Time Management

Anthony Lamacchia – December 11th, 2017

Hey everybody, here to talk about time management. One of the things we talked about over the last week and a half was goal-setting and what you’re going to do differently to change the outcome in 2018. Well, a massive portion of improving your business and growing your business in achieving your goals is time management. I’ve said before, I’ll say it again, time management in my opinion, is the single biggest and most common reason that realtors hit a ceiling and then don’t grow their business.

As I said last week, it’s one thing for a new agent, one, two, three years in the business to grow their business every year, well you should, but then at some points, realtors often hit a ceiling and there’s not enough time in the day. They just don’t have time to grow. I guarantee there’s a lot of people out there in the real estate business. Really, in any sales type business, they are thinking, “Yes, I want to do more business next year but how am I going to do it? I’m already working 12, 15 hours a day.” That’s what I want to talk about.

Time wasting activities, first thing I want to go over. In the real estate business, some time-wasting activities are dropping off checks and various documents. We have something called the U.S mail, it works great. Pictures, signs, lock boxes. I have news for you realtors who think only you can take the best pictures. There’s plenty of people out there that take very good pictures. If you can get contracted with a photographer or someone like that to take your pictures and your signs, lock boxes, it is worth the investment because of the time you’ll gain.

Next is meeting cities and towns for final walkthroughs or fire readings or water readings, things like that don’t always need to be done by you. Next is just in general attending things that you don’t need to attend. We, realtors, have a tendency to think, “I’m only doing a good job if I do everything for my client.” I have a question for you. When you go to the doctor’s, do they weight you when you go in? Do they take your blood pressure? Do they do every little thing? No, they see you for the important things. The things that they have to do and their staff does the other things.

As you’re growing in your business, please begin to think like that, because if you don’t, you’ll never grow. Our time-wasting activities, I listed four. I could have gone on and on, and on, and on, and on, and on and on with realtor time-wasting activities. Let’s jump over and look at money-making activities. Money making activities in real estate one of them, one of my favorites is training. When I started in this business I went to all the training I could possibly find so that I was always learning and always working on my business to grow my business.

That’s one. It could be going to a conference, it could be training at your company, I don’t know what it is but always invest in yourself and get training 12 months a year. Next one is prospecting. We all know, we talk about this all the time, every single day no matter how busy you are, even in the spring months when you can slip into closing mode, you need to be prospecting.

The other one is actually making deals. Negotiating offers, obtaining houses for your buyers, selling your listings for the most money for your clients, those are money-making activities. The more of this you do, the more business your business will grow. The more of this you do, the more your business will stay still. I hope that makes sense to everyone.

One more thing, I want to give you some generic time-saving tips. That’s over here. Learn to say no. Time block, schedule things saying, “I’m only doing this at this time throughout the day.” When you do that, shut off your cell phone, shut off your email, think about that.

Is the world really going to end if you get back to someone 25 minutes after they call you about something with one of your transactions? No, it’s not. It’s not going to affect your client. It’s not going to hurt anyone at all if tomorrow between 3:00 and 4:00, you shut off your cell phone, you don’t look at emails and you only do money-making activities and not getting bogged down in time-wasting activities.

The last one, I wrote here just as a tip pre-typed emails. Doesn’t have just to be pre-typed emails but I always say and I’ve said it for years, “Whatever you do more than once in a transaction, you have to have a system for it.”If every transaction you’re writing manually typing an email when the purchase is sale, a sign, when the home inspection happens, when the offer is accepted, why not just type all those emails ahead of time and have them saved in a Word doc so you can just cut and paste them in whenever you need them instead of randomly writing and forgetting things and so on?

That’s it for today. That concludes time management and time management tips. As I said, money-making activities, this is where you want to spend your time. All right everyone, thanks very much. I know that was a little long but I hope it helped you all. Have a great day.