Want to know how to make 6 figures in real estate? If we’re being honest, it’s not actually that difficult. After all, a six-figure salary isn’t as impressive as it used to be. While it’s not an extraordinary income, it’s still a decent amount of money and a realistic goal for real estate agents.
In this post, we will give you an overview of what you need to do to make 6 figures in real estate. We will also show you how to make this happen without working every waking moment.
Spend More Time Prospecting and Less Time on Everything Else
You need to have buyers and sellers to make 6 figures in real estate. This can be difficult, especially for new agents.
There are two primary ways to find buyers and sellers:
- Prospecting, and
- Marketing/Advertising
Prospecting is actively seeking out new leads one-on-one. To market or advertise is to broadcast your message to a large audience and wait for responses. There is a difference between marketing and advertising, but for the purposes of this discussion, we are treating them as one thing.
It can take a lot of time to find potential customers, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. And marketing takes more money, but less time. If you have more time than money, focus your time on finding new customers. You can still use low-cost marketing to attract leads without spending much time on it. use your time wisely and focus on prospecting
How to Prospect for Real Estate Leads
Prospecting is not difficult, but sticking with it day after day can be challenging. To prospect effectively, set aside one hour each workday specifically for the task. This Power Hour will literally drive your business. If you are new to real estate or in a slow market, you may want to spend two hours prospecting.
Make sure you have a list of people to contact during your power hour so that you don’t have to waste time wondering who to talk to. Here’s an example:
- Call on all newly-expired listings. These sellers may be looking for a new listing agent.
- Contact for-sale-by-owners. When these sellers learn how complex real estate sales are, they may decide to hire an agent.
- Follow up with potential clients on your CRM (Client Relationship Management) system. Staying in touch with leads is critical!
- Reach out to owners who are behind on their mortgage payments. Best case scenario: you might be able to help these owners reach a deal with their lender, in which case you won’t have an immediate listing, but you will have the trust and respect of these homeowners, who will likely use your services when they’re ready to sell. And if they can’t catch reach a deal, you may be able to earn their listing to help them avoid foreclosure. Foreclosure.com is the best way to find owners who are behind on mortgage payments. If you search the “Preforeclosures” section, you’ll see all the properties that have missed mortgage payments for 3 consecutive months.
- Call friends, family, past clients, and local investors. Give them a quick market update and ask if they (or anyone they know!) are looking to buy or sell in the coming months.
Stay Top-of-Mind
You need to keep your name in front of potential clients if you want to make six figures in real estate.
I know this might not sound important. However, you would be astonished at how much business real estate agents lose because their future clients simply forget about them. If you don’t stay in touch with potential buyers, they will forget about you and won’t think to come to you when they have a need. Instead of going to a real estate agent’s website, people go on Zillow and request information. Then, the person becomes someone else’s lead. If agents want to keep their clients, they need to stay top-of-mind. On average, agents lose 20% of their clients every year because they ignore this advice.
There are a few simple things you can do to make sure you stay top of mind with your clients and customers. You can use a variety of methods to connect with your target market, such as social media ads, market reports, newsletters, blog posts, hand-written notes, or personal phone calls.
Just keep in touch. It’s as simple as that.
Earn More Referrals
If you want to keep getting business from the connections you have, staying top-of-mind is key. But why not also get referrals from those connections?
Referrals are important in making a lot of money in real estate because they are potential customers who have been recommended by someone else. The clients already like and trust you because your connections have endorsed you.
To be successful, you need to find a way to get your connections to talk to their friends, family, and colleagues about you. Here are a couple ideas:
Strategic Closing Gifts
Some agents avoid giving closing gifts, thinking they are unnecessary. However, they provide multiple opportunities for you to stand out. The main reason to send a thank-you note is to show your appreciation for your client’s business. If your gift has a long shelf-life, your clients will remember you every time they see it. The gift can also help promote your business by giving your clients a reason to talk to their friends and family about you.
When your clients’ friends and family compliment them on their home, your clients have an opportunity to tell them about you and how thoughtful you were as their real estate agent. Personalized wall art, serving dishes, and home decor are all great options.
Public Displays of Appreciation
One way to ensure your clients recommend you to others is to send a thank-you gift after completing a job. Whenever someone gets a bouquet of some kind at work, everyone wants to know what the occasion is. Your client gets to respond to the new house they just closed today with a gift from their real estate agent.
You can send a thank you bouquet similar to the one you received for each referral. It’s another opportunity to generate more referrals.
Outsource Tasks When Possible
If you want to learn how to make 6 figures in real estate, you need to delegate some of your daily tasks. We opened this post by discussing the importance of spending more time on prospecting and less time on other tasks. This is the place where you can get rid of some of the other obligations so you can focus on finding new clients and scheduling appointments.
Here are a few time-consuming tasks that are easily outsourced:
- Social media marketing. You can easily hire a social media manager who understands the ever-changing algorithms for the major social platforms and knows how to maximize engagement on your posts. At the very least, spend a little money to purchase a social media calendar so you don’t have to waste your prospecting time brainstorming and scheduling all your social media posts.
- Admin work. In the age of freelancing, you don’t need to take on an employee when you’re ready to hire an assistant. You can simply pay a VA (virtual assistant) to handle your administrative tasks remotely. They can handle your data entry, email replies, and presentation prep.
- Transaction coordination. You can even hire a transaction coordinator to manage your properties through the escrow process, freeing you up to focus on client-facing communication.
- Blogging. The agents who understand how blogging generates leads are quick to add blogging to their marketing plans. But blogging can be time-consuming. So savvy agents outsource their blogging tasks to a professional real estate blogger who is already an expert in writing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
By taking care of these things, you can focus on making more money.
Diversify Your Income
If you want to earn a six-figure income from real estate every year, you will need to be creative.
The economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will result in slower home sales in many markets. But that’s ok. Recessions are not something to be feared by agents, they are just a normal part of the economic cycle. If you want to earn a six-figure income, you need to find ways to earn money from sources other than sales.
There are lots of ways to diversify your income. You could:
- Expand your real estate services to include recession-proof income streams like property tax appeals, property management, and credit repair for buyers
- Monetize your real estate blog
- Make passive income through real estate investments
Now that you know how to make money in real estate, all you have to do is put your plan into action. Make a commitment to prospecting every day, keeping yourself at the forefront of people’s minds, and earning referrals and repeat clients. You will have achieved success when you can afford to delegate some of your everyday tasks to others. By diversifying your income, you will be able to earn six figures in any market.
