Are you trying to grow an online real estate business, but you feel like things just aren’t moving?
Maybe it feels like no matter how many hours you put in, you just can’t seem to get the ball rolling.
Or you might be making decent money, but you’re trying to scale beyond your current income goals – without success. You feel like you’re trying every strategy in the book, but you’re just NOT able to break past where you currently are.
You’ve hit a plateau, and you have no idea how to break past it.
If this is sounding familiar, what you need to do is build momentum.
Momentum is the KEY to exponential growth in your online real estate business.
When you build momentum in business, things start to pick up at a faster and faster pace. Eventually, you create this snowball effect where your business is growing FOR you without you having to put in so much effort!
But right now, at this very moment, there are things you are doing that are actually KILLING your momentum.
Specifically, there are nine things that might be stopping you in your tracks from scaling your real estate business.
And if you’re currently working your way towards seven figures, or even if that’s just a goal right now…you WILL encounter all of these nine things along the way.
If you didn’t know any better, you might not even realize what’s happening in the moment. And before you know it, they’ll be slowing you down or stopping your growth altogether.
So in this post, you’ll learn to not only recognize these momentum killers but also how to deal with them head-on – so you can build the successful online real estate business you deserve.
Let’s get into them!
Mindset
If you’ve been here for a while, you’re probably not shocked to hear me say this…
But mindset is ALWAYS going to be the #1 thing people have to face if they want to bust through their current situation and build momentum.
Mindset issues can rear their head in so many ways.
Often, this sounds like agents telling me things like:
- I only want a referral-based business
- Everyone else is growing faster than me
- I should just be grateful for what I have – I shouldn’t strive for more
- I don’t want to hire a team
While some of those might seem like valid beliefs, a LARGE majority of the time, they’re just mindset issues in disguise.
We develop these mindset blocks based on preconceived notions, that often come from what we see others in our industry doing or from what we’ve done in the past.
For example, if we hired someone in the past and they were completely unreliable, we might have mindset blocks around hiring.
Or if our only experiences seeing real estate agents market themselves were seeing sleazy ads, we might have a block around showing up authentically on social media.
If we ever want to take the actions necessary to grow an online real estate business and reach that next level, we must identify the beliefs that are triggering us and holding us back.
Lead Generation
The second piece that trips so many agents up is their lead generation.
Most agents have no real SYSTEM when it comes to generating leads for their real estate business.
Or if they do have a system, it’s really more of a luck-based system. It’s not predictable or automated – it feels a bit more like throwing spaghetti against the wall, hoping something will stick.
If you don’t have a system that brings in consistent leads, your business is always going to be difficult.
You NEED predictability in order to scale.
If you’re trying to grow your business based on old-school tactics like manual prospecting, you will eventually become your own bottleneck.
Say, for example, you prospect for two hours a day.
And one day, you decide you’re ready to double your business.
Well, based on your current method, you’re going to need FOUR hours a day in order to hit your business goals.
As the CEO, you simply don’t have those hours! It eventually becomes impossible to break through your current income levels.
Instead, focus your efforts on creating a non-luck-based system, that allows for consistency, predictability, and unlimited scalability.
(Pssst. That’s exactly what we teach agents how to do over in The Listings Lab!)
Creating An Audience
When you take the time and effort to build an audience, a community, around your business – it’s like having built-in insurance.
And when you DON’T take the time to build an audience, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable and unprotected.
My husband and I talk about this all of the time. If our house got burned down, our bank accounts got cleared out, and ALL of our business systems got destroyed…
…we would still be okay.
Because what we’ve built over the years is a loyal community.
And that cannot be taken away from you.
There are a lot of people who say, “But what about if Instagram goes down? What about if Facebook goes down?”
But even if one social media platform went under, we’d still be A-OK. Because we have our audience spread across different platforms and channels – Instagram, Facebook, our website, email list, and more.
This is not just about lead generation. A lot of agents know they need to generate leads.
But so many of them feel like branding and building an audience are somehow separate from lead generation. They’re not.
YOU are your brand. Whether you have a team or you’re a solo agent.
So if you’re creating a community around that brand and creating an audience, you’re giving yourself the gift of built-in insurance…and making sure that you will always be okay, no matter what happens.
Your Mental Ability To Part With Money
This tip ties in with the mindset piece, but it’s a little different.
This is something that I’ve dealt with myself over the years and helped many of my clients work through as well.
If you want to build momentum in your online real estate business, you must work on your ability to part with your money.
If you’re someone who’s a big saver or loves to have huge amounts of cash sitting in the bank, this might feel tough at first.
But here’s what you need to know…
Growth requires cash. Especially fast growth.
When I first started The Listings Lab, I was able to scale the business to seven figures within just 30 days.
A huge reason why?
Because we invested HEAVILY from the beginning.
It was the same thing with my first online real estate business, ShopCondos.
Some of you might not know how that business came to be, so here’s the story (and if you like, you can read more on my story in this article).
I was working for a builder at the time, and making good money working for him.
But then, I got engaged. And he didn’t like that one bit.
So he fired me.
On the spot, like that.
I was terrified!
But at the same time, I had a wedding to plan. So from a financial standpoint, I knew I needed to do something, and I needed to do something FAST.
I was forced to rebuild my real estate business from nothing.
We didn’t have any cash, so I took out a line of credit and invested the full amount of that line of credit into building my new business.
