Macro Strategy for Building a Career in Real Estate

It’s been said that “homes come and go. It’s the relationship that pays.”

From the perspective of this real estate truism, here is a macro strategy for building a successful, healthy career in real estate:

At BrokerBuzz, we think of leads in two categories:

Sphere: those people that know you, like you, and would be willing to use or refer your services to others. 

Haven’t Mets: people that are planning to buy or sell real estate sometime in the near future that don’t yet have agent representation. It could be you. It’s your job to find them, connect with them and convert them. 

The pros and cons of each are: 

Sphere: with sphere contacts you already have the relationship, which gives you a head start. However, sphere contacts will be ready to buy or sell on their timeline, not yours. The challenge, in particular for newer agents or those still building their pipeline, is that the frequency and timing of sphere transactions may not be sufficient for that agent’s income needs. 

Haven’t Mets: with haven’t mets it’s the reverse - the agent can find prospects ready to buy or sell now or in the near future. But, one of the most challenging aspects of real estate is to build systems that effectively and consistently generate lead opportunities that can be converted into client relationships. 

A healthy recipe for starting or building your career is to get the most out of your sphere relationships by positioning yourself to capture any transaction opportunities on the horizon, while at the same time grinding out your lead gen to fill your pipeline with now or soon opportunities. 

But, here’s the key: make sure that when each transaction is through, you’ve built a relationship and turned each one of those haven’t mets (that are so challenging and labor intensive to generate), into a sphere contact that knows you, likes you, and would be willing to use your services or refer them to others. 

The Payoff

When you run your business this way, of course it takes a lot of effort to get your systems rolling and producing results. Typically the first two years are the most labor intensive. 

However, if you’re effective at turning haven’t mets into sphere contacts, the beauty is that after about two years you start to see repeat and referral business coming back to you. For example, that young couple you helped get into a starter townhome early on now find themselves with child on the way and need to sell the townhome to get a three or four bedroom. 

Of course it is critical that you have to have good nurture systems and a little bit of discipline to make this happen to effectively maintain and build relationships over time. Staying top of mind with your sphere will always require at least some tending and effort. 

In this way, the work that you did early on will start to pay you back in multiples, instead of one-and-done scenarios. And oftentimes those are “two-fers” where you get both a buy and sell opportunity. Real estate gets a lot more fun and rewarding when you find yourselves in those scenarios. 

Five years in you can wake up January 1st and know you’ve got 5, 10 or even 15 transactions already coming your way that year (depending on how fast you’ve been able to grow your network). This is when things really take off. 

For some agents, this means they can ease off the labor intensive lead gen systems and focus primarily on the relationships they’ve built. The key is to not take your eyes off the ball on maintaining those and keeping those relationships warm. Putting yourself in this position means you are maximizing the payoff to work ratio in your practice, opening the door to quality of life balanced with a rewarding career.

For other agents, getting their relationship pipeline rolling means they can push down on the gas pedal even further, continuing to leverage or augment their lead gen systems while continuing to capitalize on their ever growing sphere network. This is a great path for agents that want to grow the support structure around them for more capability, or even expand into a team. 

In Closing

In either case - healthy build leads to a payoff. Know there is a path to benefit from all the grind, hustle and hard work you put in to initially build your career. As challenging as real estate can be, it can be helpful to keep this light at the end of the tunnel in mind and as a motivator. Onward and upward!