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The Power of Processes for Real Estate Agents

How do you “project manage” your real estate practice? How do you approach solving problems? In other words, what is your process?

As a real estate agent, you know that this business is far from simple. There’s rarely anything straight-forward about buying or selling a house. There are always unexpected events, mishaps, and jumpy clients. In order to successfully complete a sale for your clients, you need to be able to develop a reliable process that will help you achieve your goals and push you forward on the road of success.

What is a Process?

A process is simply a series of steps that will get your from point A to point B.

In a large company, processes exist to make sure that things work like a well oiled machine. Once an efficient and successful process is developed, a company can depend on it. The series of steps that lead from the beginning of the process to the successful end can be easily taught to new employees. Every once and awhile, as a business grows, these processes are revisited and revamped, but on the whole, processes are a fairly reliable way of guaranteeing success every time.

You are not a large company. As a real estate agent, you are usually your own boss and workforce. The buck starts and stops with you. This is a great reason why, to become a successful real estate agent, you need to create your own personal processes, your own way of getting things done. You need to learn what behaviors and actions you can personally adopt that will end with a positive result for your clients. Just because a process works for another real estate agent doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for you.

Design Your Process

You can imagine a process a little bit like cogs in a machine. As one successfully turns, it causes another one to turn, then another one, etc. Your job is to design a process where each step (cog) smoothly leads into the next step until you reach your goal.

As difficult as this can sound, we each do it in our everyday life without even thinking of it. Developing a process is simply problem solving! For example, if you’re the kind of person who keeps forgetting their keys, you might come up with the solution to hang them on a hook by your front door. Here, you’ve created a process that solves your problem in a constantly successfully way. You took a look at your problem (I lose my keys), asked yourself why you do it (I’m forgetful and can’t remember where I leave them), came up with a possible solution (have a single spot where I always leave them), and then put it into action (I put a hook by the door where they go whenever I enter the house). It might take you a little while to develop this process. You might think, “What about a basket by the door, but no, that doesn’t quite work… Oh, a hook right beside the door! That way I will always see them when I am about to leave!”

Now, developing a process of behaviors and actions that will lead to a successful real estate sale will be a bit more difficult and complex, but the theory is the same. Look at your problem, ask yourself what’s in the way of reaching your goal/solution, build a series of possible steps to help you to your goal/solution, and then put them into action. If they work, that’s great! If not, well…

When A Process Breaks Down

If you can’t reach your goal or if you somehow fail in your pursuit of it, there’s a good chance that one of the steps in your process went wrong. That’s the problem with process; each step is dependant on the previous one. If something goes wrong, the entire process breaks down.

Rather than approaching a failure as… well, a failure, you should take it as an opportunity to examine all of the steps of your process to discover what exactly went wrong. Once you’ve identified the step, you can figure out exactly what the problem is. Ask yourself questions about this step: Why did it fail? What did you do, or didn’t do, that resulted in the process falling apart?

Once you know exactly what went wrong, you can begin to build a new process to address this broken link in the chain.

Learn from Your Process

At some point in your life, you’ve probably been told that you need to “learn from your mistakes”. Easy to say, not so easy to do. The beauty of processes is that they give you a real, measureable opportunity to take a look “under the hood” and see exactly what failed and why.

This is one of the behaviors that separates those who truly learn from their mistakes and those who just give up. If you’re only looking at the end result of a failure, you’re going to miss the true lesson that it can teach you. If you instead take a look at the entire series of events and steps that led to that failure, you can change that step so it doesn’t happen again in the future.

Of course, this is no guarantee of success. Just because you fixed one link early in the chain doesn’t mean that there won’t be another weak link a bit later. Being an entrepreneur, which is what a real estate agent really is, means that you’re constantly having to build your own processes, refining what works and getting rid of what doesn’t. The more you throw yourself into the process, the more opportunities you’ll get to rework and redesign them.

On a more positive note, you should also learn from your successes! If you develop a process of working with buyers that’s always successful, but you’re still having problems with sellers, you should take a look at the steps of your buyer process and see if you can apply any of them to improve your process with sellers.

A Way to Simplify a Process

Another fantastic thing about building processes is that, once you find one that works, you can continue to follow that roadmap to success without having to worry about it again. As an example, take SureFactor. Trying to find a reliable and affordable printing house that can provide all of your real estate print marketing materials can be a nightmare. Prices can fluctuate, quality can be variable, and you might end up with easily avoidable, but expensive, mistakes in the end product. By building SureFactor into your process of getting your print marketing materials, you can be sure that your real estate business cards, stationery, and other forms of business collateral will always arrive on your doorstep on time and with a guarantee of quality and price. In other words, SureFactor is a step of your real estate marketing process that just works, everytime.

 

If you want to incorporate SureFactor into your print marketing process, all you need to do is visit our website to get started. Here, you can use our real estate templates and simple design tools to customize all of your print marketing products, from business cards to fridge magnets! Once ordered, everything will be shipped to you directly with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. We pride ourselves as being an integral part of the process for so many real estate agents out there today!