5 Tips for Starting a Successful Real Estate Business

Talk with any high-performing agent in your area, and you’re bound to get a different story every time. Veteran agent. Newly licensed. Educated. High school dropout. Becoming a successful real estate agent is not about your pedigree or experience, but the strategies you use every single day to grow your business. It’s what makes this industry so special.

But where do you get those strategies from — and how do you make sure they’ll separate you from the pack? Think of it this way: becoming a real estate agent is no different than starting your own small business. Rather than download cookie-cutter scripts or pay a coach to teach you sales strategies before you know the fundamentals, commit to setting your business up for the long run. 

To get you started, here are five tried-and-true strategies for growing your real estate business. These techniques, taken from the SellWell program, have worked for thousands of agents who have completed the program, and continue to revisit it regularly. Learning them is easy. The hard part is committing to checking off these boxes every day. Let’s do this:

Follow up with potential clients the day you meet them.

Picture this: you meet someone at an open house on Saturday and have a great connection (you think). They attend four more open houses that day, and two more on Sunday. You follow up Monday morning. Do they remember you? Not likely — unless your cookies were really that good. Prospective clients are in a constant state of information overload. Between the agents, the homes, the lenders, and mortgage options, your job is to make every decision simple — especially when it comes to choosing you. Always follow up the same day. It’s as easy as that. Not only will they be more likely to remember you, but it’s one less thing a potential client needs to think or worry about. As a bonus, it shows you’ll be one step ahead of their needs throughout the entire buying or selling process.

Maintain a sphere of 50 relationships at all times.

Write this down, remember it, and repeat it every day: the sphere of 50. At all times, you should be working to maintain a sphere of 50 individuals who you are contacting consistently. A lot of coaches and sales resources will tell you to focus on building the biggest database of contacts possible, but this can be risky. You’re assuming someone will remember your name when a friend mentions they’re looking to buy, but what if you haven’t been in touch for years? It’s quite frankly, unlikely. None of us aren’t that memorable! So here’s what you’re going to do: build a sphere of 50 individuals who know and trust you, and put effort into keeping in touch. If you need guidance on how to select the right people for your sphere, manage those relationships, and leverage your sphere when opportunities arise, SellWell is a great step-by-step resource.

Follow up with prospects every two weeks.

Did you know that 80% of sales require five follow-up calls after the first meeting? Or that 44% of sales agents give up after just the first follow up? That’s why you should always have your eye on the long game. If you can stay consistent with your follow ups every two weeks, you’ll start to see different responses and better results. It comes back to building client relationships and establishing trust and reliability. Do most people get married after the first date? Not even on The Bachelor! Give your client relationships the care and attention required and you’ll get better results in the end.

Create a daily habit of managing your time.

Failing to plan is planning to fail, period. But “planning” and “time management” aren’t as tedious and time-consuming as they sound. It’s not about filling up your calendar with busy work; it’s about managing your daily tasks and ensuring they are yielding results. Or else what’s the point, right? The SellWell Morning 90 & A.I.R. process is one example of this. It clearly maps out a ritual for starting your days with growth activities, and ending your days with a method of eliminating time wasters and leaning into result drivers. Whether you use this system or your own, you can’t go wrong by starting each day with an assessment of what you plan to accomplish.

Set weekly targets focused around your vision of a successful real estate business.

No, this is not the part of the article where I start singing the praises of setting giant, lofty goals. I said I wouldn’t do that, and I stick to my word! When it comes to setting weekly targets, focus on attainable goals and then map out a clear path to execution. Targets can be big: sell a home. Or smaller: send follow ups to your sphere of 50. The important thing is that each of your targets is hyper focused on driving growth for your business.

Looking for a more in-depth resource on building your real estate business? SellWell delivers a 12-phase coaching program, complete with video content, print-outs, and downloadable resources, for less than the cost of three months of one-on-one coaching. Coach Aaron Hodson shares everything he’s learned in his 20+ years in the real estate business, and everything he wishes he had known from the get-go. 

About the Author

Aaron Hodson is a keynote speaker, business strategist, and CEO of SellWell. He’s spent 25+ years in the real estate industry in various capacities — from selling homes, to becoming CEO of one of the fastest growing real estate companies in the world, to coaching high-level sales agents and executives. Fair warning: Aaron originally hails from New Zealand, so Kiwi-isms are to be expected.