How To Jumpstart Your Real Estate Business

People often say "I just got my real estate license, but I'm having no success finding business!" In this episode I take a break from interviewing other successful real estate professionals and instead talk about my 5/3 method: 5 steps to take, every week, for the next 3 months, to jumpstart your real estate business. This is not just for brand-new agents, even experienced agents who might be in a rut will find a lot of value in this!

If I were starting over in this business, in this current environment, these are the steps I would take over the next 3 months to get up & running.

Follow Sam on Instagram: @SamRP

Follow Sam on Instagram: @SamRP

Transcript

This episode is really going to be beneficial to anyone who might be just getting licensed or is recently licensed and you're new to the business. This is also going to be really helpful for people who might be in a little bit of a slump. And I know that there's a lot of you out there right now. Look, November and December historically is always typically the slowest time of year, and especially this year, it's very, very slow. So I think there's a lot of you, no matter if you've been doing this two years, five years, 15 years, I think you'll find a lot of value in this. And then finally, if you are a team leader, I think that this might be helpful for any of your new team members. If you want to have them listen to this episode or if you want to kind of use some of this information, I think that you will find value in this as well. 

I am going to talk about what I am calling my five three method. This is five steps that you will take every week for the next three months. And guess what? None of these steps require cold calling. I've never done cold calling. I hate cold calling. It's not my thing. So if you really just do not want to cold call, this might be very helpful for you. You might ask, why are we doing this for three months? Well, I have found in doing this for the last twelve years, that we typically see that after about three months of consistent hard work, we start to get results. If you are doing something and you give up after just two weeks or one month, honestly, that's not enough. This business requires consistent hard work for many months before you start to see results. If you are a newer agent who started in 2020 or 2021, you might not understand what I'm talking about here, because the last couple of years have been very, very easy. Business has just called you out of the blue and you just show up and you sell five homes. Things are going to change a little bit, and you are going to have to put in the time and put in the effort. If you do not want to put in the effort, you're in the wrong business. This does require work. It is a job. So treat it as such. 

All right, five steps every week for three months, I'm going to go through what all these steps are real quick. Step one, get educated. Step two, CRM. Step three, coffee. Step four, open house. Step five, content. I'm going to talk about all of those. And real quick, if you have not heard of time blocking before, this is a great way of handling all these steps. Time blocking is essentially booking appointments with yourself to make sure that you get something done. If you are looking at your calendar today, for the next week or the next couple of weeks, you're probably going to see a lot of white in that calendar, a lot of empty space. What we do is we time block. We fill up that space by booking appointments. Maybe one of these steps you feel like you'll do best in the morning. So maybe from nine to eleven, you are booking an appointment with yourself to focus on that one step. Maybe one of these is a good midday lunchtime break type of thing. So from noon to one, you're going to be doing this other step. Just book those appointments and then once you have them booked with yourself, keep those appointments. Keep to the schedule, book your appointments with yourself, time block, and be consistent and you will get this stuff done. And after a few months, you will finally start to see some results. All right, let's dig into this. 

