Orlando Real Estate

If you are in real estate you already know there are three keys to success. I'm not talking about location, location, location. I am talking about the three C's: Contact, Contract, and Closing. To be successful in real estate, you need to be working on all three aspects of the business all the time. In my career, I have come across many people who spend the majority of their time in only one aspect of the business. Some do a good job in two areas, while fewer are able to juggle all three successfully. I believe the real estate team concept can help a great deal in compensating for areas of weakness, but don't go out and start a team just yet. There are other ways to compensate for those areas where you do not excel. The first thing you need to do is identify the area or areas in which you have the greatest opportunities for improvement.

My personal observations over the past 13 years lead me to believe that contact may be the most common area that needs attention. Contact is simply the act of prospecting which comes in two forms passive and active. I think most agents would say they do a pretty good job of passive prospecting which includes advertising, newsletters, calendars, magnets and of course everyone's favorite recipe cards. Probably the most important passive prospecting tool today is the agent website. Nearly 90% of buyers say they use the internet to search for properties. Personally 72% of my business last year came from the internet including buyers and sellers. There are somewhat active aspects to internet marketing such as search engine optimization and blogging, but the internet is primarily passive. Active prospecting involves actually contacting people first, and this is an area with which many agents have the most difficulty.

The good news is that many agents do have difficulty with this area. If you just try to make an effort to improve, you should be more successful. A lot of the coaching organizations put a major focus on this aspect of the business. Again, in my observation, difficulties in this area can be the most expensive and frustrating to overcome. The good news is that improving this aspect of your business brings the greatest improvements too. I say this is expensive, because the most successful approaches to improvement involve either personal coaching or paying tele-marketers to make the contacts for you. Either of these approaches can be costly. Even more costly is doing nothing to improve, because of all the lost business you might have had. It can be frustrating though, because more contacts mean more rejection, which is the basic reason so many agents have difficulty with this aspect of the business. Eveybody has heard that Babe Ruth hit the most home runs, but he also struck out the most. No matter how many inspirational stories you hear, it is still no fun to be rejected.

Orlando Real Estate, David Welch Real Estate Optimist, As Seen on HGTV's House Hunters