Ultimate Guide: The Perfect Real Estate Agent Schedule [More In Less Time]
Real estate agents are entrepreneurs, and most often, they operate as solopreneurs.
As business owners, their two primary challenges are typically a lack of leads and a shortage of time.
However, these issues are interconnected. Many believe that with more time, their productivity will increase. They would attend more events, craft better posts, and host additional open houses.
Yet, we're all familiar with Parkinson's Law: the principle that tasks expand to fill the available time.
If you allocate a day to post on social media, you'll use it up. If you give yourself an hour, you'll use that too.
So, how should one construct the ideal schedule in real estate? Let's devise the perfect daily routine for a real estate agent.
Why Most Agents Fail At Scheduling
We don't struggle with scheduling due to a lack of effort or resources. We've all crafted the perfect schedule and meticulously planned out our calendars.
We've assured ourselves that tomorrow will be different, not accounting for unexpected calls, emergencies, or sudden drops in energy.
We often believe we fail due to a lack of willpower and berate ourselves unnecessarily. This mindset needs to stop.
We're inherently predisposed to struggle with scheduling.
Our primitive minds crave immediate pleasure and novelty, which is why we might spend two hours browsing various lead-generation websites.
We also naturally avoid pain, which is most frequently manifested by evading tasks where rejection is a possibility.
For instance, consider updating your website or social media profile. Agents gravitate towards these tasks, not necessarily because they are the most productive use of time but because they are low-risk activities with little chance of rejection.
Our struggles with scheduling aren't due to a lack of resources. It's because our brains are wired that way. We falter because we don't prioritize high-leverage tasks with significant potential returns. Instead, we lean into tasks that feel safe.
Creating the perfect schedule is one challenge, but executing it is an entirely different matter.
If you ask 100 agents about the most crucial tasks in real estate, they'll likely mention lead generation, networking, consistent posting, skill improvement, and direct communication.
However, if you inquire about their activities from the previous day, you might find they only tackled a fraction of these tasks.
What occupied the rest of their time? They might find it hard to specify, often resorting to statements like, "I was swamped with emails all day and had a few property showings."
Our primitive instincts relish such activities. An incoming email represents novelty, and quickly addressing it provides instant gratification.
Conversely, following up with cold leads seems daunting - filled with uncertainties and potential rejections.
However, like any competitive field, real estate is crowded. Only a few are willing to face challenging tasks that yield genuine results.
This disparity is evident when considering that just 10% of agents handle 90% of real estate transactions.
To truly thrive in real estate, we must learn to find joy in the routine and mundane tasks.
Finding Joy In The Mundane (And Sometimes Painful)
In essence, success in real estate hinges on performing tasks you're disinclined to do, especially when you least feel like doing them, and maintaining this discipline over an extended period.
You might think, "That doesn't sound enjoyable at all."
Early in my career, I dreaded listing presentations. I lacked confidence and doubted my abilities, especially when competing against other agents vying for the same position. However, with time, my perspective shifted. I relished these presentations, embracing the excitement and challenge they presented.
This newfound enthusiasm sparked a positive feedback loop: my skills improved, leading to better conversion rates.
Interestingly, actions we initially perceive as daunting can become sources of pleasure the more we engage in them.
Consider running as an example. Many start with a distaste for it but eventually grow fond of the activity. It's essential to recognize the mind games at play.
While you may not currently enjoy following up, the more you engage in it, the more enjoyable it becomes.
Similarly, networking events might not be your favourite, but attending them consistently might change that perspective.
Here's the magical part:
Most people shy away from routine tasks.
These routine tasks can become your delight.
The general aversion many have towards taking action is advantageous for you. It presents an opportunity, a blue ocean with minimal competition.
While many agents avoid result-driven actions due to perceived pain, you'll learn to derive pleasure from what others deem challenging.
This perceived pain, especially in tasks like prospecting, is often a mental construct.
After attending an event or hosting an open house, the common sentiment is usually, "It wasn't as bad as I thought."
To begin, let's delineate the high-leverage tasks on a daily and weekly basis.
Dailies
These daily tasks promise significant returns.
Completing the entire list will take you 2 hours and 10 minutes. If that's all you manage to accomplish in a day, consider it a successful day.
That's the beauty of these daily tasks. Once they're done, the rest of the day is yours.
