Five New Year’s Resolutions for your Brokerage

The New Year came fast and is already in full swing. Did you make any resolutions? It’s important to maintain your focus on where you want to be in 12 months. Continue to take the lead and decide what direction you want to move your brokerage toward this year. Just as in your personal life, January is a good time to set goals for your brokerage to help you stay motivated and to reinvent yourself a little bit.

To improve your bottom line and keep your agents in the forefront of their market, consider ringing in these five New Year’s resolutions for your brokerage:

1.Create Buzz Around Your Brand

Think about your marketing plan for the year. After all, marketing should create buzz around your brand and should be well thought out and budgeted into your business plan. Use the amount of an average transaction commission as a base for determining how much you can comfortably spend this year. You want the most impact at the least cost.

Whether that’s an ad highlighting your listings or a glossy ad in a regional or national magazine showing off what sets your real estate brokerage apart from others, your spending needs to build awareness, bring business in and grow your brand. As marketing is so crucial to business growth, Weichert® advises having a well thought out brokerage marketing plan in place each November for the following year.

2. Track Numbers Differently

Every successful broker knows their numbers. Do you? It’s important to track sales, of course, but following the numbers of all your agent activities—new listings, buyer consults, open houses conducted—shows patterns that may suggest a change is needed to increase income. Keeping your agents accountable for their activities using hard data like this leads to better performance.

3. Introduce A New Technology Application

Technology is ever evolving and is an indispensable part of the modern real estate enterprise. Try introducing new technology to your agents that can make showing listings easier in real time. For instance, Periscope is a live-streaming video application launched in 2015 that can be used from any smartphone to simply broadcast virtual open houses for those purchasing from a distance. Best of all, the app is free to use.

4. Use A New Marketing Tool

It can be time-consuming to keep up with the latest marketing tools, but it’s important to remain competitive. We all use hashtags in our social media posts, but how do you know if your choice of hashtags is effective? This year, try Keyhole, which provides analytical details on various hashtags, including impressions, demographics and sharing.

5. Better Project Management

Recruiting, training, checking budgets, answering agent questions, reviewing contracts and many other tasks must be completed to keep the office efficiently running. Simplify big projects and tasks with Todoist and save time. Used on over 10 platforms—web browsers, mobile devices, desktops, inboxes—and with lots of special features, projects and tasks on this application can be scheduled, broken down into manageable parts, and even shared and delegated to your office manager to keep you both in check.

There you have it, five New Year’s resolutions to implement into your real estate business plan for 2018. Use of these resolutions can help you increase sales through smarter marketing, keep your agents accountable and productive, and, best of all, save you time.  And if you are looking for one centralized solution to help you implement these types of resolutions, consider a franchise affiliation.
Affiliations with a national brand such as Weichert® can offer you help with branding, tracking your numbers and have teams dedicated to researching and implementing new technology and marketing tools, so you can spend time managing other aspects of your brokerage.

Final Thoughts

New Year’s resolutions can be hard to keep, but your ability to set and keep some around your business goals are an opportunity to reinvent pieces of your business in the New Year and take it to new heights. At Weichert, we know something about reinventing real estate brokerages, it’s what we help owners do.  For more information about becoming a Weichert franchise and its benefits, contact a member of our team today at 800-533-9007 or weichertfranchise.com.

A Healthy and Happy New Year to us All!

Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/five-new-years-resolutions-brokerage/