How to Set Realistic Real Estate Goals

Motivational guru Tony Robbins had this to say about goal setting:

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”

Launching a real estate career is an exciting journey filled with limitless potential. If you’re new to the industry, one of the most important steps you can take to pave the way to success is setting clear and meaningful real estate goals. Real estate agent goals provide a roadmap to guide your journey while keeping you focused and motivated.

This post will review various strategies for developing solid real estate goals for new agents. Realtor goals can be the foundation for a highly successful and profitable career in our industry. However, to achieve success, you have to embrace the mindset of taking real estate goal-setting seriously.

DO REAL ESTATE GOALS MATTER?

Important benefits of real estate goal setting.

The short answer is YES! Top-performing real estate agents focus on goal setting to guide their daily prospecting activities. In a broad sense, here are the benefits of setting real estate goals and objectives:

• Goals Address What You’d like to Achieve in Your Life. The great thing about goal-setting is that it helps you zero in on what you want to accomplish, not only in real estate but in your life in general. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can establish priorities for your journey. You can start with long-term goals (i.e., I want to retire at 40!) as a starting point. Then, you work on the short-term goals that lead toward your ultimate, long-term goals.
• Goal Setting Gives You Focus. When you operate without goals, it’s easy to lose focus, get sidetracked, and get frustrated. Goals help you stay motivated, and motivation is essential to achieving the most important, long-term goals that will define your life.
• Goal Setting Helps You Stay Productive. Real estate goals help you stay motivated, which, in turn, helps you be more productive. As any top-performing real estate agent will tell you, production (i.e. prospecting, lead generation) is the key to a successful career. With productivity comes success, and success gives you a true sense of accomplishment, which translates to even greater motivation.
• Goal Setting Can Take You Out of Your Comfort Zone. Top-producing real estate agents know that frequent (i.e., daily) prospecting is the cornerstone to a successful and profitable career. For many real estate agents, especially those newer to our industry, the thought of phone prospecting can be intimidating. But when you start to look at the priorities in your life and focus on what you need to do to achieve those priorities, you can learn to work outside of your comfort zone on the road to meeting your realtor goals.

REAL ESTATE AGENT GOALS CAN WORK

Here’s what the data tells us about setting goals.

If you’re skeptical about the idea of setting goals, consider some of these statistics:

1. According to a survey by TD Bank, visualizing and imagining your goals can make you twice as confident in achieving them. Only 31 percent of those who don’t visualize feel confident about achieving their goals, as opposed to 59 percent of those who visualize.
2. A Forbes study found that people who vividly describe their goals in written form are 1.2 or 1.4 times more likely to be successful than those who don’t.
3. A study by the Journal of Applied Psychology reveals that presenting weekly progress reports of your goal increases your success rate by as much as 40 percent.
4. According to a study by ASTD, working with an accountability partner gives you a 65 percent chance of reaching a goal. We’ll discuss accountability partners in the next section.
5. A study published in PSYCNet found that challenging and specific goals resulted in better performance than easy goals, no goals, or “do your best” goals.
6. Frontiers in Psychology reviewed more than 1,000 studies and found that setting high goals results in better task performance, motivation, and persistence than vague goals.

REAL ESTATE GOALS FOR NEW AGENTS

Launch your career with confidence.

Following are some broad guidelines to help set realistic goals for new real estate agents:

• Defining Your Vision: As we said above, before diving into real estate goal setting, it’s crucial to envision your ultimate destination. What do you hope to achieve as a real estate agent? Is it financial freedom, professional recognition, or the ability to provide exceptional customer service that translates to referrals? Reflect on your aspirations and clearly envision where you want to be in the real estate industry.
• SMART Goals: Once you have a vision, it’s time to turn it into actionable goals. A widely recognized framework for goal setting is the SMART method:
  • Specific: Define your goals with precision. Instead of saying, “I want to sell more properties,” specify a target like: “I want to have 25 transactions in the coming year.” It might help you to create a simple real estate goals template to help you keep track of your goals.
  • Measurable: Set goals that are quantifiable so that you can track your progress. Establish metrics or milestones to evaluate your achievements along the way.
  • Achievable: Ensure that your goals are realistic and attainable. Set ambitious targets, but consider your resources, skills, and market conditions to avoid setting yourself up for failure.
  • Relevant: Align your goals with your long-term vision and aspirations. Ensure they are relevant to your real estate career and contribute to your overall development and success. It might help to keep a real estate goal-setting worksheet on your desk as a constant reference point.
  • Time-bound: Set deadlines for your goals. This adds a sense of urgency and helps you prioritize your efforts effectively.

• Short-term and long-term goals: To create a comprehensive roadmap, it’s important to have both short-term and long-term goals. Short-term goals provide immediate direction and keep you motivated, while long-term goals give you a sense of purpose and help you plan for the future.
• Break It Down: Large goals can feel overwhelming, especially when starting out as a new real estate agent. To prevent becoming discouraged, break your goals down into smaller, actionable steps. By breaking them into bite-sized tasks, you can tackle them systematically, making progress more manageable and achievable.

MEETING YOUR REAL ESTATE AGENT GOALS

Build a support network.

Setting a real estate goal is a critical first step for a new agent. But even the best real estate goals and objectives can fall short unless you build a solid support foundation to ensure your success. In this section, we offer some simple tips on how to maximize the impact of goal setting.

• Accountability Partners: An accountability partner is an individual (or individuals) with whom you mutually agree to coach and provide feedback on a regular basis. As discussed in our blog post, there are some obvious benefits to having an accountability partner.
• Role Playing: Many agents start each morning with 30-60 minutes of role-playing with another agent. Role-playing gets them in the right frame of mind for hitting the phone for their morning prospecting calls. If you’d like a role-playing partner, Vulcan7  can connect you with someone. CLICK HERE for details.
• Hire A Coach: A common strategy shared by most top-producing agents is to invest in a personal real estate coach. Instead of looking at a coach as an expense (which can easily be cut), it helps to frame the decision as a long-term investment in your business. As to whether you need a coach, consider if any or a combination of the following statements apply to you:
  • You get easily frustrated by the frequent rejections common to real estate selling.
  • You find it difficult to stay focused.
  • You’re not very good at visualizing what success looks like.

TOP PERFORMERS TURN TO VULCAN7

Helping to drive you toward your goals.

There are many reasons why Vulcan7 can be valuable in helping to set and achieve realistic goals for new real estate agents. Here are three of these reasons:

1. Vulcan7 delivers the BEST REAL ESTATE LEADS in the business to your desktop every morning. To define solid real estate goals for new agents, start with accurate, proven data, such as those that Vulcan7 provides: expireds, FSBOs, FRBOs and pre-foreclosure leads.
2. Vulcan7’s best-in-class CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software makes it easy to stay on task during lead follow-up.
3. We know how challenging it can be for a new agent to make their mark in our highly competitive industry. That’s why Vulcan7 is heavily invested in building community, so you are never alone as you march toward achieving your goals. Long-running weekly webinars like Roadmap provide real-world advice from the industry’s top earners.

If you’d like to learn more about Vulcan7, CONTACT US HERE.

Doug Spak

Doug Spak has over four decades of experience as an advertising copywriter, agency creative director, blogger, and content creator. He joined Vulcan7 as a Content Specialist in 2016. In addition to ongoing website copy refreshes, Doug has produced over 300 blog posts while developing content for Vulcan7’s social media platforms.