If it hasn’t gotten beaten into your head yet, let it stick now. There are many different jobs in real estate and you suck at most of them. Most agents suck at paperwork and a majority suck at following methods and systems which gets you into trouble.
Checklist Manifesto
There’s a book titled, “Checklist Manifesto.” The writer is a doctor and pilot and he realized that pilots followed a very specific checklist for everything they did while doctors didn’t. Doctors make a lot of mistakes. Sponges get left inside people, the wrong body part gets operated on and a myriad of other things. So what if doctors started following checklists?
Essentially they refused because of the ego I would assume. Then there was a study of hospitals of all kinds across the world to see if checklists reduced errors and improved quality of care. It showed clearly it did. He went back to doctors with this evidence of why they should use checklists. The still refused. They believed others made mistakes but not them. It was cumbersome to use and they were smarter than that.
Don’t let your ego get in the way of a successful transaction or a successful career.
I have created some checklists and will be adding more as time goes on. Use them, adapt them or make your own, I don’t care but your real estate career will be much easier with checklists.
What kind of checklists would you need?
- Listing Paperwork
- Listing Presentation
- Listing to go active
- Marketing Checklist
- Social Media Checklist
- Pending checklist
- Closing checklist
- Past client follow-up checklist
- Referral Checklist
- New hire checklist
- Basically anything you do more than a few times that has multiple steps should be a checklist.
If you’re not sold on it yet like the egotistical doctors, do it so you get paid on time, do it so you give your client exemplary customer service and they refer you, do it so you don’t miss paperwork and deadlines which might put you into a lawsuit, do it so you don’t get yelled at by your client for making a stupid mistake.
This turned into a rant more than a lesson.
If you are in this to make it a career, act like a professional and treat it like a profession and not a hobby you run out of your basement on weekends.
Exercise: It’s pretty clear, make or tighten up your checklist.
Do the work, get the results.
Next Lesson >> Real Estate Traps