Maybe I should have this sooner but I don’t think you would have paid as much attention. You’re learning how to be a real estate agent. Now you need to make sure you run it like a business.
A business plan
Figure out what all, and I mean all of your bills are. If you are a tracker, this will be easy. If not, figure it out. Utilities, eating out, cable, Spotify account, groceries, gas, pet supplies, house payment, car payment and whatever else. That’s your personal basics.
Now, let’s figure out your business expenses. Realtor dues and MLS dues are not monthly but you might as well break it down as if it were. Car costs, flyers, signs, software, clothes, marketing, supplies, education, coaching, training, networking group fees, commission split, tech fees and so on.
These two numbers equal your basic monthly needs on a monthly basis. In a perfect world, you should have 3-6 months of reserves. A lot of people didn’t pay attention to that advice before the coronavirus hit. Now it makes a lot more sense. If you don’t have that number, put it to the side and add it to the next number.
What fun do you plan to have? How do you want to grow? Do you want an assistant? Do you want to farm a neighborhood? What’s your retirement savings plan? Do you want to add better tools? Everything that is about fun and the future goes here. If you don’t have your emergency savings, how much are you going to be saving towards that? You will need it.
Combine these three numbers and that is your target. Well, after you account for taxes. Multiply the number by 1.3 to get a very basic number.
So now you reassess your goals from the previous lesson. This is where the arbitrary becomes real. You wanted to make $X. Is that still the number? Does that afford you what you wanted?
How many houses do you need to sell to make that number? How many per month is that. By the way, you can’t control that so plan for 6 out of the 12 months to be 50% busier.
Now the real $100,000 question is, how many people do you need to talk to in order to make that happen? I have no idea what it is for you. It will depend on the path you chose and how warm or cold the leads are. If you are tracking your numbers you might know. The common wisdom is that if you talk to 100 people a week, you can have the real estate career you wanted.
Hopefully, now you have a good handle on what you need to be doing to have the life you want in real estate. That’s the whole point right.
Exercise: Didn’t you do this while you were reading it?
Do the work, get the results.
Next Lesson >> The Alter Ego Effect