1. TREAT THIS LIKE A BUSINESS - Because it is a business. Starting
out, you won’t have 50 people a day calling you on your first little newspaper ad.
You’ll need to be farming your area and marketing your business and as your
business grows, you will have more people calling. You need to have a specific
plan of attack and follow that plan each day, and revise the plan every few months
as the RE landscape changes.
2. MANAGE YOUR TIME - Manage your time wisely by only dealing
with motivated sellers, clearly defining your target market, and minimizing your
distractions during the day.
Use a simple phone interview script to weed out unmotivated sellers and
make sure that every time you spend time to go see a home, you have the potential
to make the deal happen. Don’t waste your time and the sellers’ time talking about
a house and walking through it only to find out you are several thousand dollars
apart on price.
Also, clearly define your target market. Unless you have a potentially
GREAT deal, don’t spend your time driving across country to look at a house.
This is one of the lessons I learned the hard way.
Lastly, minimize distractions - Working for yourself you can have a ton of
little things that tie up a lot of your day. Run errands one time a day and prioritize
them so you spend as little time on the road as possible. Get a GPS system if you
are not good with maps. Maximize every minute of your workday so you can
spend the most amount of time with your family and friends during non-working
hours.
3. VALUE YOUR POWER TEAM - Recognize the value of each person
on your power team and make sure they know how much you appreciate them.
They are your lifeblood and it takes time to develop a close relationship with the
people on your power team.
4. KEEP CASH RESERVES - You can’t operate unless you have enough
cash on hand to keep your business running. You can talk to your banker about
small business loans and lines of credit to cover your times of cash shortages.
5. DON’T CUT CORNERS - Don’t cut corners with any of your properties.
Figure in your costs to get the proper insurance policy and general liability policy.
Pay your people to make all of your properties safe. IN SHORT - DON’T BE A
SLUMLORD. The bad PR that you will receive from being a slumlord will
outweigh all the short-term profits if you don’t treat your properties and your
people right.
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