Understanding the Real Estate Sales Process

Understanding the Real Estate Sales Process…15 Steps You Must Know To Be Successful

This particular blog can be an entire book. Please note that my goal is to make sure you know the important elements that should be considered to build a successful real estate practice. I believe real estate agents should view themselves as professionals and act like other professionals. An attorney, a CPA, a chiropractor, a doctor and business coaches treat their businesses as being professionals. They refer to it as building a practice. Top real estate professionals start out with the intentions of building a successful real estate practice. This is the group that I am attempting to assist in this blog.

There are many different ways to get listings and many different target markets to approach. For example, you can target the following types of markets:

Residential
Condominiums
Multiple Units (1-4 units)
Multiple Units (5+ units)
Commercial Properties
Lots
Horse Ranches
Bank Owned
FSBOs
Expired Listings
Mobile Homes
Coastal Properties
Luxury Homes
Seniors
Properties Inside a Retirement Plan
Strip Malls
Business Opportunities
New Homes
Land Development
Internet Buyers and Sellers
Plus lots of other distinctions

Each of these markets requires a different approach with respect to how you would differentiate yourself from your competitors. However, the underlying sales process remains the same. As I stated earlier, each step can be written about and analyzed by you in such as way as to an entire book can be completed. For purposes of this blog, I want to make sure you know what the 15 steps are and then, it is more important for you to think about what each of those steps mean to you. So if I were you, I make some notes on a piece of paper so you can develop a plan for yourself. It is important that you understand the 15 steps to initially developing a successful business model for your real estate career:

Step 1: What do you really want to get accomplished?
Step 2: How are you going to get to where you want to be?
Step 3: Assessing your own abilities & resources accurately!
Step 4: What current activities are you going to give up?
Step 5: You must interrupt your own pattern.
Step 6: Prepare Your Initial Presentation Materials
Step 7: Prepare Listing Appointment Strategy & Tactics
Step 8: Decide Where You Will Attempt To Get Business
Step 9: Start Prospecting Immediately & Stay Consistent
Step 10: Set and Go On Listing Appointments
Step 11: Make Appropriate Adjustments To Your Marketing Materials and Business Systems
Step 12: Learn How To Properly Hold An Open House
Step 13: Learn How To Get Offers Accepted
Step 14: Systematize All Other Parts Of Your Business
Step 15: Implement A Simple Client For Life Program

The very first thing you must do is DECIDE how you plan on developing leads so you can actually get to do your listing presentation so you can obtain a listing. This discussion already assumes that you have already made the decision to focus your efforts on primarily working with sellers versus working with buyers. Over the course of your career, the ratios will vary but, most top agents wind up with a ratio of 70% to 80% working with sellers and 20% to 30% with buyers.

An important point to understand is that if you spend your efforts prospecting for listings, you will find buyers to work with because of your listing prospecting efforts (i.e., open houses, sign calls on your listings, referrals, door knocking, website lead generation, etc.).

With that said, there are two basic ways to generate listing leads, the Free-Way and the Pay-Way. The Free-Way will usually consist of three activities. They are telephone prospecting to friends/associates to ask for referrals, door-knocking or a “planned talking to everyone within five feet of you” strategy. The Pay-Way consists of some consistent monthly monetary commitment to advertise/market yourself to get people to call you to act as their agent.

Initially, the dilemma that many agents have is that they are usually “afraid” or ‘lack the self-confidence” to do the Free-Way method of generating new business and they don’t have a lot of financial resources to generate the leads fast enough so that they can sustain themselves in building their real estate practice.

Honestly, the only solution to this dilemma is for the agent to “roll up their sleeves” and just go to work AND to start improving their mental outlook on life and improving their discipline habits of success with respect to their business and life.

The “free lunch” mentality is NOT going to work. There is not another method called the “Do Nothing” Way where you sit in your office and “hope” that you get the “come list me” or “come write the offer” calls. This is not the way to build your real estate practice so that you and your family can have financial security. Hoping is not going work!

Everything is a trade-off between the time and the effort you personally put into your business versus the money you invest to get your business and build your business.