Step one, get educated. Or I also like to call it study up. There's kind of two parts to this. You want to get educated on both the market and get educated on your brokerage. And here's what I mean. First, let's start with the market. Pick what market you're either working in or you want to work. And if you've been selling real estate for ten years in a certain market, you already know that market. If you are new to this business, figure out what market you want to be in. If it's in a city, pick a few neighborhoods that you want to do most of your business in and study this market. What do I mean? I mean, keep track of local trends. Understand the data, understand how many homes are currently on the market, how many are going pending. What is the average price point? What can you get for $500,000? What can you get for a million dollars? $2 million. What is the average price of a one bedroom versus a two bedroom? Understand this market. And it's not just about looking over the trends and seeing, okay, the average price point for one bedroom is $645,000. And there's about 30 of them. That are trading every month. It's not just about that. You also want to make sure that you are watching every listing that is coming on in that market. Make sure that you are taking note of these listings and really kind of digest what each one is. And on top of that, go and tour these properties. A lot of these properties will be doing brokers tours. So make sure that you take note of what day they do brokers tours in your neighborhood, in your market. And make sure you go and see four or five, six new listings if you can, that week. Go in, meet the listing agent who is in this market. Introduce yourself and walk around and understand what you can get for your dollar. Because you want to fully understand this market as if you've been doing this for years. You don't know when you're going to run into someone on the street who is looking to buy or looking to sell their home in this market. And if you truly understand the market, you know your numbers, you know the data, you know what your competition is, you know what's out there. You will succeed in that conversation. So really study the market. The second part of getting educated here is getting educated and studying up your brokerage. What do I mean by that? Well, a couple of things. First, do you know what programs your brokerage can offer you as an agent and your clients? It's important to know them and really know them. I'll give you an example. I'm at compass. We have compass concierge. That is a program that is helpful to our sellers to be able to renovate, fix up their homes before we go on market to maximize their potential profits. They don't have to pay out-of-pocket expenses. There are no fees, there's no interest. They reimburse us Compass at the closing. That is a program that Compass provides our sellers and really us as agents, we're able to use that. We also have Compass coming soon. This is where our buyers can see properties before they hit the market. We have private, exclusive. These are listings that might not ever hit the market, but our buyers have access to them. Understand what programs you can use at your brokerage. Every brokerage is a little different, but make sure you fully understand what they have to offer, and they should. Most brokerages will have webinars or in-person meetings to learn about these programs. Schedulea  time block to understand and learn about these programs. Not only that, a lot of these brokerages have tech. You should be using the tech. And if they don't have tech, get third party systems, but start to use the technology that is out there. Understand how the CRM works. Understand how your marketing tools work. Understand how you can organize your transactions. At Compass, again, we have a business tracker. Understand how all of this works. Study it. Be the best that you can be at it. It's there to help you. The other thing that you want to do when I talk about studying your brokerage, you want to know who are the other agents at this office? Do you know these other agents and what they specialize in? Different agents will specialize in different types of properties. Maybe they're buyer heavy. Maybe they're listing heavy. Maybe they are big in the ultra luxury area. Maybe they're big in estate sales. Maybe they're big with condos. Maybe they're big with investors. You want to understand who your colleagues are and what they specialize in and make sure they know you go into the office, introduce yourself, make yourself known, and start building relationships with these people. You never know who your next client is going to be. And your colleague, who has a desk 50ft from you, might be the perfect person to talk to about that client. They might have a bunch of off market stuff that's coming up that is the perfect fit for your buyer. So study your brokerage, study your market, study up, get educated. That is phase one. Step one sorry, I'm twisting my lingo here. 

