10 Point Evaluation for a Better Year in 2020
And good morning, everybody. Mike Ferry Mike Ferry TV, November 11th. Wow, two months left in what’s going to be the end of another decade for all of us. A new decade right around the corner many of you may not have either understood or remembered when we change decades as often as we do, because as we get older, the decades fly by. So here we are headed into 2020. What I like to do usually around this time of year each year is do a little strengths and weaknesses analysis for all of our customers like yourself. And what we want to look at is, you know, what do we do right? What do we need to improve upon so we can have a better year next year than this year? One of the questions that comes up a lot and I hear this, not this time of year. I hear it almost every day. What is a fair percentage increase that I should anticipate, expect or shoot for in 2020? Well, I think that depends on a lot of different things. You know, what is your motivation? What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to just add supplementary income to your household because of your spouse? Are you a single spouse household or are you taking care of all the bills? How much do you need to earn to make sure that your life is comfortable for you and your family? There’s a lot of factors that go into this.
Generally speaking, we’ll say to an agent, you should try to increase your business by 20 to 24, 25% annually each year. Now, however, if you’ve done 3 deals this year, we don’t want you to increase it by a half a deal. We want you to make some big movement forward. If you did 3 or 4 deals in 2019, I’m going to anticipate or expect you get to 10 to 12 for next year. But see if you’re at 12, 15, 20, 25 transactions with so many of our clients are, as you know, then we anticipate at least to 20 to 25% increase. So it always is going to depend upon what you’re trying to accomplish, what you’re trying to do, what your purpose, your motivation, what you’re you know, if you can define what you’re trying to do and then we can help you define how much you need to do or how much more you need to do. Second question I’m getting all the time is what are you projecting for a state of market in 2020? I’m projecting we’re gonna have a state of market in 2020.
And of course, the truth is none of us can really project. There are trends. We know that when you have these 5 to 6 year cycles, which we have been in a very positive one from 2012 to 2018, there’s gonna be normal adjustments. Now, the good news is interest rates are really almost at an all time low. Everything seems to be working in our favor. However, in a major part of the country, the prices have gotten so high. If you’re in California, Nevada, Arizona, if you’re up in Washington, Oregon, if you’re in from New York all the way down to Miami, some of these parts of the country, prices almost are unrealistically high. And that, of course, slows the market down a lot and in many cases slows down a real lot. Now we’re headed into, of course, than Northeast and Midwest. We have our normal winter months coming and there’s probably going to be an adjustment because, you know, when you have snow this deep and and heavy rains and weather and of course, in the West, we have the fires and so forth.
Well, all of these factors take place in the market. What I want to share with you is a very simple thought. The stronger you are mentally, the stronger you are in terms of your skills, the less market conditions affect what you do. Market conditions have a much higher effect on salespeople.
Don’t be offended that are weak here or weak in their skill set. As you strengthen your skill set, your confidence increases. Now, remember. In the United States and in Canada, there’s always going to be a certain number of transactions that take place every year. Now it varies a little bit depending on the economy at the time and all the factors that take place. But you’re looking at, say, let’s say five million transactions in the US annually and that’s been pretty stable. Now yeah, we’ve had some 4.8. So we’ve had some 6.1, but generally 5 to 5.2 million transactions take place. Well, if you think about it for just a minute. That’s a lot of transactions. And we also have to think about the fact that a person that is weak in their skills is not educated as to the real estate market, which you of course, are through your broker, through your company and through us. You have a much better chance of maintaining and growing if a market is unstable. So I’m going to say to you, don’t worry about the stability of the market. Yeah, it’s a concern to the degree that you want to be aware of the trends of the market.
But the truth is, the market doesn’t make any difference if you’re actively out working every day. Now, the hard part, if you had a State of a Union address coming up the end of this this year, which should be now the State of the Union says that the turnover among agents is probably setting a record. We’re probably losing faster than we’ve ever lost agents before. Now, agents generally don’t quit Real Estate because of excessive income. They quit real estate because they can’t make the money they want. I’m assuming of a hoping that you’re not in that category. Well, why is it so hard for agents to make money today? It’s because the industry seems to be backing away from the importance of strengthening the mindset and strengthening the skills. You know, we have the digital world today. We have, of course, the electronic world. We have, of course, the Internet world. All these things that are designed to substitute the skills that are required to be a great salesperson. So what I’m gonna look at with you today is some very basic fundamentals in terms of strengths and weaknesses. I want you to evaluate yourself in each of these 10 categories I’m going to give you.
And as you evaluate yourself, I want you to be honest. If I was sitting with you and we we’re going to talk for 10, 15, 20 minutes about your success, your failures, your wins, your losses, your joys and your hardships and Real Estate, how would we score ourself? 1 being worst and 10 being the best. So the first thing on my list, of course, is managing our time … without a doubt, the biggest challenge a Real Estate is managing our time. I mean, it’s it’s tough. We’re independent contractors … because we’re independent contractors we can’t be told what to do. And if somebody tells us what to do, we have the option of not doing it. So when it comes to time management, you know, how productive is the schedule you have or do you have a schedule? Because if you don’t have a schedule, you’ve got to prepare a schedule based on the goals you have set. How many hours a day are you going to be actively involved in a production based activity? Or are you on social media? I got a report today from one of my clients, Matt Weaver, and that said that social media now consumes like one 130 minutes a day of an average person’s life in the US. That’s over 2 hours on social media. Well, if you’re a real estate agent and you’re spending 2 hours on social media, you’re probably not making any progress at all.
