Are you in control of your real estate life?

Are you in control of your real estate life, or have you given large chunks of it to others to control?

Unless you own your own independent brokerage, you can’t take total control of your real estate life.

You’ll have to follow some rules set by your brokerage. If you’re a broker with a franchise, you’ll have to follow some of their rules.

Beyond those limitations, you can and should take control of your real estate life.

Begin by setting your work hours.

I believe you do need to work more than 40 hours per week and be available at least one day on the weekend and at least some evenings. After all, some of your clients are people who work 9 to 5. They need to meet with you outside those hours.

So let clients know which days and hours you will be available.  You do NOT need to be available 24 hours a day. You’re a professional who provides a valuable service, not a servant.

Yes, there may be times when you’ll need to be flexible to accommodate a client or to negotiate a transaction outside of your normal hours. However, those times should be the exception, not the rule.

Follow setting your hours with choosing which clients you will accept.

Or perhaps that should be which client behavior you will accept. I know, if you’re new you’ll want to accept all of them. But as you grow your reputation, you’ll feel more free to take control of your real estate life by turning down clients who are harmful to your well-being.

What will you insist upon before you take a listing?

• If the sellers insist on a price far higher than market value, will you still take the listing?
• Will you take a listing if it can only be shown between specific hours or on specific days?
• Will you continue with a listing if you show up with a photographer and the seller hasn’t readied the house?
• What if sellers refuse to leave during showings?
• Do you have a minimum number of days for which you’ll take a listing?
• Do you have a price range lower than which you are not interested in handling?
• Hopefully you’ll always reject a client who hands out verbal abuse or is otherwise disrespectful. However, you don’t need to add that to your “how I work” document.

You should also decide whether you’ll venture away from your own territory – and how far. If you prefer listing or selling homes in a specific price category, will you venture away from that?

If you’ve got control of these issues, that’s good.

Be aware that there are other ways that you could be giving up control of your real estate life.

These have to do with:

• Your website
• Your email address
• Your blogging platforms
• Your lead sources

If you want control of your real estate life, you must own your own website.

If the brokerage owns your site or if you pay a monthly fee to a service to provide and maintain your site, you do not have control.

If you’re not in control, your site could disappear overnight and all your hard work would be down the drain.

One agent told me that her brokerage had merged with another without warning the agents. Perhaps the brokerage didn’t know it would happen, but the outcome was no less devastating. All of the agents’ email addresses and postal address databases disappeared overnight.

She (along with her fellow agents) had no way to contact past, current, or future clients to let them know of the change. Worse, when they wrote her, the messages bounced back as undeliverable.

That disaster was accidental, but others are deliberate. Consider this true story:

A past client of mine had a dog rescue site that was set up and maintained by a young man who suddenly decided he didn’t like that she asked for donations. One day her site just wasn’t there any more. All of the content, including hours of video, was gone. And all the young man had to say about it was: “Too bad.” He had all the back-ups, so she was out of luck. It took her a year to put the website back together with new stories, photos, and videos.

If someone else owns your site, you could be restricted with regard to content.

I once wrote articles for a lady whose website provider allowed her to change the content of her articles, but not the titles. Since she wanted unique content, I wrote new articles to go with the existing titles. She was also restricted with regard to pages she could add and the number of words on each page. And for those restrictions, she was paying a hefty monthly fee.

I got into a mess when we first got our Cliff Realty website, simply because it was all new to us and none of us had any idea what we were doing. A slick character sold us a domain name and we hired some young men to create a website.

It was expensive, and when they made errors, it took days for them to get around to making corrections. Some errors were mere typos. Others were more serious. We didn’t have a digital camera (or camera phone) back then, so we furnished photographs for our listings, and they charged $5 each to scan them so they could put them on the site. Once in a while they’d get pictures and descriptions mixed up.

The more serious problem came when it was time to renew our domain name. It seems that slick character put Cliff Realty on the registration, but put his own name as the person in charge – and by renewal time he had left town. I had to send and re-send all sorts of proof before I was allowed to attach my own name to my own site. Then, 2 years later I had to do it all over again.

The moral of those stories – purchase your own domain in your own name, so that YOU are in control.

In addition, because electronics sometimes fail, keep your own back-up copies of all your web pages and blog posts.

Be careful in choosing a domain name.

Avoid using the name of your brokerage or franchise as part of your domain name. You may be very happy there right now, but things change. Should you decide to move on, you won’t want any disruption to your website. And remember, the email account connected to your previous brokerage will disappear the moment you leave.

Be sure your email address belongs to you – not your brokerage.

Although plenty of agents use gmail, yahoo, etc. I believe your email should be tied to your domain name. It simply looks more permanent. Others tie their address to their Internet provider, and I also think that’s a mistake.  What if you want to switch providers?

When you blog exclusively on someone else’s platform, you aren’t in control of your real estate life.

As evidenced by past technical problems at Active Rain, you could lose some or all of that content. Some agents post first on their own blogs, then on AR or another site, so they at least have the content to put back. If you blog exclusively on Active Rain, LinkedIn, or some other platform – keep copies!

What about your lead sources?

I’ve never believed in paying for leads, but some agents have success with it. In fact, for some it works so well that they don’t do any other lead generation activities.

What if that company goes out of business? What if they change their prices? What if the quality of the leads declines?

One agent on Active Rain reported that she’d been paying under $200 per month for leads and was happy with the results. After a couple of years, however, they jumped the price to $3,000 per month. Fortunately, she did have other lead generation activities going on and she told them no.

If you want to control your real estate life, control your lead generation.

When you’re in charge of your own prospecting, you can target the clients you enjoy most. You can establish a territory and/or create a niche or two. Because that will allow you time to focus, you can learn everything you need to know to be THE expert in your chosen territory or niche.

If you haven’t yet decided to establish a territory or develop a niche, here’s why it makes good sense.

Reach out to those best-loved clients through prospecting letters and through specialized pages on your website – complete with “lead capture boxes.”  The leads you get will be your own – not copies of the same leads sent to a dozen other agents.

Beyond that, you can advertise in publications that those prospects read, and you can attend events and give presentations targeted to people in your niche. Of course, you can also hold open houses, be active in your geographic territory, or do door-knocking.

Also of course – you can stay in touch with past clients and those in your sphere, so they never forget to call with referrals or when they need an agent.