Proper planning for the next 12 months, who are your customers, where are they, and how many customers do you need to be successful.

Any small business owner should have a plan.  As a real estate agent you are a small business owner.  When setting up your plan you should have good insight of what the trends look like for the period that you are planning for and have proper expectations of how much business you need to generate to be successful.

Look at the market trends, what this means is look at who your customers will be and where you’re potential customers will be going.  As I am sure you can imagine, as it was over the last 12 months and it will only increase as technology advances, more and more buyers will go online to search for homes.  Meaning that being able to capture more people online will become that much more important.  Your customer is changing, less baby boomers and more “Generation Y” people (20’s to earlier 30 year olds) will be buying homes.  This means that you will need to understand them and relate to them, people will buy from who they like and trust and people like and trust others like themselves.  Young people use the internet for everything, especially looking for homes.  The idea of going out looking at homes they’ve never seen with an agent seems very foreign to them.  They want to look at homes in their living room and not be bothered (think landing page, if you do not know what that is read my landing page blog).  Staying ahead of this trend is very important, if technology gets too far ahead of you it will be very difficult to catch up.

You must know where they will be looking for homes and have exposure there.  There is a reason that gas stations are on the side of the road and not in the middle of the desert hundreds of miles from the nearest car.  Gas station owners are really good at being where their customers can find them, why is it that so many agents fail to do the same?  From what I have seen technology is scary for most agents, but the industry is trending that way and there are a lot of good sources that can help you learn for free.  Just be patient and do not over think it.  Market on social media outlets, Craigslist, Google, anywhere you can where buyers can find you.

In my opinion, the most important thing when planning your year is knowing how much business you need to generate to set yourself up for success.  I do not mean how many transactions you need to have to make the amount of money you want to make, you should already know that.  I mean knowing how many new active buyers need to be added to your pipeline every month to have that number of transactions.  There is a formula that can be used to figure that out.  For every transaction you want per year you need to generate 1 to 1.5 new leads a month.  This means add good leads, bad leads, referrals, friends, and family members.  Try sending them to your landing page (read my landing page blog) and let your system convert them to the point they are will to work with you.  The more leads you add the more opportunities you will have to be successful. 

Knowing how many customers you need, where to get them, and who they are will give you a solid game plan to reach success.  Remember that most business owners are always planning and studying their customers.  You are running your own business.  You are responsible for your own success and you need to make success for yourself.