Looking Forward
67What’s your New Year’s resolution? Did you make any this year?
You can set some really wild goals right before New Year’s Day. The people who swear they’re going to lose weight are back on the chocolate by the end of January, and most people who promise everyone they’ll quit smoking end up sneaking a smoke or two behind the house until they finally give in, saying, “I must not be ready to quit yet.” My compliments to anyone who actually follows through!
I don’t know about making a resolution to change something only once a year. When I see something that needs improvement, I like to try to do it right away. For instance, I start tweaking my business every time something changes in the real estate arena. Is there anything I should be doing differently? How will that change affect me or my coaching colleagues?
So, if your real estate investing business or agency seems a little stagnant, now may be a good time for a process improvement plan. It’s easy to stay all caught up in what you’re already doing, but if you want to keep up, you have to pay attention to the changes and respond to them as soon as possible.
Sound overwhelming? The only people I know who aren’t overwhelmed are the people who stay in touch with a mentor or a coach. It’s encouraging to have one source of information and personal advice about changes in the law, company policies, or the real estate market.
I’ll tell you how I got to this point. When I started doing short sale deals in 2003, the gurus weren’t talking a lot about short sales. It didn’t occur to most people that there would be a need to talk about it. Where I’m from, however, the market was a little different.
My area had more foreclosures than almost any area in the nation, and that was way before “subprime” became a four-letter word in real estate. I had to throw out a lot of what the gurus were teaching because it wasn’t working there. I had to let the market rule the way I did business, not the other way around.
With the economy the way it was, the only deals I could find involved those houses in foreclosure. I had to learn how to buy them at a huge discount from the lenders and resell them below FMV to the nearest buyer. After hundreds of deals like that, I began to watch that downward trend spread across the country, and I began to realize that I knew things about short sales that the traditional gurus didn’t.
That was why I wrote the Short Sale Manifesto, and that was the beginning of Strategic Real Estate Coach. Since July 2007, I have coached and trained over two thousand real estate investors and agents, many of whom have gone on to coach and train others. Watching and responding to market trends really made a difference in my life.
What is the market like in your area? Do you talk to other professionals in your community about how things have changed in the past few years and how they have personally adjusted their business model over time? Do you know how the latest foreclosure procedures will affect the way you do things? How will you tweak your business in the new year?
