In This Issue...

• Words from the President
• Successful Practice - To Win the Game!
• Wisdom with Finances - For Financial Independence
• Success Is Up To The Lead Agent - 100%

Words from the President

Thanks for joining me today on your journey toward success as a Real Estate Agent.

The three areas that we'll focus our time on today are Successful Practice, Wisdom with Finances, and Success Is Up To The Lead Agent. Any of these articles could help you change your life in 2007 if you'll read, absorb, and use the information.

Before you get started, I'd like to take a moment and highlight one small change to Coaches Corner™ that we've made. This will likely carry on through out this year. We're increasing our article content by 33% by adding another article to the newsletter.

Why the change?...you might ask.

Well, there's been a lot of buzz in the industry over the last several weeks about Real Estate Teams. One thing you may not be aware of is that we here at Real Estate Champions, Inc have been coaching clients to build Real Estate Teams since 1998.

We've coached them on how to build them (sometimes from scratch), grow them, sell them, and how to use them as a path to retirement. So, we've got more than enough experience in this area to be called an authority on real estate teams.

Also, I've recently contracted with McGraw-Hill to publish a new book, "The Champion Real Estate Team" (due out Fall 2007). I'm actually wrapping it up right now and will be submitting it to the editor shortly.

In an effort to help meet the need for information regarding building a Real Estate Team, I've instructed my team to 1) assemble a pre-release version of a chapter out of my new book as the "The Champion Real Estate Team Guide" and 2) begin releasing article excerpts from the book here in Coaches Corner™. You can get an instant download of the guide here.

I hope that you'll invest a few minutes of your life with me today and that the information you gain from Coaches Corner™ proves to be a blessing to you and your career.

To your achievement of success in life,

"Swanepoel Real Estate
Trends Report"

During the past year, the real estate industry has experienced unprecedented change and significant innovation. You’ve no doubt experienced it first hand.

The key to being successful in real estate, or any other career for that matter, is staying apprised of the trends in your industry. If you can see where things are heading, you can utilize new opportunities before your competition.

• Beating your competition to the next wave of opportunities
• Avoiding fads that could set your business back years
• Gaining valuable insights about revealing strategies you can use right now

Learn More Here

Successful Practice - To Win the Game!

We all have a fundamental choice when we fall short of our goals and dreams.  We can choose to modify our goals and dreams or magnify our skills needed to reach them.  These are the only two solutions to this quandary we are in.  Which are you going to choose?  We must focus on acquiring the skills to create abundance in life.  The mastery of the skills will create a life full of rewards.  To acquire the skills in sales, in order to create abundance, we need to break it down to two components.

The first is - we must talk to a lot of people.  Great salespeople talk with more people than mediocre salespeople.  By talking to lots of people daily, we insure victory.  Mediocre salespeople let their feelings dictate their success in prospecting.  When they don’t feel like prospecting, they don’t.  Great salespeople cause their minds to control their actions in a positive manner.  George Patton, the famous general, said, “You have to make the mind run the body.  Never let the body tell the mind what to do.  The body will always give up.  It is always tired — morning, noon and night.  The body is never tired if the mind is not tired.  You’ve always got to make the mind take over and keep going.”  Which is winning daily in your life?  The mind or the body?  Resolve to control your body and talk to lots of people daily.

The second solution is practice.  Daily practice is as valuable as making the sale.  To develop a high level of skill in life we must practice.  I spent hours in my youth practicing on the racquetball court my variety of shots. If I had not I would never have won any tournaments.  For me to be able to play at the professional level in racquetball, I hit hundreds of thousands of cross-court, backhand shots.  This allowed that shot to be automatic under tournament pressure conditions.  What do you need to practice on to become a world-class REALTOR®?  Is it your prospecting, qualifying, listing presentation, lead follow-up, negotiating?  Each one of these areas needs practice. To achieve mastery of these skills it will take thousands of opportunities to improve your skills.  Do you want to make the errors on “live” buyers and sellers or do you want to practice on partners where it is cheaper?  Which do you choose?  Let me share another example.  Your child is learning to ride a bicycle.  Do you send your child out on the busiest street for their first day or do you keep him or her in the backyard?  I am sure the answer is obvious.  Practice in a controlled environment gives us confidence and the skill to compete.  It allows us to create wins in practice before we have to play the game. 

If you'd like more help with techniques & strategies needed to be a successful real estate Agent, see my new book "Success as a Real Estate Agent for Dummies^®"... check it out here.

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How to Create and Deliver a
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With the vast majority of agents in North American doing more transactions on the buyer side than the seller side, we need to now make sure that we are converting on every possibility we have in the marketplace. Every viable lead that is created must be converted to íncome producing closed transactions. This program is conservatively worth an extra $100,000 in gross commission income for you! Don’t miss your chance at mastering control and commitment of your buyer’s prospects.

