10 Steps to Kickstart Your Real Estate Career
Kickstart your real estate career and launch yourself to success with a bang! Whether still learning about real estate investing, or working on getting your real estate license there is plenty to do to get setup and running. You do not have to wait to get started on these items. You shouldn’t wait on most of them. The longer you wait to get going the longer before you’ll get a paycheck. Get started with these ten to-dos ASAP… Start telling people you are getting into real estate as soon as you have made the decision. They’ll help provide some accountability and keep up your momentum. You may even be surprised to find that this helps to generate leads immediately. People aren’t going to think to tell you about their housing needs or ask for your help unless they know you are in the business. What’s your brand? Choose a brand identity. Select a slogan or tagline. Order a logo. Get help with your back story if you need it. Consider laying out a style guide that will help any designers and marketers you work with to get it right the first time, and ensure a consistent brand. Get some professional profile pictures taken. You’ll need them for a variety of different materials and platforms from social to your website, and more. If you are on a tight budget then look to your contacts for students and new photographers looking to build up their portfolio. Social media is a big part of real estate marketing today. Many will want to set up both business and personal profile pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Those with existing profiles on these social networks will also want to optimize them. That means cleaning up the friends lists, posts, tags, and pictures. It also means recrafting about sections, and getting business and real estate related keywords woven in. Some real estate websites can be setup in an hour or two by yourself. If you’ll be having someone else design yours expect it to take a couple of months to perfect, no matter what estimates they give you upfront. You don’t want to go ‘live’ into real estate without a blog and website. You’ll have no credibility. So get on this early. If you don’t feel comfortable having a website up online yet it can always be hidden until you want people to find it. Though until you start promoting it and blogging daily the odds of it being found will be slim anyway. You can always start by getting a blog up and live right away, and then building out the website later. This way you can establish a presence, build up content, and get people in the habit of visiting you online. Lead by establishing yourself as a local expert and educating prospective clients on the local real estate market. Business cards may seem a little antiquated in today’s hi-tech world, but they are still expected in the real estate industry. You’ll constantly be asked for them. Order a couple boxes so that you can hit the ground running. Start building up a list of the people you are going to reach out to as leads and referral sources first. You’ll need this list again and again. Putting them in Excel can make it easy to turn them into mailing labels, and upload to future software programs. Once you know which real estate brokerage you’ll be working with, or have a business name you can start making announcements to your list. Include friends, family, and ex-coworkers. This can be a card, handwritten letter, email, or even just picking up the phone. Don’t skip this step! Increase your momentum and get out of the gate strong by hosting a launch party celebrating your new business or career. It can be a dinner party, barbeque, happy hour, or educational event at a local coworking space. Get in the game and start building connections, and the number of people in the industry that know you by attending local and regional networking events. Take your business cards, and add new contacts to your list.