People are always going to be inclined to set goals based on the profession they’ve chosen themselves. Although for some of them there’s not so much of a proverbial ladder to be climbed. Most of those who do have goals to set and ladders to climb will be wearing a suit to work, but what’s interesting to note is that while real estate agents often wear suits too there’s no corporate ladder to be climbed in real estate. No promotions to be had either. It’s different altogether as the concept relates to achievable real estate goals.
What is possible is earning an increasingly handsome income from yourself via commission paid when clients sell or buy homes through you. And it’s quite natural if that is the goal you have for yourself as an agent. Earning a good living for oneself is important, and in real estate there’s no guaranteed income the way there is in other professions. You get into this business knowing that, and you see the need to be hustling that much more because of it. Indeed, hustle is a key ingredient in real estate growth strategies.
Most realtors have no problem keeping their end of the bargain with that, but even those who put the utmost effort into their real estate lead generation efforts and other aims may find that they’re not seeing the results they had envisioned from them. So it then becomes a situation where the agent needs to be able to set goals that can be more realistically achieved. It’s a topic that is challenging to provide definitive answers for it, but that’s what we’re going to do with this blog entry.
Long-term success in real estate through goal setting is very possible, but it’s something where you need to get started on the right foot. It’s very essential, and so we’ll share what we know about getting started that way and making strategic choices armed with more knowledge about whether or not achieving that goal is realistic. So let’s get right into it, as our aim here is to have you start setting achievable real estate goals.
Realistic Successes
We should start by saying there’s no one barometer for success in real estate, and it also isn’t something that is necessarily evaluated as the end of a calendar year. Realtors who do well with growing a real estate business wager run theirs with clear goals and specific thoughts on how to achieve them. It’s one hundred percent true that realtors who have long-term success in real estate through goal setting aren’t expending energy or resources in ways that aren’t as helpful. But being able to make that determination is the key.
There’s always something you can be doing better or differently to scale your business with regards to driving increased sales to expanding your real estate education. The question becomes how are you tracking the actions on those intentions. This is a part of what we’re going to go over here. Every agent is going to have real estate goals they’ve set and ones they will feel will be in line with advancing their career and increasing their earnings too.
Everybody’s blueprint for success is going to be their own and there will be differences among them. You can level up your skills and sales by forming achievable and pragmatic real estate goals and putting them into action. But they need to be SMART goals and we’ll get to explaining what we mean by that acronym right now
SMART Goals for Real Estate
The SMART acronym here stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. Seeing this become a ubiquitous tool in the real estate industry would be good, because the tenets in it provide agents with a path to progress that is proven and reliable. This SMART approach is equally applicable for short-term goals (3-6 months in length) or long-term ones (6 months+). This is because it uses a system for establishing and measuring your goal performance but is geared to support your ambitions with a solid foundation.
This formula of sorts is much more in line with achievable real estate goals, and there are sort of sub-formulas in each of them that may be different on their own but when taken in a big-picture perspective they still fit nicely into the ideological framework. But expect the different goals to be requiring tweaks to the formula. Goals in the real estate industry are as diverse as the agents themselves, and the ones you establish for your business will vary depending.
Factoring into all of that will be business needs, lifestyle goals, experience, market dynamics and more. The basic underpinning of the SMART framework for real estate growth strategies is the idea that long-term goals are achieved when built on smaller successes with other ones.
Real estate agents will do well for themselves when they have an understanding of the different components of the acronym and understand how the relate to methodologies when planning for the goals. So let’s lay that out in even more clear terms.
- Specific – Short and to the point, with no possibility for unclarity
- Measurable – Measurable means there is a clear and definitive way of determining if the goal has been achieved or not
- Attainable – What you aim for always has to be realistic. A good checkpoint for that is to determine if others have made the same accomplishment before you.
- Realistic – It’s important that agents don’t overestimate what they are capable of
- Time-bound – Add a clear deadline or milestone for each goal
SMART Goal Examples
It’s helpful if the agent can map out the smaller steps they can take today for a more significant payoff in the future. Some agents may be using an EOS model, Atomic Habits approach, or a mix of growth philosophies and frameworks. Either or all, it’s important to ensure each business goal is supported by its own SMART formula. Your prerogatives may have you focusing on improving your social media marketing for real estate, listings, open houses, or any other area of your business.
