How to Plan, Start, & Grow a Real Estate Business: 27 Essential Tips

Starting a real estate business isn’t for the faint of heart, but there’s hope for 2024. It’s expected that housing prices will soften in certain parts of the country, and despite what we’re hearing, experts are not predicting a housing market crash.

If the real estate world is calling you, don’t be put off. Here’s a down-to-earth look at how to start your own real estate business, plus advice for avoiding mistakes that hijack momentum as you grow.

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For many new real estate agents, real estate is their second, third, or even fourth career.

Whether you’re a solo agent or new to a team, if you have dreams of outperforming the average real estate agent salary ($44,507 per year), you need to start thinking like a business owner — and that means planning.

Barry Jenkins is the broker-owner of the #2 Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Team in the United States. He’s also a guy who hates inefficiency. “I, to a fault, like to make things easy. The reason my business is so successful is that it was built on the core principle of leverage.”

In order to bring that principle to life, Barry uses his CRM as a true lead conversion machine. A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management system that helps you organize your contacts and come up with actionable insights. With it, you can walk leads through relevant nurture campaigns based on lead source or automate the entire transaction process.

This is incredibly useful in real estate because the home buying process is so long with many different steps, multiplied across many agents and even more leads and customers.

Using a CRM to achieve boss-level organization is how Barry and his team sold 240 homes in a year. And it’s not all about the front end, either. Barry also uses his CRM to send automated onboarding drips to new team members and keep the business admin completely streamlined so that nothing important ever falls through the cracks.

2. Craft your ideal personal plan.

Before you set the right financial goals for your business, you need clear financial goals for your life.

Commissions are great, but — let’s face it — we all came into this business wanting something bigger and better than what we had.

Consider the following questions:

• What time do you want to start work?
• What time do you want to finish?
• How do you want to feel each day?
• How much money do you want to make?

Top tip for defining your personal plan: Think about the real why. Running a successful real estate business is more about the impact on our lives or our families’ lives and less about earning cash. Get to the real motivator behind work.

3. Write a real estate business plan.

Start writing your real estate business plan, paying special attention to the things that set you apart from other businesses in your area. Give it some real thought. This is where your personal and business identities can really come together to make profit-driving magic.

Start with these questions:

• How does selling real estate make a meaningful difference for you, your prospects, and even the world?
• What are the values and principles that drive your real estate business?
• How are those different from the real estate business next door?
• What are the three to five things you are going to own completely in the business?
• Who will take care of the rest?

Even if you’re just looking to take administrative work off your plate by hiring your first virtual assistant, it’s critical to create that big-picture vision to keep your team inspired and avoid repeating unproductive patterns.

Top tip for writing your business plan: While creating that big-picture plan, make sure you also pay attention to the details. Writing your plan is an opportunity for you to explore ideas and see what’s feasible.

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4. Build a consistent marketing plan.

In the beginning, it was all about passing your licensing exam, selecting your best-fit brokerage, and building up your database without coming across as “sales-y” to the friends and family in your sphere of influence (SOI).

However, kicking back and coasting as soon as the referrals start rolling in is one of the biggest mistakes growing agents make. Whether your dream is to become the next Facebook ads guru or a master of Zillow conversions, the only thing you really need to know about marketing is that it’s the one part of your business that never sleeps.

Let these questions guide your marketing plan:

• What does your unique approach and personality bring to the table for your prospects?
• What can you offer that no one else can?
• What are the latest buying, selling, and pricing trends in your market?
• What are some creative ways to discuss these trends (including the numbers) with prospects?

First, nail down your unique value proposition. This will drive all your future marketing.

Top tip for marketing: You’re better off covering fewer channels consistently than trying to do it all. Marketing is a lot. Focus on quality and not quantity.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

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5. Get a website.

97% of all buyers now use the internet as part of their home search.

This means that no matter how much local marketing you do, you need a web presence to attract and engage online leads. It may cost a little money upfront, but a solid, SEO-focused website is essential to success.

Your site should allow you to integrate internet data exchange (IDX) listings and usher those leads right into your CRM.

Once you have this asset in place, you can start moving toward a consistent blogging and social media strategy to generate more leads.

Top tip for your website: Track data and traffic on your site as soon as you can. Analytical tools like G4 are free.

6. Prospect consistently.

The most consistent agent always wins, so choose your prospecting system and stick to it.

In the early days, it was never a bad idea to optimize your SOI. In fact, the Atlanta-based Graham Seeby Group transformed a list of just 279 contacts into $90 million in home sales in just four years by consistently marketing to their past clients and sphere.

“We focused on the ‘mets’ in our database, and it was amazing the volume of transactions we started doing right out of the gate,” says co-founder Justin Seeby.

