7 practical tips for keeping real estate agents productive

As a real estate broker or CEO, it’s part of your role to ensure that agents are productive.

You want them to hit their goals, enjoy working at your company, and you want them to become even more productive over time.

A great way to support them is to position yourself as a productivity resource; someone who’s on their side and who’s focused on helping them hit the goals of your brokerage.

Help your agents get better at what they’re doing (and hopefully bring in more business!) with these 7 productivity hacks.

1. Help agents plan around priorities

“Waste time with planning? Not me! I want to be productive.”

Leaders know that planning is the forerunner to productivity, and planning starts with priorities. Get specific on exactly what it takes for an agent to be successful at your company. Map it out, identify priorities for agents to work on, and get your priorities down on paper (or screen!).

Once you’ve identified the concrete things that make agents successful, help your agents put plans together that focus their attention on priorities. This will ultimately help them save time and accomplish more meaningful work…and it should help with your bottom line.

You may want to encourage agents to end each day by identifying “three must-do activities for the next day.” Author Michael Hyatt says “[i]t’s hard to win if you don’t know what the goal posts are. Use this time to identify and prioritize your activity for the next day. What will it take to make progress towards your targets? Make a to-do list in Evernote or drop them straight on your calendar.”

2. Set up prospecting routines

Habits help. Good ones do anyway! As agents develop routines built around priorities (like prospecting) their productivity will likely improve.

How much time do your agents need to commit to prospecting? Help them establish a routine.

And even though we may bristle at the idea of accountability, in the end it can really help. Consider having agents report on their prospecting efforts. This could open up some great conversations where you can provide encouragement and help them be more productive, get better at prospecting, networking, etc.

3. Provide social media support

Marketing on social media is huge! But it isn’t productive to constantly check Facebook and Twitter all day. Encourage agents to set aside time each workday to post to social media and communicate with their followers.

Automation tools like Buffer and Hootsuite make it easy to post to social media. Agents can schedule their posts to go out automatically, freeing them up to focus on other priorities.

And if you don’t feel equipped to provide social media support to your agents, find someone in your company who does and get their help.

4. Use tech tools 

It’s great to use technology to help with productivity.

• Evernote has been around for a while on desktops and smartphones, but they’ve recently updated the mobile version. Agents can use it to easily store and share info like photos, documents, notes, etc., across their devices.
• Try using HipChat as your office communication tool. HipChat allows you and your team to quickly communicate without filling up everyone’s email inboxes. Spending less time in email sounds like a good thing!

5. Automate listing story creation and distribution

Creating and distributing listing stories is an important part of your agents’ online marketing plans.

But it may be hard for them to carve out time to manually create and share stories for their listings.

Products like Paradym can sync with your MLS to automatically generate new stories and post them to social media. This is one of the easiest ways for agents to promote their listings on social media with very little effort.

6. Help agents nurture leads with email

Are your agents using email campaigns to follow up with existing leads? If not, it’s a good idea to start. And try leveraging automation. Instead of agents manually sending emails to their prospects and clients, look into using a service like MailChimp to automate some of the process.

And while we’re on the subject of email marketing…

We’ve all received emails that are obviously sent to a bajillion other people. They’re not personalized, they sound canned, and they’re actually not as effective at generating results.

So encourage agents to segment their email lists. This breaks up their contacts into focused, manageable groups, or “segments.” Once your agents have segmented their contacts, they can write and send emails that are more targeted, personal, and relatable.

7. Encourage downtime and breaks

Ever stared at a computer screen trying to remember what you were doing?

Working hard and being productive are obviously good things! But people also need breaks, they need days off, they need downtime. We weren’t created to run incessantly.

Make sure that alongside your company’s focus on priorities and productivity there’s room for rest.

Take action

There you have it! 7 ways you can help your agents get more accomplished.

Now it’s time to take action. Depending on where your company is right now, consider picking one of the points above and try it out!