I always love the beginning of another year. It is the perfect time to assess your mistakes from last year, and learn from them, and then most important move on. It is also time for the ever famous – New Years Resolutions! I am not a big fan of Resolutions. Yes, the idea is great, but what happens to me is that I start off with these awesome resolutions – and then by the beginning of February (or more realistically, the beginning of the second week of January) I have already broken my resolutions and feel depressed and like a looser. Some of you that are real estate agents may understand this type of resolution. You start of the year and resolve to sell x number of homes in the first quarter of 2007. But is this realistic? Can you control the market? The economy? You may meet your goal, and good for you! Celebrate! But, you may miss your mark due to reasons completely out of your control. You may bust your tale, and not see what you hoped for. This just leaves you with your spirits dampened, and lacking enthusiasm. That is why I want to encourage you to make Realistic Real Estate Resolutions. Make resolutions that you know are within your reach. Here are a few to help get your creative juices flowing. These are some that I have seen real estate agents put into practice, and yield significant results from!
- Resolve to call your sellers once a week. Call them just to touch base and see if they have any questions or concerns. They may have things they want to discuss with you, but they may feel that their needs are petty, and that you are very busy. Make yourself available. If you are a mega-seller with tons of clients, this may seem difficult to do. But please try to do it yourself and not delegate it to an assistant. As a former assistant in a local real estate office, I had the job of reading and coding many of the after sales surveys to determine an agents customer service rating. The most glowing surveys belonged to those agents who made personal and consistent contact with their sellers. Yes, I did get not-so-glowing surveys from those sellers whose agent listed their house and let them drift off to sea. Not good for your customer service rating or your business. Even if you think their house is not that great, and not that much commission. Their husbands, mother’s cousin may have a 6000 square foot home on the water and they will be looking for an agent in the future.
- Resolve to send everyone in your database an email every two weeks or at the very least once a month. When I say everyone, I mean everyone. Even those who may not be looking at the moment. Don’t worry about being an email pest; if they don’t want your emails, they can unsubscribe. It doesn’t have to be a award winning email, just a newsletter to let them know what is going on in the area, or some tips on getting your home ready for the upcoming season. If this idea leaves you with sweaty palms, hire an assistant, or buy a drip email program. Constant Contact is a good one, but you have to create your own content within the templates provided. Stuck – take a stroll over to Microsoft’s templates site and check out the real estate newsletter templates they have for free. No software but Microsoft Word required. If you desire an all-in-one no effort kind of site, I recommend Rainmaker. All you do is enter your email address for your prospect, choose an action plan from their massive library, and set up how often you want them to get an email – and you are done.
- Resolve to join an industry related forum and Network, Network, Network. There are plenty of great forums that you can join for free. I list some good ones at the end of this point. You don’t have to spend hours at time on these forums, but maybe a couple of days a week, after you finish checking your email, just drop by and see what is going on. You may be able to help someone with advice or answers to their questions. You may be able to ask questions of others. More and more seasoned agents are showing up in the forums and they possess a wealth of knowledge and experience you cant get from any real estate class. Who knows – you may even end up with a referral?
Active Rain
Agents Online
Wanna Network
4. Resolve to pick out one aspect of your industry a month that you want to learn more about and research it. You may want to know more about Virtual Assistants and what they can do for you. What is a virtual assistant? You may want to find out more about a specific designation, and what you need to get it. Whatever you have been thinking about, and wishing to know more, take sometime to Google it on the Internet. In today’s Internet age – knowledge is power. Whatever you learn can turn out to be a power weapon to add to your arsenal.
5. Resolve to blog. You can start a blog for free, and believe me, they are the wave of the future. Just “Google” the word blog, and take a look at the results. If you need to learn more about it, do it and get going. You can start a blog for free. Blog about your area – what is going on, activities, high school football, best restaurants etc. Blog about your day. Blog about anything. Blog about nothing, but blog. It give your consumers a personality to put with the face and the words on your web page. Let your prospective customers see “you” in your blog. Reveal yourself through your posts. Encourage feedback and you will learn a lot about who your are marketing to.
That leads me to my resolution for this year. This year, I just resolve to learn from the mistakes from last year, and then let them go, and focus on the good points of last year – and there were many. But there is one resolution that I am going to share with all of you reading this. I am going to blog more. Yes, I resolve to be a mega-blogger. I resolve to post a least once a week to this blog. If you are reading this, and you see that I have not made a post in a weeks time. Please, feel free to call me on it! Let me know you noticed. I mean, I can post to this blog from my cell phone for goodness sakes so I am really left without an excuse. I have been wanting to jump on the “blog-wagon” for a while, and this is the perfect time to do this.
I do need your help though. Please feel free to respond to my blogs, and offer ideas for me to post on. Ask questions about the virtual assistant industry and I will try my best to answer it. If I cant, I will network with other virtual assistants until I find someone who can. Hey, you can take care of number 4 on my list by asking me questions about virtual assistants!
I would love to hear any ideas that you have for blog post, or any resolutions that you would like to share.
One post that I would like to start is “Links for your Liking.” I find all kinds of interesting links related to our industry, and I would like to share them with you. I love finding new tools and tricks to play with. I am like a kid with a new video game. If you would like to share some interesting links you find – please do!!
I will “e”- see you again in 7 days or less. I resolve to do it!!