Step two CRM. CRM is a client relations management system, or tool. Honestly, if you are not using a CRM, you're missing out on what is probably the most important tool in this business. I've done videos about this. I talk about this a lot with my colleagues. I like to say that a CRM to a realtor is like a gym to an athlete. And what I mean by that is, let's say you're on a basketball team, but you don't want to work out. You don't want to put in the time and the effort to get in shape and stay in shape. You just want to show up a couple times a week, play the game, and then go home, sleep until the next game happens. If that is your approach to playing basketball, you're not going to get better. You're probably going to have a pretty shitty season. So the CRM acts the same way as the gym does to the athlete. The CRM is our gym. The CRM is a way to sort your contacts and keep relationships going. So the first thing that I think is important about the CRM, and this isn't talked about enough, is you actually you kind of have to back into it. And what I mean by that is you first want to think about how you want to use the CRM before you start to build it and put it together. How are you going to set this up? How are you going to organize it? Every CRM is a little different. I can talk about specifically the compass CRM, but a lot of the CRM have similar functions. All right, so let's talk about organizing your CRM real quick. Here's how I would recommend approaching this. So first of all, organizing your contacts. There are the obvious ones there are past clients, there are active clients. There are leads that you've got the contact and you need to reach out to them. There might be agents, could be a group. So there's some pretty common groups. But I think that you want to get a little bit more specific than that. And here's what you want to think about when you start to organize your contacts. If it's past clients, maybe you want to organize them by year. 2022 closed 2021 closed 2020 closed maybe you want to organize them by are they a condo owner? Are they a single-family home owner? Maybe you want to organize them by are they an investor or a developer? Think about every kind of small group that you might want to bunch together and be able to sort and find them by. Maybe you're a big fitness person or maybe you're a big dog person. If you know who on your client list is also a fitness person or is also a dog owner, you can sort them by anything really. And this is how you will find them in the future. Because then you can send out a newsletter down the road about a brand new dog park and you can send it just to the client list that are dog owners. This is what we're talking about. Or maybe it's the end of the year and you want to send out holiday gifts and maybe you don't want to send each person the same gift. Maybe you want to send your VIP clients a very special gift. Wouldn't it be great to have just a tag or a group that is all of those VIP clients altogether pulls up that whole list. So you really want to figure out ahead of time how you might want to organize just on a piece of paper, write a list down of every category you think you want to organize your contacts in. The second thing is what are the tasks? What are the action plans that you might want to use? Here's what I mean. So for example, I have a new lead action plan. This is I think it's ten or twelve steps that I will take when I get a new lead. That happens over the course of probably two weeks and it's various steps of follow up. When I get a new lead that comes in, I put them into the CRM, I start that action plan, and then for the next two weeks I'm going to get prompts on certain days of am I calling them? Am I texting them? Am I sending them a specific email? That is an action plan you might have an action plan for. Maybe it's renters who have just moved into their new lease and you want to keep in touch with them over the next year and try to get them to potentially buy in a year. Or you want to rent to them again in a year. Maybe you have an action plan just to make sure that you're sending out some sort of note or a call or a text on everyone's birthday or maybe it's their home anniversary. These are the things that you want to set up ahead of time. Once you've kind of figured out how you want to organize and set up your CRM, then then I think it's a good time to start to implement it and drag your contacts in there and start to organize them. I just think it's foolish to get all your contacts in there and then have to reorganize again. Because if you don't think about this ahead of time, you might have to go through all those contacts multiple times because then you might go through it and go, hey, there's a whole other way I could organize this. And you do it again, and then you do it again. And just by doing it this way and kind of backing into it, you're going to save yourself some time. And how can you implement this over the three months? Well, I would say time block, maybe an hour each day or 30 minutes each day. Maybe it's in the morning while you're having a cup of coffee. And just spend some time doing a little bit of organizing in your CRM and then move on. Just make sure you spend the time. It will be tedious, it will be boring, but it is worth it because once it is up and running, it really kind of works for you. So you can spend your efforts elsewhere, out trying to win business and let the CRM work in the background. 

