Systems You Need To Build A Real Estate Business 

Starting a real estate business can be hard, but not if you have plans and systems to help you along the way! Tanya Eldert shares the systems (Business, Financial, Marketing, Buyer & Seller) you need to build a REAL real estate business.

What are the Systems of Success (SOS)?

When I created the book Agent Systems of Success it was my goal to give you the assistance you need in the keeping your business afloat. Not just by keeping it afloat but helping it thrive by working ON your business, not just in your business.

When you work in your business, it’s all about the reactionary phone calls, right? I happen to trip over one of my ads, they called me and they want to see houses now. Let me run out and show them. Okay, if you do that enough, you aren’t really building your business, you’re reacting to your business, at what point in your day, are you actually building your business?

Daily Success Steps

Here’s an overview of this book: the first section of it actually talks about Daily Success Steps, a system I created over 10 years ago and have been using to help format my day. This way I know not only what I need to do for that day but also what I need to do for the rest of the week, the month, the quarter, and the year. I mean all of that. So I look at the quarterly goals -usually I don’t like to go out too far- and then I break down what I need to do or want to do. This meant writing down what do I want to achieve every quarter, and then I break them into months. After breaking those into months, comes into weeks. And the weeks in to days. And those days become my action success steps.

The idea behind it is the step: the fact that it’s just a small step. If you make so many small steps towards your goal, you’re going to get there. But when we try to do these eight ginormous things in life, everything gets in the way. It’s much easier to take a step than a huge leap.

Huge leaps can be scary while the little steps that are doable, you can do them around ton of stuff.

Tanya Eldert

I actually do have different kinds of planners and journals and things like that that are available. But I take that whole system and I start off the book that way, because I want you to have that as your foundation. You need to make action steps to move forward.

Business and Marketing Plans

Anybody who took business 101, or even some of your pre licensing post licensing classes, we’ll know of something called a business plan. How many of you actually did them outside of the classroom? Probably not many. And I can understand why.

When I was in college, X number of years ago, I remember I spent an entire semester writing a business plan. That business plan that I made which I would have never used even if I had opened that business. It was almost designed for investors. I remember being trained; you take this to the bank to get money. And I kept thinking what bank it’s gonna give me money.

You don’t need to spend a semester building a business plan. You do need to have some basics: a little bit about the structure and the direction you want to go; most of that is the marketing plan. Now the business plan to me is just the foundation of the building. I have templates available for agents to download when you get the book. It’s very simple. You can just fill in the blanks.

But the next step is also a marketing plan. And that is how you we’re going to actually bring those leads in. It’s a whole cycle. It’s not just generating leads. It is how you’re going to actually work with the customers, how you do the follow up.

In my systems of success, the differentiator between the two is the fact that you might only touch that business plan once or twice a year. And that’s okay, keep it in a file. With your marketing plan, make it a little bit changeable. Example, on how you’re going to go out and get those leads, how you’re going to target those clients, those buyers or the sellers. That is an interactive document that you are going to work with, maybe weekly, or monthly, at a minimum.

Financial Systems

Let’s talk about the financial system of success. Because in real estate, it’s a very interesting business. What happens in real estate, you’ve got good and bad months. In a good month, you get a good million-dollar listing with some commission, and then you’re at Disney World spending everything! In real estate, we have a lot of up and down roller coasters, not just with our business, but with our finances. So in this book, one of the systems that you actually plan for is if you’re gonna get a great month, what do you do with that money? How do you plan that money? How do you put it into different savings accounts? There’s a system to that? How do you make sure you’re covered on the lean month? And not just eating ramen noodles on some months, and filet mignon and others?

Buyers and Sellers

We also have the systems of working with the buyers, and the sellers, and the listings and the checklist. What you do every time you get a listing? Do you do different things for different listings? Or do you have a checklist of something you do every time, and that you’re consistent with? Those are what you need to put in place.

Over the last few years, I’ve studied lots of books, some key myths and different kinds of real estate guides. And many of them talk about the systems. But nobody gave them to me. There were a couple of books I flipped through. And I’m like, alright, you talk about this system. I want to see, where’s the system?

That’s what we do different in this book.

Do you need to know what your critical drivers are? The indicators on how well your business is doing? What numbers you need to track and why?

Somebody might tell you, you need to have a KPI report or a critical driver spreadsheet. But they won’t give you one, they won’t tell you what numbers to track, they won’t tell you to look at the ratios to see what’s going good and what’s not. That’s why we did not only put information in the workbook to do it, but we also gave you a downloadable spreadsheet. So you could work on it yourself.

Because what has taken Thomas and I years of doing real estate, and taking those systems that we created, we are making them available to you. So you can recreate a gazillion years of information and put it together in a couple of weeks, days, months. I mean, it depends on how much time you put into it. But everything is literally almost done for you.

Those are the systems that you need to have in your business. If you haven’t been on my train here, because you need to work on your business, not in your business, you need to focus on building a business. Not a job, not a reactionary. I always tell agents when they first come to me, “You know what, almost everybody can fall over a lead.” You know, I had an agent one time had her name tag on and at Home Depot. She picked up one of the cashiers that ended up buying a house from her because she had a name tag on when she was at Home Depot. She wore that nametag everywhere she goes, it doesn’t matter if she’s working or not. So that’s kind of one of her marketing systems that works.

So these are some of the things that are our systems of success to help you build your real estate business. And over the next few weeks, I’m going to dwell into them a little bit more.