Real Estate Goal Setting: 3 Tips for Tracking Productivity
Success doesn’t usually happen by accident — it requires thoughtful goals and a plan for achieving them. And success in real estate, whether you’re a broker, team, agent, or coordinator is no exception.
Among the many possible goals required to take your business to the next level, you may currently be focused on:
- Acquiring new clients or recruiting new agents
- Increasing your individual, team, or company year-over-year production
- Hitting the next commission or closings threshold
How you go about the work of achieving your goal will have a direct impact on your chance of success. A plan alone won’t cut it—you must understand how to methodically and regularly track your productivity and ensure you’re on track.
Instead of merely hoping for the best, you can set yourself up for achieving your goals and real estate success by following these three tips.
1. Make Sure Your Goals Are S-M-A-R-T
Experts agree that your goals themselves are one of the biggest determinants of your ability to achieve them successfully. Goals that are defined in concrete and specific terms are more easily translated into action than fuzzy, vague hopes for the future. Take the above example of growing a pipeline of prospective buyers. Without definition and clarity, it’s difficult to know if you’ve achieved success or to ensure that this goal is also supporting your higher-level business objectives. Instead, break such high-level goals into actionable objectives and tasks that are clear and trackable.
The S-M-A-R-T goal framework is often helpful for turning goals into reality because it bakes the path for achieving your objective into the goal itself. The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely:
Specific: the goal is well-defined (“This quarter, I want to sign on as the buying agent with five families who will be looking to purchase a new house in my region within the next year.”).
Measurable: there are clear criteria and defined indicators for measuring and tracking progress and outcomes.
Achievable: as you define your goal, it’s important to factor in how you will achieve it. Have others done this successfully before? What tactics have they used? What tools are available to you to help improve your chance of success? As you develop your plan for achieving your goal, make sure all of the associated subtasks are also “S-M-A-R-T.”
Realistic: it’s important to base your goals on the reality of your market. Spend some time looking into historical trends in your market as well as upcoming changes that may affect buyers’ attitudes. Economic trends, impending zoning changes, and countless other factors can spur or slow interest in the real estate market; understanding what is currently afoot can help you focus your goals appropriately.
Timely: setting a deadline for achieving your goal injects a sense of urgency and can motivate you to perform the necessary tasks to stay on track.
2. Get the Tools You Need to Easily Stay on Track
If you think of your goals as the endpoint on a map, then you’ll realize that you will still need a way to ensure that you are navigating your path successfully. Paper lists are mildly helpful, but they have numerous downsides. Among those that can derail your chances of achieving your goal successfully: they can become messy and disorganized as you make updates and changes; they don’t provide any inherent functions or benefits that make it easy or desirable to track your progress and stick to your plan; they are neither flexible nor dynamic.
Just as a GPS provides real-time feedback that allows you to monitor progress and ensure you are on course, some platforms help you navigate the route to achieving your real estate goals. For example, if your goal for the year is to increase commissions, then you’ll need a plan to get from your current level of production to your goal — along with ways to ensure you’re on track —well ahead of year end when you still have time to course-correct if your projections show a risk of underperforming.
With commission tracking, calendars, checklists, notes, automated reminders, and other easy-to-use features, Paperless Pipeline provides real estate brokerages, teams, and transaction coordinators with all of the tools they need to easily track every step of the goal setting and achieving process. Accessible from any computer or mobile device, these features support all of the imperatives of S-M-A-R-T goals: once you define your objectives, you can set them up within Paperless Pipeline and track and measure your progress. As progress moves forward, so do the transaction completion percentages. And as your goals evolve, you can easily make updates and compare current and historical performance – to see just how far you’ve come.
3. Make the Process Fun – and Satisfying
Although the simple act of tracking your goal setting productivity can be a powerful incentive for staying on track, this can feel like a slog or fall to the wayside when you have properties to show and transactions to close. But status reports shouldn’t be yet another task you have to remember to perform, as this can add even more perceived work to the process and reduce the likelihood of sticking to your plan.
Conversely, receiving updates about how well you are doing can add excitement and motivation that propels you to the next milestone, or incentivize you to try some new tactics for growing your pool of listings, for example, if your annual sales targets look like they could fall short. Paperless Pipeline’s automated production reports can be a motivating tool, delivering information right to your inbox about how the company and your agents are progressing toward common goals.