All right, step three coffee. What do I mean by coffee? I mean at least at least once a week, plan a coffee date. If you're not a coffee drinker, maybe it's a beer, maybe you want to go for a run or a walk with someone. But make sure that every week you have some sort of date, like a coffee date set up with someone that is in your local market who might be able to either do business with you or refer you business. I would not recommend doing this with mom and dad or your best friend that you see every week anyways, because they're going to know that you're in the world of real estate. Pick someone that you haven't seen in a little while and ask them if you could take them out to coffee. You're super excited about this new job. You'd love to kind of catch up with them and chat with them about what you've been working on. Meet up with this person, hear what's going on in their life, talk to them about your life. Make sure at some point in the conversation you talk to them about your new job, whether it be you just changed brokerages, maybe you just got licensed in your new Realtor. This is where studying your brokerage and studying the market really comes into play, because this is where you can use that knowledge. You want to talk to them about why you are excited about being a real estate agent in that market, why you are excited to be at Compass or be at EXP or be at Keller Williams, wherever you are. You want to talk about why you are excited about this job and how you are going to be able to help the clients that you are serving. They might not be someone who's looking to buy or sell right now, but what you're doing is planting a seed so that they know that you are the expert and that you are the professional. Just talk about the properties that you just saw this week. Make sure that they fully understand that there's no one better out there than you. Even if you are new to this business, by knowing what you're talking about, by putting in that effort of studying the market and getting educated, they will trust you. By putting in the efforts and work on step one of getting educated and studying up, you're now able to use that and show these people, when you're meeting up with them, how much you know. And then at the end of the conversation, you can ask them, do you have any friends or family or coworkers? Whatever it might be, whatever you feel like might be the right fit. Do you have anyone in your life that might be interested in chatting with me about this new job or about my new position at Compass or wherever you are, try to just plant that seed and there's a good chance they won't, but at least they are going to be keeping an ear out for you. If they hear someone talking about it, they might be able to make that connection for you. This is how that starts. And guess what? If you're just grabbing coffee with someone, you spend $10. If you do this once a week for three months, $120, that is well worth the investment. And if you really want to challenge yourself, try to do two a week. I know that feels like a lot for some people. So if you're a little shy or if you don't know that many people, at least stick to one a week. And this will help you tremendously. These conversations that you have with these people over that coffee or over that beer or as you're walking the dogs around the park, these conversations are going to pay off maybe in a year, maybe in three years. But I guarantee you that they will pay off if you just put in a little bit of time and effort. 

All right, step four. This is selfexplanatory: open house. When you are starting out in this business, look, it's no surprise you probably don't have any listings unless you are working on a big team. If you're by yourself or you're on a small team, there's a good chance. You don't have any listings to work. So get very comfortable going up to people in your market, in your office, asking them, hey, do you need any help with your open houses this weekend? Try to see if anyone needs coverage. And what you want to say is, you do not need to pay me. All I ask is that if a buyer walks in unrepresented, let me take them as their agent. That's it. And look, it's November right now. We're going into December. There might not be a ton of action out there. You might sit some open houses that get zero people. You know what? I don't even want to say you might you will sit open houses with no people. However, sometimes the first sale that a lot of agents do is covering someone's open house and the person walks in and they just build that rapport immediately. And then they go and take them to see more places the next week and then they're under contract. So this is a great step to take, especially on the weekends, you know, do what? One or two open houses? One open house Saturday, one open house Sunday. If you can find enough to cover it will only take you an hour, maybe it's 2 hours. It's worth it. It's probably one of the easiest ways to build rapport with someone. Way easier than trying to get someone on the phone. They are right in front of you. You can just kind of shoot the shit, talk about whatever. It doesn't have to be talking about real estate. Just build rapport with these people and try to get a follow up appointment scheduled. And like I mentioned before, you have probably established what market you work in or what market you want to work in, because that's what you're going to be studying and focusing a lot of your efforts on. The same goes with the open house. Don't try to cover open houses in a market you don't work in or you don't want to work in. If you get a buyer in that market now you're stuck with a buyer that might turn to another buyer and now you're in a completely different market that you didn't want to work in or you don't know and you haven't put the time in an effort to learn. So choose where you do these open houses, but try to cover at least at least one open house a weekend for the next three months. And finally are you guys still with me? Have I been rambling a little too long? I know I've had to pause a couple of times to kind of just gather my thoughts here. I do have some notes for a change. 

Okay, final step content. I talk about this a lot on the podcast. Content is so important these days. If you are not already on social media, I don't know where you've been, but get on social media. If you're one of those people who used to have a Facebook or used to have an Instagram and you got over it and you don't think it's cool or hip anymore. Get back on specifically to help with your business. You should have, at this point, you should have a Facebook account, you should have an Instagram account, and you should have a TikTok account. Those are the big three that I think you want to focus on. There's a conversation that I have with some people about, do you have two separate accounts, a business account and a personal account? I think it's important for you to merge and have both be one. You want to be giving the same content to both people who follow you in your personal life and people who follow you in your professional life. Get comfortable with that. I think that actually a lot of people who follow you professionally are going to resonate with some of the personal stuff more than the business stuff. That's going to actually show your personality. It's going to show who you are. It's going to show that you are human. So I think you merge one. There could be an argument to keep things separate, but I used to have them separate, and things have gotten better for me on social media with lead generating once I started to merge them. So that's just a quick note. 

