Achieving Gary Keller’s Real Estate Vision
It’s been 15 years since Gary Keller wrote his best-selling book, “The Millionaire Real Estate Agent”, which laid down the foundation of his massively successful brokerage. One of the key lessons taught in the book is that agents should treat their work in real estate more like a traditional business. Traditional businesses grow by analyzing data and improving processes, so real estate agents need to do the same.
Gary promised that any agent who tracks their numbers like this would improve their business by at least 20%. We’ve found this promise to be painfully conservative – the businesses that we’ve watched put these practices into play have doubled their revenues within a year. Seriously, it works that well.
Here’s the problem for most brokerages and teams: Gary’s promise is proven, but how do you get agents to actually do it?
Visualization And Gamification Are The Missing Pieces
Two of my sons have hardly ever expressed interest in working out. A few days before Christmas, one of them went out and bought an Apple watch. The other purchased one about a month earlier with his birthday money. Then, the craziest thing happened. They suggested that we start a family challenge based on $1/day. We each put up our $30 entry fee and, overnight, they started working out for approximately 5 hours each day. Seriously, they were going to our neighborhood clubhouse at 10:00 p.m. to be the one with the most steps and most calories burned at midnight.
When I got past my amazement, I started looking into what changed. What motivated them to take action? It’s simple. Apple made it simple to track their progress with a device that stays on their wrist all day. Then, they took that data and made it meaningful through visualization and gamification. It was like magic. Now they’re the ones pushing me to reach and exceed my fitness goals by 300% so that I can win the competition.
Real estate sales are the same way. It’s hard for agents to stay motivated and keep an accurate record of their activities if nobody ever sees the data.
Even worse, sometimes the agents themselves don’t even look at it! That’s why even agents with the best of intentions find themselves giving up on their goal of number tracking and analyzing. However, those who can form this habit become addicted to the fun, the success, and the game.
Make Tracking Painless
Step one is making it as simple as possible to track data. It's not as easy as turning your agents loose with a clunky spreadsheet.
I guarantee you that not a single one of your agents want to head back to the office to open up Excel or Google Sheets after a long day of working with clients.
Number tracking should integrate seamlessly into the agents day—and what's more integrated into our lives than our cellular devices?
You'll see a dramatic increase in buy-in from your team once you enable them to track their data from the field. As you get more advanced, you'll take it a step further and pull data from your existing systems (such as CRM, dialers, etc) right into your dashboards.
Visualizing Real Estate Data
Now, imagine you take all the data your agents are tracking and make it visual.
You give them an easy mobile app to track their daily activities and make all of the data readily available in online dashboards.
You pull all of their data from the past two years and compare it to their progress this year.
You make use a clean color scheme and easy-to-read graphs to show how they are pacing against their personal goals, as well as automatically tracking their conversion ratios (for example, it takes 25 phone contacts to schedule one appointment).
Suddenly, with all of this, that data becomes effective, agents start to see their results, and they feel more motivated to continue tracking.
That’s what we mean by making the data visual.
What visual team dashboards could look like
Gamifying Real Estate Data
But we’ve found that making the data visual and easy to input isn’t enough, because it’s not enough that the agent alone views that data. Agents feel motivated when they are recognized for great achievement and enabled to compete against their colleagues. This is where gamification comes into play.
Go one step further than visualization—Gamify the data and create team leaderboards.
If you see yourself at the bottom of the leaderboard, but know that you’ve put in the work to be at the top, wouldn’t that motivate you to keep an accurate record of your data? What is there was a reward for being at the top? Leaderboards and scorecards allow for recognition and competition, two factors that make work rewarding and fun.
Gamification also allows team leads and broker/owners to run contests according to the metrics they know will make a difference. If you’re a leader and know, from looking at your leaderboards, that you’re going to be low on listings next month, you could set up a contest that emphasizes contacting, listing appointments, and listing agreements signed.
Number Tracking Is For Millionaire Real Estate Agents
I’ll end this post with an important message: don’t settle for mediocrity! Number tracking and analysis are time-proven practices that WILL cause explosive growth in your business, so stop making excuses that “my agents will never take the time to track.”
If you really want business changing results, you’ll leave that limiting belief behind and take massive action to HELP them understand the value of running their business the right way. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with your excuses and mediocre results.
I’ve made it clear HOW you can help them make the change – make their data meaningful through visualization, then gamify it. Feel free to reach out to me for more information on how to do this.
