If you are still visiting ActiveRain, I'm going to assume that you've decided to commit to another year in real estate. Otherwise there isn't much point in sticking around through the slow fall and winter seasons only to leave at the start of 2009, before the next spring bounce. With respect to the bubble bloggers, many of whom I read on a daily basis, there is always a spring bounce relative to the rest of the year, even in a dismal market. If you have decided to stick around, you'd better have a marketing plan, because this year is going to be different.

Since 2005, brokers have adapted to the slowing market by playing the numbers game. Just as agents need contacts to generate prospects to generate clients, brokers need agents to generate clients to generate commission checks. When agent productivity started to fall, many brokers responded by bringing in more agents. Recruiting is always important for brokers and sales managers, but over the past few years there has been a higher premium on recruiting. Even unproductive agents were being offered generous splits in a desperate attempt to increase revenues to cover overhead.

We're going to see a change over the next few months as brokers recognize the need to adapt their business model and reduce their overhead. We're going to see more accountability programs as the number of available desks and the amount of available overhead for agent expenses shrinks to fit the decreased number of available transactions. In some cases this may be due to office closures or downsizing, but in other cases brokers will simply come to the realization that taking a "lean and mean" approach is more practical than the "panning for gold" volume approach of recent years.

This means that agents will have to have a marketing plan, not just a license or a track record. How many people are in your database? How are you engaging the people in your database? How are you adding new people to your database? How do you present yourself to your clients and prospects? What is your competitive advantage? I've known veteran agents who had less than 100 people in their database and were adding only one or two new names per month. That's not going to be good enough to make it through the next year or two, even if you have your own broker's license.

This is the year brokers start running out of patience, money, or both. This is the year recruiting standards rise above the level of having a current license and being able to fog up a mirror. This is the year that if you don't have a marketing plan, you'd better start working on one, because pretty soon you're going to have to compete for desk space.  I'll be discussing a variety of marketing plans this week in my local blog.

Thanks for reading!

Frank Jewett