Number two on my list is, of course, the ability to talk to people. Call it what you want. Call it lead generation, call a prospecting, talking to people is what our business is all about. I don’t care what any one of these tens of hundreds of trainers teach you. I don’t care what all these coaches are saying to you. If you’re not cognizant of the fact that you have to learn how to talk to people, you’re simply not going to make it Real Estate. Because if you’re showing property, you have to talk to people. If you’re trying to list property, you have to talk to people. If you’re gonna negotiate a contract, you have to talk to people. So it’s our ability to talk to people. And of course, talking to people means you’re in such a situation where you’re attracting people that want to buy and sell real estate with you. Call it what you want. I call it prospecting, which I know most of us hate to hear. Third, of course, this aggressive lead follow-up. How good are you at following up on the lead you get? And the reason I say aggressive is because you’ve got to know … do they really have to or do they really want to buy or sell? If they have to you make a good presentation, they sign a contract. If they want to if they can get the price for listing or steal a home at the price as a buyer, the motivation is not as strong as if they have to.
So the difference is, do they have to or do they want to? How do you find out? You ask a lot of questions. You take the pre-qualifying questions for Buyers or Sellers we offer and you use them all the time. Commit to that type of follow up. Fourth, of course, is the aggressive pre-qualifying because you’ve got to find out the motivation. Again, watch. Either you have to sell your home or you don’t. And if you don’t, I’m okay with that. But I’m not going to spend time making a presentation. Well, you know, if you could get me my price. Well, if I could get your price, we’d both be richer. But you have to look at the reality of the market stats to understand the price. And of course, next is the Listing Presentation. And I really can’t stress enough the importance of just walking into the house and saying I’ve written down some important questions that I need to ask you. May I ask them now and just read the questions we recommend you ask on Listing Presentation. Asking questions brings people to a conclusion. And on a Listing Presentation we’re trying to create a conclusion that we can do the job for them better than they can do it for themselves or have a co-op broker do it with them.
Number six on our list is showing property. You know, showing property can be one of two things opening the door, getting out of the way and hoping they buy or walking through the house and demonstrating to that particular Buyer the qualities of the house in a manner that allow them to get engaged in the house. Showing property is a process that’s very important. Handling objections. I mean, you know, I used to hear this all the time. You know, you always have to receive an objection to make the sale. And I’m going to counter that by saying if you really present strongly the number of objections to receive are going to be minimized, if any, at all. But if you’re going to get an objection, you might as well know the answer. And there’s only a handful of objections a Buyer or Seller will give. Learn the answers so you can respond in a professional manner and then, of course, closing the sale. You know, I need a signature on the contract to complete this particular transaction. And closing is nothing more than the ending to a good presentation. Negotiating the contract of course is critically important because we have to bring the two parties together. What you’re seeing is there’s a lot more in terms of skill set than most people think. And why do most agents then turn to every single magic formula, magic and some magic wand magic pill to try to make money in real estate versus learning how to sell? Because negotiating is a vital part of the transaction.
But the tenth thing that I want to say to you that we have to look at is our ability to start over again each day once we’ve completed the task we have. Hardest part about Real Estate is the repetitious boredom … restarting every day. You know, the work that I do, the work that my company does, we have to start every single day. We have to call the people, call the prospect, call the coaching clients. We have to get up and speak and do a seminar. We can’t just say we had a good day yesterday. We’re not going to show up today. We can’t do that. So my question then, of course, is how good are you at starting over? So what I want you to do is I want you to go and rewatch this video, rewatch this program … write down the ten thoughts and then honestly evaluate yourself from 1 to 10, 1 being the worst and ten the best. So then, you know, and you can sit with your Coach if you have a Coach, you can sit with your Broker Manager. You can sit down as to planning how you’re going to strengthen any weaknesses you have and you’re going to also learn how to accelerate your strengths. So the last thing I want to say on today’s call is this and I want you to think about the fact that as you progressed into 2020 … you need to make a tough decision, and that tough decision is where do you want your income to come from, working with Buyers or working with Sellers? A good portion of all the Top Producers and we’re very fortunate we work with hundreds well, actually thousands of the Top Producers in the nation today, and the majority of them are gonna have 75 to 80% of the revenue come from listing sold in the balance from a Buyer controlled sale. If I talk to a general audience of 500 people and we’ll have one hundred and fifty of our good clients in that room. So I have 350 to talk to that are not our clients. Probably 90% of them are going to be working with Buyers all the time. And the question is why? And the answer is it’s a different skill set to work with the Buyer versus working with the Seller. The skill … don’t get mad … the skill of working with a Buyer is minimal compared to the skill of working with the Seller and the competition you have listings is much stronger than the competition you have working with Buyers. So think about we have what, 6 weeks left in this year? Think about the direction you want to take your business in.
Because the direction is vitally important. So I’m excited for you finishing this year strong. If you’re involved in our Coaching, press hard. If you’re not involved in our Coaching, we’re doing a great promo from now till the end of November, which is basically called Finish Strong, Start really strong in 2020 and you do that by joining our Coaching for 4 months or in essence, test what we do to see if it makes sense to you in either case let’s have a great finish. Let’s be strong and I’ll see you next week. Thank you.
Mike Ferry is the global leader in real estate coaching and training. Watch Mike each week as he discusses a variety of topics to help real estate agents and brokers. Grow your real estate business by improving your mindset, developing your skills and creating a plan of action to increase your production!
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