This article is part of our Real Estate Business Startup Guide—a curated list of articles to help you plan, start, and grow your real estate business!
If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you love talking to others, building connections, and helping out—you’re a people person. If this is the case, the real estate industry is a perfect career choice because it relies on you having excellent people skills in order to be successful.
And, if on top of being personable, you’re also organized, ambitious, goal-oriented, and up for a challenge, you’ve hit the metaphorical jackpot.
The real question is: Are you able to play the long game? While traditional business models provide a more regular income, in the real estate world, it might be three months before you get paid—and it could even be longer.
If you think you have the drive and the people skills, keep reading.
A little bit about the sources in this article:
In order to write a comprehensive article, I interviewed not one or two real estate agents—but over 13! Unsurprisingly, there’s some feedback that seems to hold true across the board, including the importance of having a good online presence, a solid understanding of SEO, a niche or a well-defined target audience, brilliant people skills, and the ability to manage your contacts and connections.
Step 1: Planning
Whether you’re starting a real estate business, a corner coffee shop, or a company that manufactures rocket parts, it’s a good idea to write a business plan. It makes you more successful, and that’s been scientifically proven!
Not only will working through the planning process prompt you to think about important things like how you’re positioned to compete with similar businesses, and how much cash you’ll need to actually get started, but it will also help you validate your idea and get into a habit of setting goals and milestones.
According to real estate investor Eric Bowlin, the purpose of a business plan is twofold. He says, “First, it gives you a way to formalize your goals and direction. More importantly, it is a document that you can provide to lenders or investors to clearly illustrate not only your direction but where you are and how you got there.” During the planning process, Eric got a lot of great advice from a local Small Business Development Center.
If you haven’t had any experience in the real estate industry, it’s a good idea to get advice from someone who has. Real estate agent Jamal Asskoumi of Castle Smart says, “If you yourself are not directly involved in real estate, then it’s best to find someone who is, at the planning stage. They’ll know a lot more of the do’s and don’ts.”
Of course, you could always go down the route of taking formal courses on the topic, or reading the right books (see the resources section at the end of this article).
Tools like LivePlan make the business planning process even easier, guiding you through each section. The same is true of sample business plans—take a look through some of the free sample real estate business plans on Bplans.
Step 2: Market research and idea validation
How do you know you’ve got an idea that will work? How do you know you’ve picked a niche in the real estate market that actually has a target audience? How do you figure out how to position yourself within this niche?
These questions and many more like them can be answered in the initial market research phase. By conducting both primary and secondary market research, you give yourself a broader idea of whether or not the target market you’ve picked is valuable enough to pursue.
Of course, there’s no one-fits-all approach to figuring out what niche you’re best served to help—and the variety of responses we got from real estate agents across the United States is proof of that.
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