And from there, we were able to scale it to seven figures in just six months.
A huge part of the reason we were able to do that was because we were able to invest and make financial decisions quickly.
When you hesitate to invest, or you need to think about financial decisions for ages, you lose your competitive advantage. You’ll never be the fastest in your market and your unwillingness to ACT will kill your momentum.
At its core, money is really just energy. It’s a tool to be able to build the life and business of your dreams.
You need to release your attachment to holding on to it, and instead invest freely knowing it will ALWAYS come back to you when you make strategic business decisions.
Operations & Systems
You need systems and someone to MANAGE those systems
The fifth thing that will bog you down is faulty operations and a lack of systems.
You can’t do it all in your business. You need efficient systems and operations, and you need someone to MANAGE those systems.
Even if you’re not quite ready to hire, you want to make sure you’ve got your systems down pat so that when you do bring someone into your business, it’s easy to get them trained.
Another thing you can do if you’re not ready to invest in team support right at this moment is to start to automate as much as possible.
A lot of the time, we have a mental block against automating our business, because we feel automation will make our business feel cold and impersonal.
But in reality, it’s actually the opposite.
If you want to serve your clients at the highest level and be incredibly attentive, it’s going to be way harder if you’re spending all of your time on mundane tasks.
I like to call these $10/hour tasks.
You’re spending all of your time on tasks that aren’t even worth your time and could easily be outsourced to someone else!
The goal is to systematize and automate as many of these tasks as possible, and then when you’re ready – delegate whatever can’t be automated.
More often than not, WE are the bottlenecks in our business.
Often, agents think the reason they’re not growing is that they don’t have enough business. But if we just put in systems that freed up time and energy, they’d have the space to go out and create more business for themselves.
So don’t neglect this important area of your online real estate business!
Your business will grow when you spend more time on $1000/hour tasks rather than $10/hour ones.
Burnout & Overwhelm
When you DON’T prioritize systems, automation, and delegation in your business, the sad reality is that you’re headed straight for realtor burnout.
Creating systems to minimize overwhelm isn’t just about using a project management tool.
It’s about creating a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for every single area of your business.
- Lead generation
- Your sales process
- Client onboarding
- Client offboarding
The whole deal!
Even the smallest things – like how you respond to text messages – should be documented and recorded.
Because guess what?
When you have everything documented, down to the smallest details, that’s when team members are able to swoop in and take things off your plate.
I’m willing to bet that 50-75% of the things you’re doing on a daily basis can be systematized, automated, or delegated.
Branding
Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
Your brand is SO much more than colors and logos.
It’s about how people perceive and understand your brand.
A quote I’ve heard about how to think about your brand that I absolutely love is:
Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
People tend to minimize the importance of branding, thinking their brand can be summed up in a simple tagline. It can’t.
It’s so much deeper than that.
- It’s your client results
- Your story
- Your values
- Your mission
When you take the time to build a powerful brand that deeply resonates with your ideal clients, you will always be okay.
Again, just like building an audience – your brand is your built-in insurance. No matter what happens in your business, if you have a strong brand, you’ll be able to weather whatever storm your business brings.
Long-term Decision-Making
Most businesses that haven’t reached the seven-figure mark are still making 90-day decisions. They’re mostly looking ahead to their next business quarter, and not much past that.
If you want to create long-term, exponential growth, you *must* start making long-term decisions.
You have to start looking at your business in terms of where you want it to be in ten years.
It’s not to say that quarterly goals are not important, because they are. But we need to shift away from the short-term thinking that’s so prevalent in our industry.
Your quarterly goals are actually one of the LAST things you should be deciding on.
You have to start with your ten-year vision and then work backward.
The way that we do this in The 7 Figure Agent program is through a process we call, 10 – 3 – 1 – Q.
- 10 stands for your 10-year vision
- 3 stands for your 3-year plan
- 1 stands for your 1-year goals
- Q stands for your quarterly rocks (AKA your bigger 90-day goals)
When you use this process, you make sure that the small actions you’re doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis will actually get you to where you want to go.
Financial Awareness
You can fill your ego or your bank account.
Do you know your numbers…or do you bury your head in the sand when it comes to your finances?
I get on WAY too many calls with agents who are totally in the dark when it comes to their numbers.
It’s really important that you recognize that your commission cannot equal your income.
You need to start making that separation between YOUR money and your business’s money.
While yes, you may be the face of the business, you may be the heart of the business…your business is a totally separate entity from you. Especially financially.
If you’re truly committed to growing an online real estate business, you have to make sure you keep enough money within the business so you constantly have enough profits to reinvest back into business growth.
If you’re treating your business’s revenue like your personal salary, you’re essentially acting like an independent contractor.
And if that’s what you want to be, no judgment!
But if you want to be a CEO of a seven-figure company, you need to start treating your finances differently.
I pay myself out of what the business earns as a whole. And even if the company earns seven figures, that doesn’t mean I’m paying myself that much. I really don’t even pay myself that much! Because at the end of the day, I’m reinvesting BACK into the business so it can continue to grow. That’s my top priority.
If you find yourself struggling with any of these nine core areas, I encourage you to join us in The Listings Lab.
We’ve taught hundreds of agents how to bust through these momentum killers and scale their business to the multiple six and seven-figure mark. Hustle and burnout not included.
