You’re working full time at the finance department for a chain of retail stores in the state. While you are based in Daybreak, you get to travel to various cities to visit the different branches there.
On the side, you dabble as a realtor, selling real estate properties from houses to condominiums to office spaces. You’ve managed to set aside a substantial amount of money from your earnings as a real estate agent. You want to investigate the possibility of doing this full time. Is your part-time experience enough to help you launch your real estate brokerage business? What do you need to know to get started?
Let’s look at some possibilities:
An Overview of the Real Estate Brokerage Industry
The sales & brokerage industry is demonstrating stability with a recorded $165 billion revenue as of July 2019. This revenue is directly tied to the value of the properties and the volume of transactions generated in real estate.
The strongest of the real estate segment is still the residential market, which accounts for more than 66% of the total revenue.
Initial Steps
It starts with a lot of questions. That’s where you should begin. Why do you want to do it? Do you have the resources to do it? Reflect fully on why you want to do it because that’s the one thing that will keep you motivated to keep moving forward every day. Money is a good motivation because you will earn more if you run your own office vs. working as an agent.
Once everything is clear in your head, the next thing that you need to do is plan everything. Your business plan should clearly outline your financials, your marketing strategy, and your agent recruitment. This plan sets the direction that you should take next.
Executing the Plan
You’re sure in your head, and a plan that sets your direction is properly written down. Time to get to work, and here are some the things you need to do to get started:
- Know the market. Remember the more than 66% share of the market earlier in this discussion? How do you plan on attacking that? Would you allocate resources to cover the remaining 34%? Read up on trends from journals and be in tune with what’s being said on the business news. These are all part of your continuing research, which allows you to carve a niche for your business.
- Go heavy on marketing. The industry employs nearly 1.2 million people. If you can’t make yourself stand out with your marketing initiatives, you will die. Do not relax because you have a couple of referrals always coming in during the past months. It’s all about being ready to communicate your value proposition. Try doing an exercise that completes, for example, this sentence, “We’re better brokers because…” You need to be constantly aware of data, like pricing and trends.
- Prowling for Prospects. You need to be always on the prowl for prospects, and you need to be creative in how you build your contacts or database. Don’t be shy to work people from your SOIs (sphere of influence). Mailers still work, and it could be a text email, a graphical postcard, or a short video. Your contacts must know that you want to remain connected.
Creating your website is an excellent way to stay connected, and for you to stand out in the market. There are others on the list, like eventually getting your own CRM tool. But these items should cover the fundamentals on how to start your real estate brokerage business.