The following are examples of how that could look for some of the key areas in your real estate business:
Sales goals
- Increase GCI by 30% from 240,000 to $360,000 by this year’s Q4
- Boost referral rate from 35% to 40% by year’s end
- Grow transactions by 30% from 20 to 28 this year
Follow up goals
- Have all lead sources centralized in your CRM by end of month
- Spend one hour per day Monday to Friday following up on leads
- Dedicate two hours 2x days a week to reaching out to expired listings
Marketing goals
- Produce 2 listing videos each week rather than the 1 you’ve been doing
- Send gift or mailer to sphere once per quarter
- Block three hours on the first Monday of the month to analyze marketing efforts
It’s also a good idea for an agent to evaluate how many prospecting calls they make in a week. This will be including new leads, follow ups, and any notable expansions on their sphere of influence. Then they should frame that within whether or not they are bringing them closer to a sales goal? If that’s not clear, it may be time to revisit them and start setting achievable real estate goals.
Agents should always see their efforts building on top of one another here. Those who have success with this will be relying on YoY leads, activity, source, and deals and then seeing how they’ve been promoted to what extent by the prospecting goals the agents set in the past. How did the efforts to meet those goals correlate to sales. It’s so important for the agent to be asking themselves this.
Break Down the Math
It’s beneficial to be breaking down the math behind your top-line sales goals. SMART goals are that much more measurable and revisable if the realtors are mapping out there existing performance data, and taking especial note of:
- Average # of transactions for the previous year
- Number of days worked last year, plus any changes in that foreseen for the coming year
- How many weeks they want to take off
- Number of COI transactions
- List sources for top leads
- Conversion rate
With this agents can have greater clarity on where they’re starting from (past sales data) and where they want to end up with current goals for the year. It’s also good to come up with a method that keeps the realtor accountable for all of this as they try to have more success in their career.
Ideally, they get to the point where they can take their goals and then break them down into smaller actionable steps and habits that they can then translate into day-to-day activities. Common ways to break goals down so that they become more actionable is to categorize them in this way:
- Number of new leads
- Number of calls made
- Appointments booked
- Deal closed
Which should be fairly standard for any realtor in Canada and independent of where they are working and looking to generate new real estate leads for agents. After that what’s required next with achievable real estate goals is to crunching the numbers, and doing the basic math that can help you give you a clearer understanding if what you are doing is working.
Let’s create an example and say an agent on the team wants to work 48 weeks next year. Their goals might break down along these lines:
Last year the agent claimed 98 leads. With a current goal of 48 working weeks at an average of 2.04 leads per week, this looks like – 98 / 48 = 2.04 average leads per week. If we then put that into the SMART box then it becomes ‘I can be claiming a little more than 2 new leads every week as a realistic and doable goal for myself.’
Understand as well that the process of working through the math presents a great opportunity for coaching conversations – ‘enough new leads?’ ‘Too many?’ ‘Can we foresee needing more or less of them to achieve the goals set for the year?’
Make the Calls
Realtors who want to generate real estate leads will need to be making calls, or contacting prospective clients by other means. They need to know how many calls or contacts match up with the number of them deemed to be necessary for achieving a SMART goals. These agents will want to let their past performance inform their future SMART goals and daily action plan.
3,254 calls made last year / 45 deals closed. Works out to 74 average calls per deal. Updated goals is 53 deals for next year = 3,871 calls for the year. 3,871 calls / 48 working weeks = 82 calls per week or 17 calls per day
The requisite for the goal to remain a SMART one then becomes making 17 calls per day from Monday to Friday. It’s also good to use data from an agent activity report and the agent goals report to create averages for every agent. We can say as well that increased sales shouldn’t be all-encompassing aim for your achievable goal setting in real estae. The best results in this, or any other business, is in nurturing progress in all areas of life.
To that end it’s recommended to write out a list of the personal and lifestyle goals you want to achieve too. They could be spending more time with family, finding more ways to serve your community, or taking a vacation that you’ve been hoping for over many years now.
Real estate growth strategies may also be more followable if the creator starts the process by asking themselves if they have the capacity for be starting towards this goal in the first place. Most people tend to end up with poor results if they don’t have what it takes to complete a task properly. This is going to be no exception. Asking if the goal is realistic or if there are other versions of this goal I can work towards may also be advisable. Agents may also want to try to have an understanding if the measurement of the goal’s achievement might change based on factors that are out of their control.
Always keep in mind the success behind SMART goals is that they are not big our daunting in any way. The idea here is that they’re achievable based on a realistic definition of whether that’s possible. Be honest with yourself, and for some it may be that failing to achieve one reorients their understanding of what they are capable of. We’ll conclude by saying that it is NEVER a bad idea to be thinking and aiming big in real estate. It’s possible to do that AND Start setting achievable real estate goals right now.
