Sales for 2019 don’t start on January 1st of the year, they start on December 1st of the prior year.

What that means is your plan for success has to be locked and loaded well before the clock strikes midnight on a new year.

The good news is that 2019 looks like it’s going to be the fifth year in a row where well more than five million homes are going to sell across the United States. That means there will be plenty of opportunity for success-minded agents to have an amazing year.

That said, each new year of sales presents its own set of challenges as real estate markets ebb and flow on a pretty consistent basis.

To that end, it’s important to first look at what you did and didn’t do well in the current year. From there, take the lessons you learned and use them as the foundation for your plans for the future with the goal of making the upcoming year even more successful.

As you put your game plan for your real estate business together for 2019, take these suggestions into consideration.

Know where you’ve been

One of Jay Abraham’s tenets of business optimization is that if it can be tracked, it can be improved upon.

As you sit in front of your computer or journal looking to lay your game plan for 2019, you need to first look at the results you got in 2018. To do this you need to identify your outcomes for your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and your Key Result Indicators (KRI).

A KPI is a measure of a business activities that lead to a business reaching its goals. In real estate, some of the most important KPIs are:

• Leads generated by type
• Dials
• Contacts
• Nurtures
• Appointments set

A KRI is the result of the efforts of your KPIs. In real estate, some of the more important KRIs are:

• Appointments kept
• Listings taken
• Buyers taken
• Offers written
• Offers accepted
• Homes sold

Now, there are lots of other things you can and should track like expenses and your return on those expenses, no doubt.

Aside from money spent, these KPIs and KRIs are the foundational elements of why your business turned out the way it did...good, bad or otherwise. So, in order to determine what you need to do to improve on things for next year, you need to know what you did this year.

Know where you’re going (and how to get there)

I’m not a dream stealer, I’m a dream enabler.

What that means is if you have a goal, dream or aspiration to accomplish something, then I’m all for doing everything I can to help you make that a reality.

All of this said, it’s important that you have a clear idea of where you want to go and how you’re going to get there.

For instance, if you made $50,000 in GCI this year and you want to make $100,000 in GCI next year, then you need to do the math — yes, I just said do the math — to know how you’re going to get from $50k to $100k in a year.

Here’s what I mean:

On average, it takes 46 contacts to set one seller appointment if you’re calling expireds, withdrawns, home value leads, FSBOs in addition to doing some circle prospecting.

Of the appointments you set, roughly 65% of them will be kept by your prospects. The remainder will be rescheduled, cancelled and sometimes, ghosted altogether.

For the folks you actually meet, your conversion rate from listing appointment to listing taken will be approximately 55%.

And once you take the listing, you’ll have about an 85% success rate in getting the home sold.

Using this math as an example and an average sales price of $250,000, here’s what it would look like to make $500,000 in GCI from your listing business:

$100,000/$7,500 ($250,000 x 3% commission = $7500) = 13 listings sold.

To back into what your effort needs to be in order to make this happen, this is what the math looks like;

85% of homes sell: 13/.85 =15 listings taken to get 13 sold

15 listings taken/.55 conversion rate at the kitchen table = 27.8 or 28 listing appointments met

28 listing appointments met/.65 show rate for prospects = 43 listing appointments set

43 listing appointments set x 46 contacts per appointment = 1,978 contacts

If you take your total contacts needed 1,978 and divide them by 12 for the months of the year = 164.8 or 165 contacts per month.

Divide that by 4 and you get 41 contacts per week.

Assuming you call 6 days per week, that comes out to 6.86 or 7 contacts per day.

These are just national averages for conversion across the board.

Your specific numbers could vary, up or down, in either direction. No matter what the numbers are, however, you need to know them in order to make your goals for 2019 a mathematical certainty.

Be strategic

It’s hard to argue taking massive action and just going out and making your goals a reality.

But before you raise your fist in indignation and charge forward, make sure you’ve got a strategic plan in place so that you know how you’re going to use you resources of time, energy, people and money.

A good strategic plan doesn’t just have your monetary goals lined out, it also details all the things you need to take into consideration as you make those goals a reality.

In addition to that, it has you plan your current goals so that they are in line with your long-term goals. More specifically, whatever you work on today needs to be congruent with — and help you get closer to — that which you want to accomplish 3, 5 and 10 years down the road.

By setting up your plan this way, you are not only working to make your current goals a reality, but also you’re going to provide much greater certainty that your long-term goals are going to happen for you.

Goal setting is not brain surgery; otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to explain what I’ve shared with you hear today.

It’s not just important that you have a game plan if you want to have a great 2019, you need to take the time to look at what you’ve accomplished and then do the math on what it’s going to take to get your business to the next level.

If you’d like help with your game plan for 2019, click here to set up a no-cost clarity call with one of our strategic business advisors.