In reality, you'll probably have emails to respond to, property showings, presentations, and perhaps some additional time on social media.
However, it's reassuring to know that by finishing these tasks, you've achieved a successful day in just over two hours.
One crucial guideline to remember: during this 2-hour and 10-minute period, refrain from responding to emails, texts, or phone calls unless they're of utmost importance—and most calls aren't.
Daily Realtor Schedule
Mindset Work (Daily ESP) - 5 Minutes
Start your day with mindset work. I know you don’t think you need to, but real estate is a tough career. One that can drain you mentally and emotionally
Personally, I like the Daily ESP - developed by Dr. Nate Zinsser, Director of Performance Psychology at West Point.
This task is centred around improving our confidence.
All you need to do is open up a piece of paper and write the following.
E: “Where did I put forth effort yesterday?”
S: “Where did I see success due to my effort?”
P: “Where did I see progress due to my effort?”
You’ll quickly start to notice your effort sparks results. And this will catalyze confidence.
Update CRM - 5 Minutes
I’ve been there all too often. The CRM black hole where I put people in intermittently.
And when I open it, I panic as there are leads I haven’t thought about in months.
This task requires only 5 minutes. You open your CRM, add in missing people, and see a person or two that it’s time to follow up with.
But don’t follow up with them. Just use this time to get organized in your CRM.
Your future self will thank you.
Market Intelligence - 15 Minutes
This time block was popularized by Tom Ferry. He suggests spending this time to understand the market further. There’s nothing wrong with this, and depending on where you are in your career, you may spend this time looking at new listings, sales, and market dynamics.
Our approach is slightly different.
Use this time to research the market, read that list of articles, watch those videos, and explore a community.
This is your time to spend reading and researching.
Personally, I use tools like Pocket, Readwise, or Instapaper to save articles or videos about my market and read them during this time.
You can also spend this time focusing on a community.
Maybe there’s an area of town that you’ve been dying to understand better. Spend 15 minutes doing this.
What matters is you have your finger on the market pulse. And you can speak to market dynamics with people in your network.
Text Twos/One Card - 10 Minutes
This small task will change your business. If you struggle with prospecting, this is you becoming a prospecting real estate agent.
The idea is quite simple.
Text two people. Send one handwritten card.
But there are two rules:
These can’t be people who you’re already in conversation with (active deals, etc.)
These can’t be people who you message weekly (family, close friends, etc.)
Choose someone who hasn’t heard from you in a while.
And mostly, these conversations will not be about real estate.
Looking for a script? Our favourite is “Hey [Name], you just pop into my head.” or “I was just thinking about you.”
Now, before you think this is cheesy, ask yourself if you’d be put off by this message.
I’ve received these, and I absolutely love them.
Going back to our primitive brain, we’re wired to be liked. And we like it when people think about us.
Don’t approach these conversations looking to convert (that comes later). These texts are just starting (usually brief) conversations.
But what about the one card? Who do we send this to, and what do we say?
Usually, the cards are for one of three reasons:
Thank you
Congratulations
I was just thinking about you
Basically, every card falls into one of these categories.
Pro tip: if you’re struggling to find someone to send a card to look at your calendar over the last week. Did you see someone? Did you go into anyone’s house? Did you go to a business? (Sending cards to businesses counts too.)
Here’s a recap of the first three items
30 Minute Social - 30 Minutes
The process of forming connections and building your sphere of influence has two components:
Meeting the person
Nurturing the person
Meeting the person is best done through in-person interactions (easiest) or gaining an online audience (more difficult).
Once you’ve met them, how do you nurture them? There are various ways, but the main approach is having them see your stuff!
As such, we need to be active on social. But how do we remain active without spiralling into the social media vortex?
Time constraints
Each of the subsequent tasks has a time frame that needs to be followed. Set a timer for each.
This doesn’t mean you’ll spend only 30 minutes per day on social.
Instead, it means once you’ve completed the 30-minute social, you can close social for the day - if you’d like.
Here are the tasks:
High Fives: This was developed by Sean Carpenter. You’ll simply scroll and comment on 5 posts. The trick here is you’re not allowed to just “react” or “like.” They need to be comments
Brainstorm: You’ll go through your social media content bank (see below) and select a post for the day. Next, you’ll look at your calendar and think of 3 opportunities for stories that day. Once you know when/where you’ll post the stories, put them in your calendar.
