Michael Montgomery
Staying organized in real estate is very important but it can also be very challenging. When you are first getting started, there may not be the deal flow to keep track of but there is still a lot of learning, prospecting, and marketing to organize.
In this new real estate agent training podcast, you will learn a few quick tips to help you stay organized in real estate.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Rev Real Estate School. The podcast with quick tips and actionable advice to help you sell more real estate in today's world. And now your host Michael Montgomery.
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome back to another episode of Rev Real Estate School I'm your host Michael Montgomery. Do you want to stay organized in real estate. If so this episode is for you? But don't worry if you know me you know that I'm probably not the most organized guy out there so you would not want to take these tips directly from me. These come from our brokerage co-founder and my wife Willemina. So she is the organized one when it comes to real estate sales. She has this down. I do not. So we're taking these tips directly from her. If I was to provide these tips to you directly I wouldn't necessarily follow my organization tips. It's one of these areas that requires some improvement in my life. I do know my way around real estate sales and sales training but not organization.
[00:01:02] So these come directly from Willemina. Let's jump in and let's talk about how to stay organized as a real estate agent.
[00:01:09] Number one is day/time blocking. This one you've heard I'm sure you've heard this before. My whole calendar is blocked out the whole day. Now I don't always stick to it. I'm not always 100 percent on but at least I know exactly what my game plan is for that day. And I always have prospecting in the morning and that's what Willemina also recommends is prospecting in the morning and clients in the afternoon. If you have done any real estate training you've probably heard this whole process of the golden hours or power hours or anything like that to be done in the morning. Reason being is you're fresh. You're ready to rock and roll and then use the afternoon for meeting clients. But we also use afternoon for education or learning or anything along those lines.
[00:01:56] Next she says make sure that you book time off. So I have an interesting story about this. I had an agent that worked for me a while ago and when I sat down with him I always ask agents OK. What's your game plan. How long do you plan on working. And these sort of things. And this agent had said that he was hoping to work 24/7 for the next 365 days of the year. And I love that. I love the fact that he's wanting to work that hard. It shows hustle shows grit and it shows a great intention to be working very hard of course. But we have to be realistic about this and you will burn out. I have burnt out. It is no fun whatsoever. And trying to get back on track after a burnout is a challenge. So make sure that you book time off. I try to book off my Sundays personally and then we usually book off Wednesday evenings for date night so Wednesday evenings are just my date night I try to avoid showings or presentations or anything like that on those nights or events and then Sundays.
[00:02:58] She recommends a checklist for everything. And this is important as you start to go along in your career. We oftentimes put a little bit too much pressure on our own brains and we think we're going to remember absolutely everything. If you have a checklist in place for the listing process the buyer process all sorts of things like this even if you don't think you need it I can't tell you how many times that a checklist has totally saved me. Her next tip is keep a notebook with you at all times. Now this is kind of a funny one. There are these amazing apps out there so I use Evernote for pretty well everything that I possibly can. But having a notebook there's some power to this and I'm going to show you why. So when you have the notebook with you. Yes you can stay organized you can jot down notes and that sort of thing. The other reason why I use a notebook is when somebody watches you take notes when they're talking to you they definitely think that you are paying more attention. You very likely are paying more attention. I don't like taking notes on my phone when I'm talking with a buyer because it seems like I'm texting or when I'm with a seller for sure not. I just see it just seems like you're texting right. It just seems like you're on your phone even though if you let them know look I'm just taking some notes on what you're saying. Even when somebody does that to me for some reason when they're on their phone they're typing away it still feels a little disconnected. So she recommends always having a notebook to stay organized and I would also recommend this but also to just maintain good rapport with your clients.
[00:04:23] Next is have planning sessions. So every year every month and every week. So this is the whole reverse engineering side. If you've gone through our agent business plan you know that we're all about reverse engineering what your success is down to what you should be doing on basically a daily basis. This is a check in and you can even do this down to a daily task but making sure that you're on track every single day week month and year. Now some tools that she recommends Trello, Asana, or Teamwork. They are great tools for project management, and keeping organized. They are great for checklists as well. This one's great. On our team we use a program called Teamwork which is very similar to Trello it just has a little bit more functionality. I also use Evernote for everything. Honestly my my To Do list my tasks everything is put into Evernote. Reason being is it because it syncs with devices. And plus you just have a little bit more flexibility with what you do with Evernote. So whether you're taking notes or whether you're doing a checklist or something like that Google Drive is a huge one.
[00:05:35] Another one, of course, is your CRM so you should have a CRM. I know agents that do a ton of business without a CRM and just use an Excel spreadsheet. But whatever your system is just my one word of caution is make sure that it is up to date. I'm so guilty of not updating the CRM and then needing to have some information on a client in a year's time or something like that and then kicking myself down the road for not updating the CRM. So make sure that that's kept up to date even if you don't think you'll need or even if you think you're going to remember their pets names or their kid's names you probably won't. So keep it up to date. Finally for client file organization. So I will do some screenshots of how we organize our client files in the show notes just so you can see this because it makes a lot more sense when you're looking at it but keeping your client files organized is very very important. I dropped the ball on this early on in my career and a client would call and want to know more about a house on their street or something like that and I couldn't even find their address. So I learned this the hard way. Well I mean of course keeps it all organized and it's all done through cloud storage. She says to make sure it's always backed up and she has a folder with each client name and then if there's another client or something like that that is added to it and then within the client file there is each address so each property that they have within that person. So as time goes on you can if somebody sells a few homes with you, you're going to have more and more files.
[00:07:01] So that's the file the client name then to the address. Now the other side of this is you. That makes sense right you have a client name you have an address associated with that client name within their file. The next thing that she does is she has an active and an archived file. So if we are dealing right now with these active buyers or with these active sellers they are moved into an active file so that I am easily looking at that it almost serves as somewhat of a hot list because you're constantly looking at whom you're currently dealing with because it's all within your active file and then we have archives. So as soon as the deal's done we move that person off into archives. So the active just stays people that you are currently working with. And of course it is their name. And then within their name you're going to have their properties and then the archived is just going back in time. So this one has saved me multiple times just having a systematized approach again we'll add some screenshots we'll have a little bit more information in the show notes just so you can have a look at this but this has saved me multiple times.
[00:08:01] Thank you very much for listening. This episode I really appreciate it if you would like to ask a top producer or anything you can head on over to our website revrealestateschool.com . Go to the free coaching session and all you do is rate in review the podcast and then from there you can ask a top producer or anything they'll give you a call and you can chat about business how they've built their business or anything that is on your mind. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you in the next lesson.
[00:08:26] This episode of Rev Real Estate School has come to a close. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you back here for the next lesson
