Seeking efficiency in the real estate process
So you are busy. Your advertising is working, you’re getting referrals, and you feel like your real estate business is at capacity. Before you go and hire an assistant you may want to optimize your business to make sure you can squeeze every last bit of efficiency and productivity out. Not only will you be keeping overhead as low as possible, but when you do hire on agents and assistants, training will be much easier when you have written systems and checklists to follow.
A Realtor’s systems and checklists should cover every aspect of the way you run a real estate business. If you are a broker, you may have been required to take a class about the real estate business operations log which is important for everyone to use, even new agents. Why not make your business run as smoothly as possible to free up more time to generate new business?
Parts of a good system make a whole
The parts of a good system will have a couple of key points with the end goal in mind, points regarding customer satisfaction, and the quickest routes while covering everything. The reason for being in business is most likely to reach a goal and by keeping the end in mind, your systems and checklists will always point you to where you need to be going. In real estate, it will usually be a stress-free closing with excited clients that will still talk to you.
That brings us to customer satisfaction. Real estate is a people business, so you will obviously want to keep clients happy if you want more business. The client should be kept in mind, and the system should be structured in a way that spoon feeds them what they need. Just because you are going through hell on a transaction doesn’t mean clients need to. The problems should be caught and fixed by the checklist before clients even know about it. This will make referral business a lot easier.
Lastly, efficiency is critical. Time is money, and real estate agents work on commission, so take the shortest route possible without taking short cuts. You can still be fast but thorough if your systems are set up correctly. If an important step is missed, it will kind of defeat the whole purpose of creating the systems in the first place. After reorganizing any list a few times and testing it, you will quickly optimize it to work well for you.
Getting started with your systems and checklists
As a starting point, there are downloadable sample checklists at the end of this article. Most checklists found online are either outdated or are being sold for $80-$90. We will give you a couple of free checklists to use as template for your business and encourage you to transfer these into whatever digital platform you use to manage your business or alter them however you want. You can also modify them to prioritize some other real estate processes by using PDFtoWord.com or other exporting tools.
Free checklist downloads
Included is a very basic buyer checklist, short sale checklist, and escrow checklist and we hope you’ll use this as inspiration for a variety of other checklists in your career from seller checklists to marketing checklists, accounting checklists, trust account checklists, referral acquisition checklists among others.
Get started! The best part about systems is they only have to built one time. From there, they can be replicated and modified through the rest of your career. The reason every successful business creates systems and protocol checklists is because they work. As a Realtor, you are a small business and running it like one will improve your success.