Create: It’s time to Create! If you think 10 minutes isn’t enough time to create a post, see the “Content Creation Day” in the Weeklies section. You’ll already have a bank of social posts, and all you need to do is write the caption and prepare to post it. If you don’t have a post, spend this time putting one together. But here’s the rule - after 10 minutes, you need to post it. No more tweaking, improving, or changing. Done and posted is better than perfect and not posted.
Post: Now that you’re all ready to go. Post your content.
Follow: Finally, you’ll spend 5 minutes researching target accounts to follow. These could be people or businesses in your community.
The key to all of this is the time frame. At the 30-minute mark, you’d done. If you didn’t complete everything. You can pick it up later in the day.
Lead Follow-Up - 15 Minutes
Following up more will make all your production worries disappear. It’s true. Most agents don’t follow up nearly enough. In fact, sources say that most agents follow up 1.2 times on average. And it takes an average of 6-8 attempts to connect.
So, the average agent isn’t even close to the number of follow-ups required.
There are two reasons agents don’t follow up:
No time
Fear of rejection
By allocating 15 minutes daily to follow up with outstanding leads, you can’t say you don’t have time. This is only 15 minutes and usually translates to 3-4 follow-up attempts.
When it comes to fear of rejection, we need to understand what’s on the other side of it.
All the production in real estate is on the other side of fear. And our fear is (again) routed in our primitive brain. Remember, we’re wired to be liked. We’re wired to be accepted.
But all you need to do is ask yourself this one simple question:
“What’s worse: being rejected or having no income?”
The reason they say this career is hard is because we are getting paid to handle difficult situations.
But if we think of it differently, rejection is a blessing.
There was one client that I followed up with for 3 years before I got rejected. I sent emails, went to his house, and called him every few months. When it came time to list, he listed with someone else.
Thinking about this, I really wish he would have rejected me earlier.
If I’m going to get rejected, my aim is to get rejected quickly so I can move on to other prospects.
Yes, it stings. Still, after years in the industry. But the sting doesn’t last as long.
Golden Zone - 60 Minutes
This 60-minute block is magic. It will transform your productivity and business. Most business owners neglect the Golden Zone quadrant, and their business suffers.
Considering the classic Eisenhower Matrix, here is what they will tell you:
Quadrant 1 (Urgent and Important):
This quadrant is for tasks that are both urgent and important.
Actions: These tasks should be tackled immediately and personally. They are your first priority.
Quadrant 2 (Not Urgent but Important):
This quadrant is for tasks that are important but not urgent.
Actions: Allocate time to work on these tasks to achieve your long-term goals. Planning, preparation, and relationship-building often fall into this quadrant.
Quadrant 3 (Urgent but Not Important):
This quadrant is for tasks that are urgent but not important.
Actions: These tasks can be delegated to others, if possible. They need to be done soon, but they don’t contribute significantly toward achieving your long-term goals.
Quadrant 4 (Not Urgent and Not Important):
This quadrant is for tasks that are neither urgent nor important.
Actions: Consider eliminating these tasks, or do them in your free time. They do not contribute to your goals and often serve as distractions.
But there’s a problem - everything seems urgent, which means the commonly neglected quadrant is Quadrant 2 (Not urgent but Important)
This is the Golden Zone.
These are the tasks that really move your business forward. But they are also tasks that, if you miss actioning them today, will have little impact on your business tomorrow or the following week.
But miss them consistently for months, and your business will suffer.
Pay attention to your Golden Zone, and your business will flourish.
Weeklies
This moves us to the weekly tasks. As with the dailies, you may be surprised at how easy this is.
Agents tend to overcomplicate real estate. Real estate is nothing more than finding ways to connect with people.
And specifically, people who are not considering buying and selling. This is where many agents go wrong.
They try to find people looking to buy and sell right now.
But here’s the thing — everyone knows 5+ agents; if they are looking to buy or sell in the near term, chances are they are working with an agent.
Focusing on people looking for help with real estate is one of the most common errors.
We’ve missed the boat at this stage.
Given that most people already know and trust an agent, we need to get to know more people and have them trust us. That’s how our business grows.
How do we do this throughout the week?
We need to prioritize two things: connecting in person and connecting online.
1:1s - 60 Minutes
Spending time 1:1 with people is magic. Do this consistently, and you’ll start to notice a trend. Your referrals will jump — specifically from people you recently met.
