Your First Week as a New Agent - Meet Other Agents and Listen

Whether they're bragging or complaining, old timers will let good info slip.

If you're following a good planning strategy for a new real estate agent, you're in the middle of personal expense analysis, business expense budgeting, marketing planning and all types of new business planning activities. To do this properly is difficult, as you don't have a backlog of statistics to tell you what you can expect for results from certain efforts.

Part of a good budgeting and marketing plan is to try and determine expected results from certain behaviors and marketing practices. In other words: "If I have 650 people in my Sphere of Influence list, contact them regularly, then how many transactions might I expect to get each year from this particular market segment?" Since you haven't done this before, how would you know?

Well, the experienced agents in the office have been doing it for a while and just might share that info with you. Ask questions, but listen too. When you hear "Geez, I've got 1200 people on my list and work them hard, but I only get about 4 transactions a year out of it!", that's valuable information. Whether this agent is doing the proper job of "working" his list or not, you could use this number as a benchmark to plan your expected results on the low end. Your 650 person list might then be expected to yield only a couple of transactions this year. Not exciting, but better to err on the side of caution and be pleasantly surprised at a better result.

Listen for and remember quantitative marketing information. When you plan your activities to yield certain results in the way of prospects or actual transactions, you would hope that you're working with realistic results expectations.