The 'Convert and Commit the Buyer... Every Time!' Series will teach you how to:
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Wisdom with Finances - For Financial Independence

Most Agents begin their real estate career with the hope of gaining financial independence.  They are attracted by the possibility of earning large sums of money.  Even when Agents make more than a six-figure income, the vast majority have not dramatically improved their financial balance sheet.  After looking at hundreds of Agents’ Profit and Loss statements and personal spending habits, I’ve determined that real estate Agents are poorly prepared for financial independence.  Why should real estate Agents be any different from the American population in general? 

According to the Social Security Administration, statistics indicate that out of a randomly selected one thousand people from age twenty-five to age sixty-five:

• 190 would have died—19%

• 150 would have incomes over $30,000—15%

• 660 would have incomes less than $30,000—66%

Let’s look at these numbers.  There are more people deceased than earning something close to a decent quality of life.  Of the people still alive, 66% of them exist on less than $30,000 per year.  My question is:  Which group do you want to be in?  Which group are you heading for based on your financial plan, investment choices, and savings plan?  These are the top three reasons people fail in their finances:

• They never create a financial plan.

• They make poor investment choices.

• They put off starting a savings plan.

Let me share with you a few simple rules that will ensure that you don’t join the 66% of the group.  I have used these rules with hundreds of Agents to transform their financial picture in a short period of time.

Rule #1:  Track your expenses, both business and personal.

You must know where the money is going.  Separate your business from personal expenses.  Establish a business checking account and pay all business bills through it.  Too many Agents co-mingle their business commission checks and business bills with personal and household expenses.  It is more difficult to control your money when you can’t track it.  Enter all your expenses and revenue in an accounting software program.  I think the easiest is Quicken.  Quicken will allow you to accurately track your costs to run the business, then you can run a monthly Profit and Loss statement to see where you are spending your money.  The money you earn in real estate can come in bunches.  It can become very easy to spend that large commission check that’s burning a hole in your pocket.

When we have money, a want looks like a need because we have the ability to buy it.  We begin to rationalize our wants into needs.  For most of us, a want that our neighbor already owns becomes a need.

Rule #2:  Adjust your Lifestyle.

Spending less than you earn makes up 90% of financial planning.  The premise involves saving money and making sacrifices.  The ability to pay now in the form of adjusting your lifestyle and saving the difference will allow you to play later.  To play later you will need more than the $30,000 per year.  Thomas Stanley, who wrote the book, “The Millionaire Next Door”, summed up how the vast majority accumulated their millions:  “They lived well below their means.”  Living beyond our means is a national epidemic.  Consumer credit card debt in the United States is in excess of $528 billion.  Roughly two-thirds of Americans who have credit cards do not pay off their monthly balance.  We are clearly living beyond our means.  Take a close look at your monthly obligations and evaluate where you are spending your money. 

Rule #3:  Aggressively reduce your debt.

There is an old Proverb that speaks of a borrower being a servant to the lender.  The weight and pressure of debt can be crippling.  I have seen this happen to Agents for years.  I have even seen it manifested in my own life.  I have not always made the wisest choices with my money.  Fortunately, I have made more wise choices than foolish ones. 

If you have credit card debts, make a decision to pay them off.  Start with the highest interest rate credit card first.  Decide on a monthly amount that you can commit to reducing your debt.  If you stretch, you will be able to find a few hundred dollars per month to pay towards your debt.  Most credit card companies require you to pay 2% of the balance owed monthly.  Let’s look at that practice.  Let’s say you have a debt of $2,705 with an interest rate of 18.38%.  Your 2% toward the outstanding balance would take you 27 years and 2 months to pay off.  You would pay $11,047 of total interest.  How do you feel about eating out more often now?  If you increased your payment to 8% or to $216.40 per month, it would take 2 years and 1 month to pay it off.  You would pay $94.00 in interest.  You need to accelerate your payments to reduce your debt.  You must adopt a cash mentality.  This cash mentality will allow you to charge only what you have funds to pay for. 

Rule #4:  Create a savings plan now.

The biggest enemy in financial planning is procrastination.  People wait too long to start saving.  The truth is becoming a millionaire is not very difficult.  The power of compounding interest will take care of your needs.  According to Investors Business Daily, a 20-year-old person only needs to invest $1,014 per year or $2.78 per day with an annual return of 11% to have $ 1 million saved by the age of 65.  Look at the daily number of $2.78.  Who couldn’t save that amount per day, even at the age of 20?  Even someone working for minimum wage could do that with ease.  My mentor, Jim Rohn, used to say, “What is easy to do is also easy not to do”.  It’s easy to save the $2.78, but it’s also easy to buy a latte every day at Starbucks instead of saving.  That’s all we are talking about here—choosing financial independence planning rather than the latte. 

Therefore, we need to create a system to automatically remove the money when we receive it.  We need to transform ourselves into savers.  Savers pay themselves first.  It’s amazing how little you miss money that never comes into your possession.  We are not a nation of savers, although we really need to be.  On average, Americans save less than 5% of their disposable income.  Let’s compare the United States to other countries in regards to income saved:

Germans are saving:               11.5%
Japanese are saving:              12.2%
Belgians are saving:                17.0%

We are behind in our need to pay our savings accounts first. 

