's a real title, but I call myself a business freedom expert and focusing on these four things will Give you the time and, and freedom in your business that you're looking for. That's what I'm after for you. So let's, let's get after it here. So there are four things and there's an acronym that's going to help you remember these things. It's P L A N. The P and the L are what I call new business development. So there's only. And the acronym is, it's a little, I'm just going to tell you the acronym so at least you can remember it. It's prospecting, lead follow up appointments and negotiating deals. And let me unpack it because I want you to understand. So the P is prospecting. That's the first part of what I call new business development. New business development is lead generation or prospecting. The P and lead follow up which is the L in the P L A N New business development. In terms of lead generation or prospecting. This is doing what you do to have conversations with your sphere or fizbos expires if you're a circle prospector. I was never much of a cold caller but I know people still get circle prospecting new work, which sort of blows my mind. Whether you're following on open following up on open house leads or you're you do home search leads or you can do giveaways on social media. Those are working like gangbusters. Now you could have people call in to enter into a raffle and you're asking for them referrals. Anything you do to have a two way conversation with a decision making adult about real estate, that is prospecting or what we call lead generation. Right. You're just looking to have as many conversations as possible every day and turn those conversations either into nurtures or into appointments. That's the goal. Most agents that will struggle to survive or get out of the business, they're not even in the game. They're not tracking this simple, simple metric of meaningful contacts. The leadingest indicator of your success is the amount of time you spend every day in this prospecting or lead generation activity. And the metric we track is just the number of meaningful conversations you have every day. The reality is if you're not achieving your goals in terms of your income, the amount of sales you're making in real estate and, and this is true if you're leading agents had a call today with a guy that leads four agents and he has no tracking or accountability in place for any of his agents. I'm like, you don't even know if they're having Conversations in a day. He's like, no, we don't have anything in place. I'm like, holy cow. Like, I'm like the only thing you need to do is go to your agent, say hey listen, I'm going to do this thing, I want you guys to do it with me. We're going to start tracking our meaningful conversations. This is a conversation with someone that you haven't talked to, you're not in an active nurture sequence with about real estate. So a decision making adult could be calling your sphere and catching up for a split second and then saying, hey listen Sally, you know the market is squirrely right now. There's no inventory. Who do you know that might be looking to sell their home? That counts as a meaningful conversation, right? You do that 20 to 25 times in a day. You ask that question 20 to 25 times a day, you will be massively successful in real estate. Typically this is a three hour time block in your calendar. First part a day is the best time of day. If you've ever read the book Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy, Eat the frog. The frog is prospecting, the first aspect of new business development. So that's the P, the L is lead follow up. It's the second, even more crucial activity, but a totally different time block in your calendar. Most of your meaningful conversations, the first part of new business development, the prospecting, they will not lead into appointments. You will not be setting appointments with 90 to 95% of people that you talk to. Right. So most of those are going to turn into nurtures where you're sending some sort of item of value, whether it's a market update monthly or it's like topics videos about real estate. We send, typically we'll do a market update video screen share based and two sort of informative value add topics about real estate to our database. Then we do a bunch of giveaways and we call the database four times a year end around giveaways or we do voicemail drops. So we have like 58 to 62 touches in our, in our touch program for the database. So your goal is to take those initial conversations, put them into your database marketing machine. Right. We've got a blueprint laid out for that but have those follow up conversations. So that's lead follow up. That's like Maybe there's a 15 minute break after prospecting and then you do at least a 60 minute time block for lead follow up. This is follow up conversations with folks that weren't ready to meet either their buyer leads or seller leads. Right. So that's the second. That's literally the third is appointments. But these are very specific kind of appointments. In real estate B school we call these consultations. This is when you're sitting down with a buyer for the first time or a seller for the first time and you're presenting your services to them. That's the only appointment where we're looking to set in these prospecting or lead follow up time blocks. Right. So typically your morning is time blocked with new business development and you have two or three appointment time blocks in the afternoon. You're looking to fill those appointment time blocks as you're in your new business development activities. So very, very straightforward. And if you don't fill those consultation or appointment time blocks in your calendar, you can either double down on new business development or you could. There's actually, there's a bonus on this one. There's actually five. There's S, P, L, A N S. It's systems work. But I'll get to that in a minute. If you don't have a consultation or an appointment booked for the afternoon, you're either working on your business, which is building systems, or you're doubling down on new business development and you're just using those time time blocks to generate more business. Because if you don't have appointments then you don't get to like just go home at that point. Right. We're going to. This market will not allow for agents to be successful that are going to check out at 1 or 2pm because they don't have any appointments for the rest of the day. Right. That's not what we do if we want to crush this market. So that's the third thing. Appointments. The fourth is negotiate deals, not negotiate appraisals, not negotiate repair agreements. This is getting buyers and sellers under contract. Yes, it's valuable to hold a deal together with repair negotiations and appraisal negotiations. But honestly that's not a highly dollar productive activity. We could hire really skilled transaction coordinators that can handle those with client care in mind for 25, 30, $40 per hour. You know, I was able to make over $3,000 an hour my real estate business because I got out of all those aspects. Um, so negotiating deals, putting buyers under contract or sellers under contract. The fifth and the bonus here is S systems work. So like I said, if you don't have an appointment for the afternoon, the reason I was able to scale my business from 44 transactions as a solo agent, my first full year in 2008 to a handful of years later, 10x the amount of production with 10 agents where I, I made close to a seven figure income from that one business. The reason I was able to do that is that I either went back and did more new business development or I built systems. I was obsessed with building systems. And some of you may not even realize what it means to build a system. Like what kind of systems are you talking about? It's our buyer consultation system, our listing consultation system. It's our buyer packets, our listing packets, our follow up text and email sequences are database blueprint. You know, how do you structure these monthly market overviews you go Facebook live, how do you structure the videos you send out? You know, what does any direct mail to the database look like? Expireds and fizbos are going to come back at some point. Like what's a direct response system for those? There's all these client care systems. We have client care as a lead gen lever where every client you work with, the goal is to get two closings from that client just because of the way we handle that transaction from a knock their socks off Ritz Carlton experience. So client care is a legion lever. That's a system, right? So there's so many systems you can put in place that will allow you the leverage to be able to grow your business without you putting more hours in. So the bonus, I guess there's actually five things but the bonus was systems. So prospecting, which I call lead generation, lead follow up appointments or consultations, negotiating buyers and sellers under contract, not appraisals or repair negotiations and systems building systems in the business, those are the five things that will make you money in real estate. If you get out of your own way, you have to get out of your own way. Give yourself some grace. There's no shame, there's no blame for where you are in your journey. You just have to make the decision to do something different going forward. So I've got more deep dive training that I can do on this. We've actually done it in our free Facebook room group. It's called the Time Freedom system. If you go to Facebook and search up in groups, real estate, business builders, you can join that group. It's completely free. I've got like 40 or so free trainings in that group that you can go find the Time Freedom system. But if you know you want to take a next step with real estate B school specifically, all we can offer you is a free conversation about your system. We call about your business. We call these business growth assessments. So a BGA go to r e b s growth assessment dot com. That's r e b s growth assessment dotcom and book in a call. We're going to talk about where you are right now, where you want to be in the future and what's holding you back. And if we can help you, we'll talk about it. If we can't, that's okay, too. So much love, much respect. We'll see you on the next episode. Be good.