All right, there are a couple of steps to getting your content going and building out your social media. What I would consider the right way. The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you are updating your bio in all these platforms. Make sure that it does show that you do real estate. Make sure that shows where you do real estate, where you sell real estate. If you want to tag your brokerage or your team, I think it's important to do that. But make sure that's very clear. I am Sam, I sell real estate in Boston. I'm an agent at Compass, and I run the RP Group as a team. Just make that very, very clear on all social platforms. Not that specific. I mean, if you want to take my bio and put it on yours, sure, I don't care. Make sure that your bio is clear and easy to understand. Step two, make sure that you are following everyone who you would consider your sphere of influence. These are going to be maybe not just your close friends, but could be your referral partners. So just make sure that you're following them. There's a good chance that if you follow these people, they will follow you back. Step three is to also follow your clients. A lot of people don't do this, and honestly, I didn't do it for a little while, but it is a huge step. Imagine not having to randomly reach out to your client every year. Send them a gift or send them a card just to remind them that you exist. What if those people followed you and you interact with them on a weekly or even daily basis through Instagram? Maybe you're kind of laughing at each other's jokes and you're commenting on what each other are doing in life. That is way, way better at keeping that relationship going and keeping it alive. So make sure you follow your clients. They will almost certainly follow you back. Step four. If you have not listened to my interview with Will Draper after this episode, I definitely recommend you go and check it out, because we talked about this a lot. But this is picking your style. Understand your brand, understand who your target audience is. You want to try to create content that will have a consistent look and appeal to whoever your audience is. And I think it's very important to actually define who the audience is. Like, if you're working in downtown Boston and you're trying to work in the luxury market, this is the market that you are studying in. This is the market that you're covering open houses in. This is the market that you are spending all your efforts on. You also probably want to be creating content that would appeal to the home buyers or home sellers that live or want to live in that market. Makes sense. Great. Step five. And this is actually really important, and it's often overlooked by a lot of agents. And this kind of comes into play with the meshing. Your personal social media and your business social media together. Make sure that you are doing a little bit of both. Make sure that it's not just about real estate and make sure that it's not just about your personal life. Do a property tour and then follow that up the next day with a picture of your kid or your dog or you and your spouse out somewhere or a trip that you're on. And then follow that up with a market statistic. Follow that up with another personal thing. You want to do a good mix. Show people that you are both working and you have a personality, you have a personal life. You will be surprised that obviously it's very important to put out there that you are selling real estate. But often the posts that get the most engagement from both your sphere, the people that know you personally, but also the people that you might be working with your colleagues or your referral partners or your current clients or past clients. Almost always the posts that get the most amount of attention and the most amount of engagement is your personal posts. If you have a kid, cute picture of the kid every time, same with dogs. Cute picture of a kid, cute picture of a dog almost every time, those posts will get more engagement than anything else that you've posted. This is such an it's just such an easy way to connect with people, especially people. That you may have not even met yet. There's probably a good chance that there is somebody who's already following you on social media, probably on Instagram, maybe it's on TikTok for the content that you are putting out. And they already know that they want to work with you. They want to be either a buyer of yours or sell of yours. Maybe it's in a year, maybe it's in two years, but they're kind of following you. So keep putting out that content because it's such an easy way to be in front of these people without sending them a just listed or just sold newsletter or email or postcard. This is honestly it's the easiest way and it's the cheapest way because it's free. So then the final question really is when it comes to content is what is the content that you're putting out? Look, I've talked about this a lot. Video. Video. You need to be putting efforts into making video content. It does not need to be professional. I know people don't start putting out videos because they feel like it needs to be professional. I put out iPhone videos all the time. Just start to get comfortable making videos and putting it out. So what's the content of? What are the videos of? What are some of these posts that you're putting out? Well, first off, property tours. And I know you're going to be like, well I don't have any listings to do property tours of. No, but you're covering open houses, you're going to brokers opens. When you learn the market, ask agents while you are there, hey, would you mind if I do a quick video of the property and throw it up on my Instagram? I'll be sure to tag you in that post. Not everyone is comfortable with that, so you need to make sure that you ask them. But you are seeing property every week. You should be able to grab at least one video tour a week as you are touring these properties. Throw that up on reels with Instagram or throw it up on a TikTok, put some music behind it, try to be consistent with it. But people love to window shop, they love to see, especially if they're really nice properties. Try to just do one a week. Trust me, it will help you a lot. Another thing that you can be consistent with, with your content is being the local expert. Again, you know the market that you want to work in or the market that you already are working in. Talk about whether it be a still picture, a post or videos. Again, I would highly encourage you to do videos first, but do neighborhood tours. Walk around, show off the neighborhood, talk about the neighborhood. Go to restaurants, review the restaurant, show yourself at the restaurant, go to parks, go to stores that you love. Just be that local expert, that local guide. Do this once a week, showing off the market, talk about the market stats, what's going on in that market, and provide that information. Because, look, you're already showing a bunch of properties. So by doing this, you're now showing that you really, truly know this area. You know this neighborhood. You are the expert. Outside of just how much does a two bedroom cost in this neighborhood, how much does a two bedroom cost? And if you move into that two bedroom, where's the best place to get tacos within four or five blocks, where's the best place to grab a beer with a friend? Where's the best park to bring your dog? You know this stuff. People are going to follow you because of this. And then finally, if you still need some content to create, you can always put out market stats. Look, the market is changing a lot right now. People really want to know what's going on. So you can share market stats and you can share market news, whether it be about interest rates dropping or rising. There's a lot of talk about inflation. Is the market going to crash? You can share posts about this and inform your followers what's going on as it relates to the housing market. 