The secret to saving is writing the check to savings first.  Do it before paying other bills and obligations.  Savings is a habit to be forged.  Here is the formula I used on each of my commission checks for many years:

20%    went to a tax account
10%    went to a retirement savings account
10%    went to a business savings account

These percentages ensured that my taxes were always current and my retirement account was always fully funded.  There were also reserves for an investment opportunity or slow closing month.  The more you make your money disappear into protected accounts, the more you will have for later.

If you'd like more help buidling your career & personal success you may want to explore "Real Estate Coaching"... check it out here.

Success Is Up To The Lead Agent - 100%

There has been a big push in the real estate industry for agents to establish teams.  The number of agents using listing coordinators, transaction coordinators, marketing coordinators, runners, buyers’ agents, and listing agents has increased drastically in the last few years.

I was one of the first agents in my sales area of Portland, Oregon to elicit the help of assistants to build a larger, better practice.  I hired my first assistant before I completed my first year in real estate sales.  I added more administrative help, and more sales help through buyers’ agents, in my second full year in the business.  I speak from a position of experience from making tremendous mistakes in those early years in hiring, firing, accountability, time management, organization, structure, implementation, and systems development.  The building of a great team is much more than hiring a few people.  It’s much more than hiring great people.  The initial step starts with you.

Having coached and trained hundreds of thousands of agents (thousands of whom had teams), I have found that the most successful agents do not approach establishing their team with the right steps in the proper order.  To achieve lasting success in business, it’s not enough to know the steps you need to take.  The right steps in the wrong order will lead to disaster, as well.  You might be able to fend off the looming catastrophe longer, but it will come soon enough.  Conversely, the right order with the wrong steps will send you crashing to the rocks, as well.  The application of correct order and correct steps is the only way to circumvent disaster.

A team will not make up for deficiencies in core skills that you may have as an agent.  The core skills in real estate are time management, prospecting, sales skills, qualifying, presentation skills for buyers and sellers, objection handling skills, and closing skills.  On the larger scale, your skills that directly link to lead creation, lead conversion, and prospect commitment must be at the Champion Agent level before you can even hope to build a Champion Team.  You will rarely be able to hire people who possess these skills.  You will have to instill and train these skills in others.

Champion Team Rule – Your individual, personal productivity is the most valuable asset in your business.

Most agents, when building a team, let their direct income producing activities (DIPA) slide.  The DIPA activities are prospecting, lead follow-up, listing appointments, buyer interviews, showing property, writing and negotiating contracts, and even personal development time.  All of these activities connect directly to income.  That’s why they are direct income producing activities.  The tendency for most agents, when establishing teams, is to reduce the hours invested in DIPA.  The section of DIPA that gets hit hardest is the prospecting and lead follow-up.  For many agents, when bringing on staff to expand their team, these two activities cease. 

There are two core reasons why the prospecting and lead follow-up drop heavily when an agent is working to establish or expand their team.  The first is that they want the team to prospect and do the lead follow-up for them.  They want the team members to do all of the prospecting and lead follow-up, so they don’t have to ever again.  Too many agents want a team so they can avoid prospecting.  That is the wrong reason to create a team-based business.  If you manage to hire someone who is exceptional at prospecting, it won’t take them long to figure out how to go out on their own.  They can easily calculate how much money they are bringing into the team.  When the number gets large enough that they feel they can make more on their own because they know how to generate leads, they will move down the road or across the hall and become your newest competition with inside information about you and your business.  You can’t stop the practice of prospecting your sources of business.  In fact, you might have to increase your prospecting time to increase your volume of leads to ensure your cash flow to help capitalize your new or growing team.

The second core reason prospecting and lead follow-up drop is because there is a new focus on system development and increased management responsibilities.  Now that you are adding staff, whether they are administrative or sales producing, some of your time needs to be devoted to monitoring, managing, and coaching them.  You will also need to establish checklists, task and priority lists, job descriptions, and many other items that fall under the buzzword of systems.  If only we could just download all the skills, knowledge, and information we have acquired in the business in minutes to new staff members by connecting a cable between our brains and hitting the download button.

Too many agents have a view that is driven by their ego that the larger the team, the better.  Bigger doesn’t mean better.  With every person you add to the team, you increase the management, monitoring, personal problems that come to work, inter-staff politics, distractions, and disruptions.  My grandmother, Bobbi, had a saying about productivity and people that I must have heard a thousand times.  It was, “At work, one boy is a whole boy, two boys are a half, and three boys are no boys at all.”  If we are only focused on volume of people or size of the team, we can end up with no team at all.  The added staff must enable you to provide a higher level of service to your clients that is recognized and appreciated.  This can lead, with the right consistent prospecting and marketing approach, to an increase in referrals, as well.  The added staff should directly increase revenue because they are sales people.  Examples of this would be buyers’ agents or listing agents on the team.  The added staff creates a better quality of life for you.  You relinquish lower value activities, increase your time off and frequency of vacations, and make it to more t-ball games and date nights.  How ever you define quality of life; it is improved.

If you'd like more information on how you can build your own real estate team, get your free copy of "The Champion Real Estate Team™ Guide"... here.

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