After analyzing 1000s of transactions, we’ve concluded that most deals come through repeat, referral, and your SOI.
But there’s an additional interesting insight — the most common people to send referrals are clients you’ve worked with in the past six months.
Sure sometimes you get a referral from a client you help 5 years ago, but the majority of referrals come from people you’ve recently interacted with.
This is the Recency Effect. In psychology, The Recency Effect is a memory phenomenon in which people tend to recall the most recent information more accurately.
In real estate, the more recent your interaction with someone, the more likely they will send you a referral.
As such, you’ll want to connect with people in your database regularly.
All you need to do is go for 1x coffee, lunch, breakfast, drinks, dinner, or anything once a week.
What’s the most challenging part of this? Asking — we’re afraid of rejection.
In reality, very few people will reject your request, but if they do, it’s a blessing.
These folks are unlikely to send us referrals anyway, so move them to a stage in our CRM where we don’t focus on 1:1 attention.
2X Events - 90 Minutes Each
It’s always surprising when you ask agents these questions:
How important is meeting new people in real estate? Everyone says 10/10 importance.
How many times have you put yourself in a position to meet new people last week? Most agents say nothing.
This is a case of Cognitive Dissonance.
Our attitude towards a concept doesn’t align with our behaviour. It’s very common in real estate.
We know there are certain things we should be doing, but we don’t do them.
Events and meeting people in person are some of the most common perpetrators.
There are plenty of opportunities to connect with new people in person. Check Meetup.com, Eventbrite, Facebook Groups, or local event calendars.
There’s no shortage of options.
There’s a shortage of discipline to go and unwillingness to be uncomfortable.
The latter is the most significant blocker. We don’t want to attend an event and be stuck standing in a corner with no one to talk to.
Flip the script.
If you feel this way, then everyone else feels the same way. People come to events with the same limiting beliefs — we’re all human. So be a good human and initiate a conversation with someone, not for your personal gain, but to give this person what they are looking for — connection.
The easiest goal is going to an event with the goal of connecting with only one person. Once that’s achieved, you’re welcome to leave. Sometimes, you may meet one person and leave, but other times, you’ll be surprised at how enjoyable the event is.
And here’s where it gets really interesting: don’t attend events that aren’t interesting to you.
Not everything needs to be business-related — attend events for personal interest.
The minimum is attending 2x events per week.
Content Day - 4 Hours
Creating content is hard. It’s time-consuming and challenging to come up with ideas, but we need to focus on our digital presence.
Yes, you can meet people in person, but you’ll also need to meet people online.
In person, we have events; online, we have content that people interact with.
Almost every agent has either started or had the idea to start a YouTube Channel, TikTok, blog, or podcast, yet few do it.
Why is this?
Generally, it’s because they say they don’t have time.
We can be sympathetic to this. There are a lot of things fighting for our attention.
But we also need to be realistic. If you don’t do it, you’re missing a big opportunity.
Some content like YouTube, blogging, and podcasting is evergreen. This means you create it once, and it pays you for years to come. Most marketing campaigns don’t work like this.
If you stop paying for online leads, you no longer get online leads.
However, if you create engaging content and go on a hiatus, leads will still come in.
The solution is easier than most think.
You only need to dedicate one day per week to creating content. Generally, this is a minimum of 4 hours, but it could be more.
You avoid transitional prospecting and real estate tasks. Your whole focus is on creating content.
This gives you freedom.
Freedom to focus exclusively on content one day per week.
Freedom to not focus on content on the remaining days.
Important note: You will not do your daily tasks on your content day. Dailies for the other working days. The content day is exclusively for creating content, and that’s it (unless there are fires to put out)
Wrapping It Up
If you’ve followed along with the timing, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much time you will get to work on your deals, showings, presentations, or even just chill time.
The daily tasks are going to take you around 2 hours. And here’s the interesting thing — if you complete the daily tasks and do nothing else for the day, you’ve had a successful day in real estate.
This goes to show that if you’re a part-time agent trying to scale to full-time, in 2 hours per day, you will be getting more than 90% of full-time agents.
The weekly tasks are equally straightforward. Between your 1:1 and events, you’re out in public 3x per week — that’s not bad. And you’ll couple that with a day exclusively focused on content creation.
Real estate doesn’t need to be complicated. Just focus on high-leverage tasks, and your business will grow.