Most real estate clients play Realtor Roulette. They flip through pamphlets, ask a friend, click their iPhone or go to an open house. If you truly want to succeed at Realtor Roulette you need a bullet in every chamber. In other words you need a business plan with a heck of a lot more ammunition than you gave them last year. “Same old” is a direct route to failure and disappointments.
This series of professional strategic business plan design articles can help you finally reach your sales expectations. It may even fill in many of those blanks that the industry courses and broker workshops overlook.
As in any strategic plan the hardest part is the strategic thinking. But like a good physical workout, it takes time, dedication and determination to take your mind into each important functional area of your business, never mind writing it all down.
When it comes to spending time on mental hard work for a business plan, many people would rather spend money at Starbucks. Yet the payoff for even one hour of planning in our industry is truly remarkable. (My broker, Vivian Risi, once said to me, “Jim, get away from your computer and start meeting people.” In less than one hour I planned my route and planned what to say. A one hour door knocking session produced two listing appointments and two listings!)
If you are committed to working real estate full time (as a lifestyle and career), you need to design your functional lifestyle around the marketing of your personal brand within the industry. You need to strategize all the functions you will carry out as a “Living Realtor”. Most of this is actually common sense.
Five-year vision
To get up to speed you might want to educate yourself on the functional components of your business plan listed here. These basic functions will not likely change much over the next decade, so it makes great sense to establish broad parameters for a five-year vision. As you conceptualize your strategic plan and begin to fill in the elements, your confidence in your knowledge and expertise will expand and you will be able to become more purposeful in your lifestyle. After all, the harvest you are planting for your family is worth your time and mental efforts, isn’t it?
What lies ahead for the Canadian real estate market — the Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal real estate markets or any other big market in Canada — should not be a concern for independent contractors in our industry. Toronto may have another year of 100,000 property sales or 200,000 deal ends, but GTA sales reps may only need 10 deals to make the $150,000 in net commissions you need to maintain your family’s present lifestyle and put away some funds for future needs.
In other words, you only need half of one hundredth of one per cent (.0001 per cent) of the market to meet your business plan. It doesn’t matter a whit if the market increases or decreases 20 per cent, there will still be plenty of opportunities to meet your personal goals.
The key to the door is the strategies you deploy that complement your nature and growth aspirations. Canada’s demand for housing units is barely keeping up with immigration and new family formations, so our markets don’t commonly have excess supplies. In fact it is a micro-economic perspective that sales reps need to focus upon in their 2017 business plans.
Every independent contractor without a strategic business plan is unlikely to be more productive than last year. But don’t expect the same results, because our industry is undergoing tremendous competitive change.
Potential clients may be imbedded in their digitized world. New seller real estate services are increasing like fruit flies, team signs are everywhere, direct mail is over flowing blue bins, non real estate companies are trying to collect referral fees for leads, regulation bending by real estate agents is endemic and the major franchisers may soon deploy sophisticated technology to attract clients.
But the best ways to find your 10 or 20 deals haven’t changed much. Direct marketing is focused target marketing, which still relies upon human communications and interactions.
An important component of every business plan is to develop marketing strategies. These should address all eight primary marketing functions and their sub-functions:
Primary marketing functions
- Marketing research
- Product development
- Marketing communications and technology
- Distribution
- Advertising
- Selling
- Public relations
- marketing administrative
Next time we will look into some key real estate marketing research functions: market research, customer research, property research and strategy initiatives.
Ring a doorbell!
Jim Reid is a strategic planning consultant and has been a corporate executive, university and college lecturer, business owner, real estate broker and wilderness canoeist. “Your average Canadian failed entrepreneur, wage slave, divorced former Realtor,” he says. Visit his website, or send him an email.
