How to create a vision for your real estate business

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For any business, it’s absolutely crucial to have a clear vision, backed up with strong values that truly resonate with you. This will help you keep moving in the right direction at all times, even if you’re not exactly sure what to do next. It’ll also make your work more meaningful: you know you’re doing something important that matters to you and others.

So what is a vision exactly? What are values? Let’s dive in!

What is a company vision?

‘Vision’ is defined as “the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom”.

So you could say that a vision is most high-level strategy that will guide your business. It’s the big picture of where you see yourself and your business in a few years. It’s a set of overarching goals for your entire business. So this includes everything from the production you want to make, what kind of cashflow you want to have, where you want to be based, how many offices, what kind of clients you’ll serve and more.

What are company values?

Values, on the other hand, are defined as “principles or standards of behavior; one's judgement of what is important in life”. So your values should be closely aligned with what you truly believe in. A lot of people don’t spend enough time on this and come up with some generic things to put on their website.

But, if you really flesh out your values, you’ll have an incredibly useful set of principles that will guide your short-term and long-term decisions. You can make the same dollar in many different ways in real estate, so it’s important to decide on how you want to make that dollar. Who is paying it to you? What are you willing to accept? Whose money don’t you want? What value are you generating, besides the money?

1. Finding your vision

So how do you go about it?

The first step is to create the vision and values. The best thing to do here is to write down the answers to the following questions:

• Where do you see your company in five years? 10 years? 15 years?
• What does success look like to you (both short term and long term)?
• What is the purpose of your company? Think about overall objectives and what makes your business different from others.
• Think of some long-term, overarching goals. These should be financial (e.g. make $X profit by 2025) and non-financial (e.g. provide value to small and medium-sized businesses)

This will get you thinking in the right direction. Remember to keep the vision as general as possible -- you’ll be going into the details later on.

2. Discover your company's values

Next up is to try and identify values that you mention in your vision statement. Finding the guiding principles that underpin your vision.

The values you identify should be closely aligned with your identity, so try to avoid using words that don’t have a deeper meaning to you personally. Nonetheless, here’s a few ideas to get you started:

• Customer service
• Value
• price
• Community

For each value, you can also write down a short sentence to clarify. For instance: “Helping others: my company will help others to find the property they are looking for, making the process easy, taking them through all the steps. We’ll take time to explain all aspects in detail.”

3. Implement your vision and values

The next step is to actually implement your vision and values. The best way to do this is to break down your vision into clear actionable goals.

First, find 4 or 5 general focus areas, based on your vision and values. These focus areas could include marketing, sales, customer service, business development, etc.

Then, for each focus area, write down how this will allow you to execute your vision. Then, write down specific goals for each focus area. Make them measurable and connect them to a clear time frame.

That’s it! This should have gotten you started on creating a vision and values for your business.

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