As a real estate agent, one of the most important challenges you need to face up to is managing growth. Growth can be tough to get right when you are starting out, but even if you’ve been around for years you might find it hard to expand into new areas.
Here are some useful tips to make the process of growing a lot easier as you move forward.
1. Improve time management
First off, you will need to become much more efficient with your time. That can be tough, but it’s important that you use modern software options to help improve how much of your time you are using. From using a mortgage repayment calculator to a project management tool, you can stay on top of your day-to-day challenges much easier and take your business to the next level with the help of this kind of software.
Tip: One of the best ways to improve your time management as a real estate agent is to use a CRM like Daylite. Daylite is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) and project management tool that should make it much easier for you to get things done quickly. It’s useful for all small businesses, but it’s especially useful for real estate agents as it’s great for setting up meetings, arranging follow-ups, leaving call notes and preparing checklists. If you find that your day is often quite chaotic, a tool like Daylite will help to solve that.
2. Email every single lead
Many real estate agents will build up a lead, and then do nothing to help further that lead or help them to build up more interest in the process. With that in mind, we recommend that you take a look at emailing every lead that you can.
A quick follow-up email can do a lot to show them how keen you are to help them out. While this can be tough to get right, it’s going to be very important to help you make the most of every lead, showing them that you are the professional they can rely upon.
Tip: If you need helping staying on top of your follow-ups, Daylite can help remind you when to follow up. Check out this tutorial to stay on top of follow-ups.
3. Keep buying an investment property all the time
Next, make sure that you are always investing in a new property. One of the best ways to keep your business growing is to keep buying new investment properties. These can be used to help strengthen your portfolio and give you a new set of options when it comes to raising capital.
If you are serious about building up your business, then having an investment property sitting there that you can then use to your advantage is naturally going to be very useful, especially when you’re starting out.
4. Sell an investment property when needed
Of course, don’t feel like you need to hold onto that property. You could always sell an investment property when needed, using that to really help empower yourself when you need to raise capital quickly. It can be tempting to just hold onto all of those investments, but there’s wisdom in selling when you need to.
5. Use the proper tools
You should look to make better decisions with regards to your real estate investment tools and property management software. There are many good real estate investment tools and property management software out there, many of which should be very useful to your long-term prosperity. From the likes of DealMachine to HouseCanary and even Rootstock, you have many useful tools that you pick and pull from on the real estate market.
Each of these will be useful to help you build a more cohesive strategy for your business. With that in mind, you should be able to easily reduce the amount of challenges required in any investment you make.
6. Build new relationships
It’s recommended that you spend as much time as you can networking with others in the real estate industry, too. for example, you should look to build relationships with professional estate attorneys, as they might be able to get you access to better value properties and help you to get in ahead of the competition.
The more friends you can build who are in the real estate industry, the better. Having friends in the industry, particularly attorneys, can help you to settle quick and cost-effective sales as they might have creditors who are in need of a quick payment, meaning a faster and simpler sale.
7. Don’t be afraid of social media
Many realtors will just avoid using social media, but it’s one of the biggest mistakes that you could make. Social media helps you to build up your visibility and your authority. By connecting with people on social media who you could help out, you can more readily advertise everything that you have to offer on a platform where people are always looking for helpful information.
Don’t just see social media as an advertising gimmick. From helping you to answer questions to advertising your latest properties to a wider and active audience, social media has many benefits that you can gain from.
About the author:
Sean Price is a community manager at RightSwitch, he has a passion for web design and user experience and when not working enjoys rugby, cycling and swimming.