In many ways the real estate game is different to other types of business. Even though sales are at the core of our activity, we do not generally buy product at wholesale, we don’t stock an inventory, and we often actually have to compete against others to sell the exact same item. Once it’s sold, we lose that potential income forever.
So you may be wondering how concepts applied to other business models could have any bearing on our industry. To answer this question, I am going to use the business achievements of prominent British entrepreneur, Reuben Singh, as a case study.
One of his most successful recent business creations is a company called AlldayPA. This company provides outsourced services to other entrepreneurs, allowing them to be available to the public 24 hours a day. In fact this is even a concept that savvy real estate agents could take advantage of, switching to a dedicated answering service to handle their appointments, but that’s not really the point of this article.
The lesson that can be taken from AlldayPA is that it is an extremely task-oriented business. It focuses on doing just one thing and doing it to perfection. As a busy sales agent, you could consider that the main activity that makes money for you is taking people to look at houses. If you don’t do this often enough, you can expect to make less sales, and consequently you will make less money.
Time is money. When your time is spent on productive activity, you increase your potential earnings. When your time is spent on non-productive activity, your potential earnings are likely to decrease. Many real estate businesses spend a lot of time on non-productive activities, and if your business is doing that, it’s time to make a change.
So what you should do is look at all the activities that you participate in during a typical day. Make a list and record also how much time you spend on each activity. You could do this in real-time, which is the ideal way, recording the activity as you are engaging in it.
Once you have a clear picture of all the activities that you do during the day, you should divide the list into productive and non-productive activities. The following example list is probably quite similar to your own:
| Productive | Non-Productive |
| Showing houses to clients | Answering general inquiries by phone and email |
| Selling properties | Accounting / Book Keeping |
| Leasing properties | Researching properties |
| Advertising | |
| B2B transactions (eg. paying bills) |
By cutting down time spent on those non-productive activities, you can dedicate more time to productive activities. You’ll spend more money initially by outsourcing those non-productive activities, but the time you save should more than repay you in increased sales volume. If it doesn’t then you are definitely in the wrong business.
Taking control of your time gives you power. It makes you focus on the most important thing that you do, so you can do it perfectly. Just like Reuben Singh and his AlldayPA company.
