[Download] The Simple Real Estate Business Plan

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As a real estate professional, you run your own business. So you need to take care of planning, accounting, marketing, sales,.... Everything!

To tie this all together, you want to have a solid business plan. A plan that you can easily and quickly set up, and develop further as your business grows -- and as your business needs change.

Whether you’re just starting out or have been operating a long time, you’ll need a business plan that evolves as the business evolves. But also, one one so complicated it gets thrown out come January 30 and you've got too many things to do.

To keep things simple and concise, we've boiled down a solid real estate business down into it's few, essential components. Your business plan should at least include these 5 steps:

1. Work from your values
2. Determine your real objectives
3. Set your goals, KPIs and strategy
4. Determine your timeframes
5. Measure and learn

Let's get into it.

Work outwards from your values

What do you believe in? What values are most important to your business?

For instance, you could be looking at providing impeccable customer service, always providing value, always helping to find a perfect match between buyer and seller, and so on.

This is important. What you do as a business is not just generating cash. You need clarity on you values, so they function as a beacon in the distance: something you can aim for when things get tough and you’re muddling through the day-to-day.

Determine your objectives

Here, you’re planning your road to success. You’ll first have to define what ‘success’ looks like to you. This can include moving into a certain geographical area, niching down and only focusing on helping a particular type of client or catering to a specific type of real estate.

Based on this, you can come up with higher-level, more abstract goals.

Narrow your focus areas

With your objective set, now you can break down your objective into focus areas.

For example - imagine you were to move into a neighbouring area, how would you go about it? How would you generate new business, make sure you know the area and why people are looking to buy there?

To accomplish this, you’d probably need to focus on things like marketing, sales and educating yourself. Each of these elements would then be your focus areas.

Set specific goals and KPIs

Here, it just comes down to what exactly you’re going to accomplish.

For each focus area, you can write down a number of specific goals. You can start with 2 or 3 goals per focus area and take it from there.

Then for each goal, write down your key performance metric. This can be, for example, calls made, leads generated, showings given, etc.

Make sure goals are tangible, concrete and realistic. You’ll want to set a good number of increasingly ambitious goals, so you keep momentum in your business.

A good example of a goal is to turn a production of $10,000/month by next year. That’s a tangible, easy-to-understand goal -- and it can be split up in sub-goals quite easily.

This type of planning will give you clear guidelines for your actions over the coming weeks and months, so you’re never wondering what’s the next step.

Set timeframes

And of course, you should add time frames to all of these parts. So don’t just say “Increase production to $5000/week”, but say “Increase production to $5000/week by March”.

This will not only give you clear guidance on what to do, but also on when to do it by. You’ll have a better understanding of where your business should be in 1, 3 and 6 months. And if your business doesn’t improve as planned, you’ll know where to start looking for what went wrong.

Measure your progress

With your objectives, goals, KPIs and time frames in mind, you will now in the position to put your business plan in action. Be sure to measure the progress on each of your goals and KPIs over time so that you can tweak performance.

Looking to take action on your business plan? Subscribe to our newsletter to download our Simple Business Plan template below: