It’s easy as real estate agents to spend all your time just doing, but how productive are you really? Here are some steps you can take to make 2021 your most productive year yet.

1. Turn your phone off for five minutes a day

One seemingly counterintuitive thing to do is to switch off and take a break. Work-life balance can be hard to achieve in real estate, with the job often interrupting time with family and friends to the point that sometimes you may just want to throw your phone out the window!

Taking short breaks has been shown to boost concentration, memory, and creativity whereas working long hours can lead to decision fatigue.

Make a habit of turning your phone off for five minutes just once a day to simply disconnect from the business world and recharge. You could also try muting your phone when you're completing tasks like vendor reports to help minimise interruptions.

You could even go one step further and take a real break. Experienced Wellington Tommy’s agent, Alistair Rieger goes to yoga three times a week. He says he comes back from these sessions “totally recharged.”

“My mind is decluttered. I have that much more clarity on everything,” he says.

2. Generate a lead a day

Leveraging display advertising to build brand awareness and posting on your social media channels can be a good way to keep your name top of mind and reach a wider audience, with less effort than cold calling and networking.

If you work as part of a team, delegate your social media plan so they can monitor, update, and respond to customers and prospects regularly.

Although he’s active on Facebook, Rieger knew he should do more, so he has enlisted the help of a younger agent who he is helping mentor, to help him boost his social media presence.

3. Make the most of digital tools

For Ray White agent, Ben Atwill, as well as using his company’s excellent CRM platform, he uses tools on Gmail and Google’s G suite which make him more productive.

He finds Gmail’s canned responses particularly useful when marketing a property. Once he receives a query from a Trade Me Property-sourced buyer, for example, he clicks canned response, which provides the person with a Google Drive folder containing all the property’s details.

“In this day and age no one wants to wait for an agent to get back to them. We live in an information driven era,” says Atwill, who says he will follow up with a call.

4. Take advantage of your time on the road

To stay on top of market information and real estate trends, listening to real estate podcasts while out and about can make the amount of time you spend in your car more productive. Ask successful colleagues who they listen to for inspiration.

We recommend taking a listen to The Property Academy Podcast by Opes Partners and High Performance with Josh Phegan and Alexander Philips.

5. Condense your reading lists

Rather than spending time searching for real estate industry news, make things easier for yourself by subscribing to relevant industry websites such as Elite Agent, or stuff.co.nz and set up keyword alerts for “property” and “real estate” in Google Alerts.

5 strategies to improve your productivity