Your First Week As Real Estate Agent

Your First Week as a New Agent - Meet Other Agents and Listen
Whether they're bragging or complaining, old timers will let good info slip
If you're following a good planning strategy for a new real estate agent, you're in the middle of personal expense analysis, business expense budgeting, marketing planning and all types of new business planning activities. To do this properly is difficult,as you don't have a backlog of statistics to tell you what you can expect for results from certain efforts.
Part of a good budgeting and marketing plan is to try and determine expected results from certain behaviors and marketing practices. In other words: "If I have 650 people in my Sphere of Influence list, contact them regularly, then how many transactions might I expect to get each year fromthis particular market segment?" Since you haven't done this before, how would you know?
Well, the experienced agents in the office have been doing it for a while and just might share that info with you. Ask questions, but listen too. When you hear "Geez, I've got 1200 people on my list and work them hard, but I only get about 4 transactions a year out of it!", that's valuable information.Whether this agent is doing the proper job of "working" his list or not, you could use this number as a benchmark to plan your expected results on the low end. Your 650 person list might then be expected to yield only a couple of transactions this year. Not exciting, but better to err on the side of caution and be pleasantly surprised at a better result.
Listen for and remember quantitative marketinginformation. When you plan your activities to yield certain results in the way of prospects or actual transactions, you would hope that you're working with realistic results expectations.
Jumpstart Your Real Estate Sphere of Influence SOI
First, realize that you already have a sphere of influence. You have family, friends, old schoolmates, previous business associates, soccer buddies, and more.These are people that know you, and just because of that, you have some influence on them.
Throughout your career in real estate, you should always have a plan to grow this group and implement it faithfully. This will become a huge source of repeat and referral business over time.
1. Get your current list all in one place.
This is a big task, but it's important and begs planning to avoidduplicate work later. You'll be surprised at how large a list you can come up with when you start pulling in your friends, old classmates, sports team members, business associates, your doctor, lawyer and others.
What is important is to hopefully start with something more than a list on paper. If you use Outlook in your computer, use that contacts database or another like it to get these people intoa system for management.
First, realize that you already have a sphere of influence. You have family, friends, old schoolmates, previous business associates, soccer buddies, and more. These are people that know you, and just because of that, you have some influence on them.
Throughout your career in real estate, you should always have a plan to grow this group and implement it faithfully. Thiswill become a huge source of repeat and referral business over time.
2. Make contact the way you usually do.
This has to do with being effective, but also saving some money. There are plenty of advisors out there that will have you develop a really nice letter in envelopes and mail via first class mail. This may be how you do it for some of your list.
However, if you're making a really largecontact list, many of them will be people you usually talk to via email, text messaging or phone. It's OK to contact them the way you always have. Just split your list into groups by contact method.
3. Go ahead and categorize by how you know them.
As you progress in your career and your knowledge of contact management, you'll find that you want to have certain common types by which to identify...