My Top 5 Mistakes as I grew my Real Estate Business

In any business, it is key to learn from your previous mistakes in order to continue to grow. As a real estate agent, I have made my fair share of errors that have hindered my productivity and effectiveness in working with clients. Out of all the mistakes I have made, these five stand out to me as the most crucial to avoid if you want to be successful in real estate:

1. Not staying in touch with past clients and people in your database. It is so important to keep up with past clients and potential leads that you have been unable to work with. By hosting appreciation events, you let them know that you are still thinking of them and indirectly remind them that you are in Real Estate, generating real estate conversations that can lead to new opportunities. Appreciation events can be any size; the value is in the invitation and making them feel appreciated. Ideally, you are sending out the invitation 3-4 weeks prior with a button to RSVP. The cost can be split with sponsors like your title & lender relationships. What worked well for us was an Email Blast to all past clients for a local event called painting with a twist. Within minutes after the email blast, the entire team was sending a text message to everyone that was invited to ensure they received it which broke the ice and comes from the contribution as the tonality is, I hope you can make it to this event. The event got completely booked within 48 hours which got a lot of other past clients asking when the next one will take place. The way we ensured everyone heard about it was by implementing the Email + Text strategy in a timely manner that kept the message very relevant.

2. Newsletter always seemed so boring to me until I finally tried it and WOW! Was I surprised?! Yes! We got over a 40% open rate on a Newsletter! According to recent research, the average Real Estate industry open rate for real estate-related emails is 19%, and we were a bit above 40%. The recipe? Come from contribution and make the sections short and simple. We decided to send the Email Blast through our CRM Follow Up Boss and powered it through a Send Grid integration. We get a lot of custom merge field integrations with Follow Up Boss, so that allowed us to make a newsletter that felt genuine to the user. The result was over 9,000 people opening our email 🤯 while having less than 1% unsubscribe rate. For this newsletter, we were giving away a weekend cruise giveaway. Great way to catch their attention. However, as they saw that, they also saw our Q2 Quarterly Magazine for Miami-Dade County and Broward County. They also saw our top 3 blog posts inserted in the newsletter. All while having a gratitude tonality all throughout the email. By the way, the newsletter goes out once a month. Yes, we challenge ourselves with what can be enticing to catch the user’s attention. Gift cards and invitations to either appreciation or education events do very well.

3. Not holding yourself or your team accountable. In real estate, it is very easy to make excuses for why things haven't gone as planned. However, it is so important to sit down regularly (whether that be daily, weekly, or monthly) and reflect on what could have been done better. By being accountable to yourself and your team, you can catch issues early on and prevent them from becoming bigger problems down the road.

4. Not joining Keller Williams earlier in my career. Keller Williams is such an amazing company that provides its agents with world-class training and resources. I wish I had joined sooner so that I could have implemented their systems and strategies earlier on in my career.

5. Being complacent with where you have grown. It is so easy to get comfortable once you start seeing some success in your business. However, complacency will only lead to stagnation. In order to continue growing, it is important to always be looking for new ways to improve and expand your business.

If you can avoid making these four mistakes, you will be well on your way to a successful career in real estate!