For example, he recounts, his team did $2 million worth of sales from one couple he hadn’t talked to in 13 years.

“I mailed them a postcard, because I was afraid to pick up the phone and call them. I didn’t know if they’d know who I was. When they got the postcard, they called me. They ended up spending $1.2 million on a new house and selling an $800,000 house,” Seeby said.

Justin’s prospecting strategy was based on a simple schedule of mailers, emails, and phone calls. A winning system doesn’t have to be complicated, but it absolutely must be consistent.

Top tip for prospecting: Don’t stop when you get busy.

7. Nurture leads.

If a lead contacts you, they expect to hear from you.

Mike Pannell is a master lead generator and the leader behind Nu Home Source Realty. According to Mike, a follow-up system is crucial to long-term lead conversion.

“I tell my agents that 70% of people are not going to buy for 180.5 days. If you’re waiting on those new leads to buy, you’re only going to close 3%,” he says. “That will make you enough money to survive, but your goal is six months and beyond. You’ve got to follow up to get to those; you’ve got to build that pipeline to get to those people.”

In addition to avid blogging and website optimization, Mike also checks up on the competition to see what’s happening on the ground.

“I sign up on a lot of different websites out there. I don’t give them a real name, but I give them a real phone number,” he says. “And I can tell you what, I don’t get a lot of calls.”

Be the agent who’s always there, and you’ll automatically beat the herd.

8. Have good time management.

If you’re like most of us, a big part of the dream is to have more time and energy for the things that really light you up.

But most agents who set out to build a real estate business haven’t built that into the plan. They end up with a revolving door of team members and have to outwork the business problem du jour. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

For experts in automation, a motivating factor is saving time. By eliminating manual work through automation, you can free up time to focus on the activities that actually drive revenue.

The ability to do marketing automation further underscores your need for a CRM, which ends up acting as the engine that supports your efforts.

Top tip for introducing automation: Start with low-risk tasks that you don’t want to handle.

Want to call yourself a REALTOR®? Until you join the National Association of Realtors, you can’t. A NAR membership will also earn you access to the Multiple Listing Services (MLS), where you’ll be able to search through all of the listings in the network.

4. Pay your dues.

Don’t expect to get your license, join a brokerage, and start selling million-dollar homes.

Digital marketing strategist Hillary Robert says, “New real estate agents need to know that building a business takes time, hard work, and effort. To build a sustainable career in real estate, they need to be willing to put in the elbow grease to build an audience and database of contacts. Then they need to learn how to work it, provide value, and be consistent.”

Prepare to roll up your sleeves, do the hard work networking and supporting more seasoned realtors for a few years, and don’t expect to be bringing in the big bucks right away.

5. Find a mentor.

Learn from those around you. Is there someone in your brokerage who specializes in for sale by owner (FSBOs) or has a knack for running Facebook ads?

Schedule time to grab coffee with them once a month, see if you can shadow them for a day, or offer to help with a project they’re spearheading.

Spend time and build relationships with people who are good at the things you’d like to be good at. It will pay dividends in the years to come.

6. Get crystal clear on who your ideal customer is.

Working with first-time home buyers is vastly different than working with retirees who are downsizing into an active adult community. Both of those groups are different from second-chance home buyers who are entering the market again after recovering from foreclosure.

Not only does each of these subsets require different considerations and industry knowledge, but they’re also different audiences. This means they do not share the same needs, concerns, or goals.

If you want to resonate with prospects, you must understand their pains, problems, desires, and triumphs. The first step toward doing that is to create a buyer persona.

This exercise can lead to information and perspective that will inform your marketing efforts, your messaging, and even how you present your personal brand.

7. Build your personal brand.

One thing that seasoned real estate agents know to be true is that real estate is a lead-generation business. You should always be building your personal brand and expanding your network.

You can do this by building a personal real estate website outside of the one you have on your brokerage’s site. Create a social media presence for your professional brand. And host happy hours and networking events that will get your name out in the community.

Read on for even more tips on building your personal brand and lead generation engine.

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5. Run Facebook ads.

Sixty-nine percent of adults in the U.S. use Facebook. Chances are that your audience is on this platform. By running location-based ads, you can increase your brand awareness in your area and get highly targeted views on your ads.

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6. Optimize your website for organic search.

Search engine optimization takes a while to work, especially in competitive industries, but if you’re going to have a website, it should be optimized for search. Make sure that each page has a purpose, is crawlable by Google, and contains keywords you’d like to be found for.

7. Start blogging.

Since Google ranks pages, not websites, one way to get more search engine visibility is by blogging. Choose topics that your target audience wants to read, and be sure to also promote each post on social media.

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Once you’ve leveraged business and marketing strategies to your advantage, you’ll begin to see the fruits of your efforts in the form of leads, sales, and revenue.