I watch a lot of short sale real estate agents, investors, and other business people struggling to stay on top of all the many details in running a successful business.
Moving a short sale business from a start-up or even a stumbling position to an income-producing successful business is all about conforming your business to a successful model and then
creating systems that are either automated, performed by "trained monkeys", or minimize the amount of time taking care of the business of business.
Short sale Systems, or any system for that matter consists of people, technology, checklists, or procedures. Anytime you find yourself getting bogged down, you create a system to open up the bottleneck.
One way to obtain more results from short sales with less time and effort is to leverage resources. That means that you use other people to do more of what you do now. In your real estate short sale business this, of course, could refer to an assistant. The assistant will do work for less cost than you do yourself. The idea with leveraging the use of assistants is to delegate everything that does not require your skills to perform to the assistant.
Can't afford an assistant? If you cannot afford a full time short sale assistant, considering paying another agent who has an assistant for some hours for your work. Another alternative is to get together with other struggling agents and start a joint venture and share the leveraging expense of an assistant.
Leveraging means more than getting an assistant. Leveraging applies to using other firms as well. For example, leveraging TheLawsonGroup Mediation Services would allow you to focus on listings and just turn 
your short sales over to us to deal with the banks. Many of you are already using us to leverage your own success. There is no cost to you nor do our fees come out of your broker commissions.
There is another way for leveraging other people. I know several successful short sale agents who use other agents to do the detail work and take a negotiated referral fee. One of these agents made over $120,000 last year solely from referrals. She limits her time almost exclusively to marketing.
Leveraging, however, consists of technology as well. Our firm uses Google Apps Intranet connected to our firm website. This intranet service provides excellent processing and categorizing of emails, a great calendar integrated with the task list, 
and the ability to store all of your documents, and even create them, online. For teams, it allows messaging and chat, checking each others' calendars, and both public and private access to documents. When I was selling real estate (both normal sales and short sales) there was a lot of pressure to pay for those online database systems, but I found that I could do most everything with Outlook, and with no monthly cost. Now, with Google Apps, you can do most of that on the intranet.
One great feature of Google Apps is that all of my emails can be viewed from my Blackberry (many of you already have that) and my calendar is sync'd with my blackberry when changes are entered.
However, when I coach real estate businesses, the most common error I find is the improper use of organization and time. I wrote an article on this some time ago. I did not think that I needed training in time management --- until I received training in time management. Now I understand it to be absolutely essential
in moving a business into a successful enterprise. Leveraging your time is an important aspect of a short sale business.
For a free time management summary with forms, send an email to Info@LawsonGroupMediation.com and insert in the subject field: "Time Management".
For those of you who are submitting your own short sale packages to servicing lenders, it is imperative to be leveraging systems to cut your time. For example, we perform activities most agents do not do. We complete a document review when submitted to us by agents (setting up the file and reviewing the documents until complete accumulates approximately 1 hour). We then perform both a legal analysis and a market analysis that accumulates another approximately 1 hour. Drafting the short sale proposal and submitting it to the lender will add about another 1 hour. We have very specific times when we call the lenders, so we spend very little time on the phone with them. Even with lenders who are problematic we have efficient systems to keep the time to a minimum. To perform all of these additional activities increases the likelihood of approval, so we are leveraging technology, procedures, and checklists to make it happen and keep our costs low.
For those of you who are not yet successful, I hope this article has started you thinking creatively to leverage anything around you that will save you time, produce greater results, and make your short sale business a success. If you need help, we are here and available to provide you with whatever assistance you need.
Best wishes,
Ken Lawson, JD
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