How to Stay in the Driver's Seat of Your Real Estate Business in an Unpredictable Market

In real estate, being adaptable and innovative is crucial to ensuring your success in the long-run. With market shifts and industry changes, it’s more apparent than ever that the things you did last year, or two years ago, or in your best real estate year ever simply don’t work today. You have to do things differently. Thankfully, greatness is predictable if you have predictable systems and processes — and you actually execute and follow them. To maintain predictable success in unpredictable times, we’re getting into a couple of approaches you can take to stay in the driver’s seat of your real estate business.

Don’t Go it Alone

If you’re currently flying solo in your real estate business, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to consider teaming up. A study conducted by Workman Success Systems surveyed approximately 500 real estate team members to get a better understanding of what they found beneficial about working on a team. According to their findings, nearly 90% of real estate professionals think major real estate companies should support a team model. 85% of real estate pros believe being on a great real estate team is a competitive advantage in the industry, while more than 70% of real estate pros believe being on a team is essential to being successful in real estate.

With so many unpredictable variables appearing in real estate, joining a team can be enticing. But it’s not just a matter of having built-in accountability, there are other serious benefits, like:

• Achieving a stronger work/life balance, since you’re not shouldering burdens or managing your entire workload alone
• Your income continues to come in, even when you stop working for the day
• It provides an opportunity to increase financial stability and security with more predictability, since teams are marching towards shared goals
• Joining a team creates a competitive advantage

Going it alone tends to be a natural progression in real estate, but to shore up your real estate business and stay in control of your own success, joining a team can help keep you on track — and even elevate you to the next level.

3 Critical Systems You Need to Put in Place to Stay Ahead

As we’ve shared before, and as you know all too well, there are a lot of “what ifs” and uncertainties abound right now. But this isn’t the time to shy away from a challenge. After all, threats will always be there, so how can you position yourself to continue to be hungry for the next level in your real estate business? Only massive action creates massive results. This is not the time for tiny, incremental steps if you want to make changes. And in this new era of real estate, you have to make big changes.

You might be wondering, What massive actions can I really take? We’re no longer in an action-based market, where you show up, go through the actions of real estate, and see success. Nowadays, we’re in a skills-based market: if you don’t have honed skills to prospect, attract clients, present what makes you different and showcase your competitive advantage, you’re simply not competing.

To ensure you’re well-positioned to stay in control of your real estate business, you need to put these three systems in place:

1. Track Your Daily Success Habits

Greatness is predictable if you do the right things. The things you do in your real estate business on a daily basis need to be trackable and measurable. After all, if you can’t make adjustments, how will you ensure you’re tracking to success?

To really see how your day as an agent shakes out, get radically honest: write down your day as it flows in 30-minute increments. Jot down everything you do. Then, look at your time blocks. Did you do the things that generated results and made your time investment worth it? If yes, keep building on those habits. If no, it’s time to reorient.

2. Design Your Perfect Week

For this exercise, you want to get aspirational… and then get real. Sketch out your desired week ahead, day by day, and break it down even further by time of day. Go through your week and use the previous exercise of tracking your daily success habits. Then, when you get to the end of the week, review what you actually did versus your ideal week you designed. How lined up were your expectations with reality? Use this as a tool to see real results — and get the insights you need to make sure you can replicate your success, or get it back on track.

3. Partner with a Coach or Real Estate Mentor

Whether you opt to join a team or not, you still need to have a system in place for holding your own growth accountable. Enter: a real estate mentor or business coach. Having a mentor to help you weather the storms of real estate can be invaluable. You get access to their cheat codes, so to speak, by learning from the mistakes they’ve made and lessons they’ve learned, so you don’t have to. 

You can tap into their wisdom and expertise, and their own experience in the current state of the industry. Having access to hands-on brainstorming, problem-solving, and coming up with fresh ideas is unparalleled. And at their core, these trusted experts will hold you accountable to ensure you’re tracking to the goals you set and things you want to achieve.   

With these three systems, you can create solid approaches to building consistent, predictable success metrics. Without tracking, you don’t know what you don’t know. Use these three systems of tracking and measuring everything that happens in your real estate business to make predictable progress.