Before you pick a closings number for next year, figure out what your life actually costs and work backward to the daily activity that gets you there.
You can write 30 closings on a whiteboard and look at it every single day next year, and it still won’t tell you what to do on some random Tuesday in June. This is the time of year when agents start penciling in a number, so before you commit to 30, stop and ask yourself why 30.
Start with the life you want. Your goal should start with your life, not with a number of houses. Think about how much you want to make next year. Then think about what you want that money to do for you, which matters even more.
Maybe you want to travel more, pay off debt, put your kids in a certain school, buy a house, or save more. Maybe you just want a little more breathing room every single month. Once you know what that life actually costs, you can work backward to a number. It might take 25 closings, or 30, or 40.
Look back before you look forward. Before you set anything for next year, begin by looking at this year. Figure out where your business came from, what worked really well, and what didn’t.
Notice what you spent a ton of time on that honestly didn’t produce much of anything, and decide whether you’re happy with where you’re going to finish. With that review in hand, figure out what your business needs to produce to support the life you want, and build your plan backward from there.
Plan around what you can control. Goal setting matters even more right now, because there’s still a lot we don’t know about next year. Nobody knows exactly what interest rates will do, what inventory will look like, or what will happen to the economy.
There will always be something in real estate we can’t control. Instead of building a plan that only works if the market cooperates, build one around the things you can control.
“A goal on a whiteboard can’t tell you what to do on a random Tuesday in June.”
Work backward to your weekly activity. Say you need 30 closings. Figure out how many appointments it normally takes you to get there, and how many conversations you need to have to set those appointments. Based on your actual conversion rates, map out what that looks like every month and even every week.
If the market gets more challenging, your goal doesn’t necessarily change. The activity required to reach it might. You may need to have more conversations. Your follow-up may need to be more strategic, or you may need to get better at converting the opportunities you already have.
Track your pace all year. This is something we spend a lot of time on with our agents at the Neal & Neal Team. We take that big annual goal and break it down into the actual activities that will get each agent there. Instead of telling someone to go sell 30 houses this year, we can show them what selling 30 houses actually looks like in their business.
From there, we look at those numbers throughout the year. If you’re on pace, keep going. If you’re not, we look at what’s actually happening rather than blaming the market.
We check whether you’re having enough conversations and whether you’re setting appointments but not converting them. We also look at whether one lead source is producing well while another isn’t, and whether something in your strategy needs to change. Now you have something real to work with.
Setting goals in an uncertain market means knowing what you’re going to do regardless of what happens, since none of us can predict exactly what comes next. We can’t control what the real estate market will look like next year, yet we can control how we show up.
If you want help turning next year’s goal into a plan you can work every single week, we’d love to talk. Call us at (888) 519-7431, email us at shane@nealteam.com, or visit www.mysanantoniohomesearch.com/blog. We look forward to helping you build next year around the life you want.
