How to Better Organize Your Time as a Real Estate Agent

As a real estate agent, time management can often be difficult. Working for yourself, you likely don’t have an outside force like a boss to regulate your productivity — so it’s essential to self-motivate to get things done.

With that in mind, below are five tips on how to better manage your time on a day-to-day basis. Read them over so that you can decide which tips might be most helpful to you.

1. Create a comprehensive schedule.

First thing’s first: if you’re not already managing your time with a comprehensive schedule, there’s no time like the present to get started. Having a schedule will help you to stay on track with the tasks that you need to accomplish each day.

Best practices suggest that your schedule should include more than just showing appointments or other meetings with clients. Instead, you should make an effort to schedule out all work-related tasks, including lead generation, marketing activities, and administrative upkeep.

By planning out a specific time to tackle each of these tasks, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them rather than allowing them to fall by the wayside at the end of a long day.

2. Batch tasks.

In the same vein as maintaining a schedule, consider batching your tasks.

Here, “batching” is the act of grouping similar tasks together so that they get all get done at once. This method is supposed to dissuade you from multitasking, or switching between tasks.

Task batching is said to minimize distractions and to lead to a better workflow and better attention to detail. Put simply, by making sure that similar tasks are grouped together, it’s likely that you’ll be able to work faster and more efficiently overall.

In practice, batching off tasks looks like blocking off a specific time in your schedule to do all of your cold calling at once. Then, when it’s time, focusing solely on that task. No answering emails. No taking other phone calls.

Once you’re done, you’re free to move on to the next set of batched tasks.

3. Automate as many tasks as possible.

Next, consider automating as many tasks as possible.

For those who are unaware, automation is the process of using software to take care of simple tasks rather than doing them manually. These days, technology makes it easy to automate many real-estate-related workflows.

For example, one crucial automation tool that many real estate agents use is email drip campaigns. An email drip campaign is a pre-written set of emails that get sent to your contacts over time. Many agents have specific drip campaigns that go to various groups, such as warm leads or past clients.

Another example is automating your social media posting. Many agents use social media management software to schedule their social media posts ahead of time. After they’ve been scheduled, the individual posts are then posted to your social media profiles at a pre-determined time.

4. Hire an assistant.

If you’ve already followed the above suggestions and you still have too much work on your hands, it might be time to hire an assistant. Obviously, an assistant will be able to help you better manage your time by taking some smaller tasks off of your hands.

These days, a real estate assistant can be either in-person or virtual. It’s up to you to decide. If you want someone who can help take your clients out on appointments, you’ll need someone who can come into your office. However, if you’re mostly looking for paperwork help, you might be able to save some money and hire someone to do work virtually.

You’ll also need to decide whether you want a licensed assistant or not. Again, if you want an assistant who can interact with clients, you’ll need someone licensed. On the other hand, if you just want to hire out administrative tasks, an unlicensed assistant should be fine.

5. Join a team.

Lastly, if an assistant is not enough to help you better manage your time, think about joining a team. In real estate, team members often have a defined role, such as a buyer’s agent or a conveyance manager. In this case, by narrowing your role, you’ll cut down on your workload as a whole.

That said, joining a team is a big decision.

If you’re considering going this route, you’re going to want to interview with at least a few different teams. It’s important to make sure that you land on the one that is ultimately the best fit for you.

Alternatively, you could consider starting a team of your very own. In this case, starting a team will allow you to delegate tasks to your team members. Again, it’s absolutely crucial to make sure that you hire team members who are a good match for you personally and who have complimenting skills to yours professionally.