The life of a real estate agent can be a tough life, running around searching for a buyers, looking for homes to list and trying to scare up a transaction or two. A key to agent success is to develop a real estate marketing-based business that generates a steady flow of new leads. Most real estate agents operate deal to deal, working very hard to get a deal, servicing that deal and then starting over looking for the next deal, it’s a “hamster-wheel” existence. When they do start over looking for the next deal, they often start looking for a quick fix. This is not a good way to structure your business or organize your life.
Here are 10 good signs you’ve fallen into the deal-to-deal trap:
1. You make excuses that the demands of your current clients don’t allow time for marketing and prospecting.
2. You get a listing and you start “marketing the property” and think that that’s actually marketing.
3. You’re waiting for your next commission to establish a marketing budget (and you’ve been saying this for your last four transactions).
4. The phones are silent, your web site isn’t producing leads, you just closed a transaction and you say to yourself, “I have to do some marketing.”
5. You’re on the Internet searching for the next great idea in lead generation.
6. You’re thinking: “Ah, social media. That’s cheap. I’ll just focus on that to generate leads and build my business.”
7. By the time you get to making calls to your sphere, it’s been a year since you last talked to everyone on your call list.
8. You get a listing outside your target market and all of a sudden find yourself prospecting around that listing and forgetting about your farm.
9. You need another deal so you decide to “do a mailing, send an email, start a blog, post on social media, door knock and make some calls” in a frenzied attempt to “do some marketing.”
10. You don’t have a written plan and if you were to write down your marketing efforts, it would be a pretty brief report.
If you are seeing yourself in a handful (or all) of these ten points, it’s time to look for a strategy to get out of the deal-to-deal grind and mindset. For agents, personal marketing is the way to break this cycle. Follow this link to read other articles on how to break out of this trap.