So that that's it not that hard, right? It seems like a lot. I know it's five steps. You're going to do it for three months. You're going to fill up your calendar for the next three months. Every week you are focusing on stuff. Some of the stuff you can do every day. Some of the stuff maybe it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, some of the stuff, maybe it's every Thursday. But just schedule it out ahead of time. It will be super helpful. You are going to get educated. You're going to work on your CRM. You're going to plan coffee dates or meetups walk in the park, beer runs, whatever it might be. You are going to cpver open houses on the weekends or even maybe it's in the evening. And then finally, you're going to be building content as you're out doing all this stuff. If you focus on all of this stuff, after about three months, I promise you are going to start to see some results. It will be a slow build. It will trickle in. But this is how you jumpstart your business. And guess what? You are not making a single cold call. Now if you prefer to just make cold calls, calling expired, canceled, FSBOs, go for it. I hate that stuff. That's not for me. This is building your business with all the tools that you have, with all the people that you already know and just filling up that time and being consistent and dedicated. I hope you guys found this helpful. I hope you didn't find it too rambly. I'm going to do my best to edit it down to cut out a lot of the noise and bullshit that I was talking about. I've been recording for like an hour. And I hope that this is, like, 20 minutes in the end. So I hope you enjoyed it. Definitely, definitely would love to hear what you think on Instagram. Feel free to send me a message. Feel free to share it with anyone who you might think will find this useful and valuable. And we'll be back with regular programming in two weeks with another guest. And maybe at another point, if you guys really like this, I'll do another one. I just kind of talked about everything that I know, so I don't know what I could do again all by myself. But if you liked it, you found it valuable and useful, and you enjoyed it, I'll think of something. Maybe I'll teach you guys how to play guitar or piano on the next one. Or maybe I'll talk to you about how I make waffles, love making waffles, or my favorite ice creams. I'll just talk about whatever. Doesn't matter. I like to talk. Obviously. I have a podcast. Anyways, till next time. So long.