Real estate is a career where your earnings don’t depend on your login hours but on your ability to manage yourself. Nobody is going to lead you or supervise your work. Your income here is in the form of commissions you earn for real estate deals. So if you manage your time well and get maximum leads conversion, you can earn more amount of money.
Managing time in the real estate industry is quite different than in other industries. But if you successfully can manage time then you can excel in this field. Time-blocking is an important practice followed by real estate agents to manage time. It blocks your time for specific work and makes you more productive.
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What is Time Blocking?
Time Blocking is a time management method where you divide your day into blocks of time. Each block is allocated a certain time for the specific work. From the start of the day you would know what tasks you need to do and at what time. This helps you to work throughout the day with a concrete plan.
When your time is blocked you won’t have to waste your time. You can work on a pre-determined schedule and this increases your efficiency and productivity.
Time-Blocking for Real Estate Agents
Different real estate agents have different schedules as per their experience in the industry. The time-blocking schedule depends on your experience and goals. A real estate agent needs to perform various tasks throughout the day. These tasks include lead generation, responding to communication, lead conversion and many other tasks. Consider all these tasks in your time-block schedule.
Tips on Time Blocking for Real Estate Agents
Being in the real estate business, you would be interested in knowing how you can apply time-blocking. Here are some tips that real estate agents can follow to start the time-blocking method to manage time.
Select the Format that is Convenient for You
You can apply time-blocking in your way. There is no strict rule to this. It shall aim to make your work convenient and increase your productivity.
If you love technology then you can use your phone itself to block time. You can make use of an online calendar or any application to block your time. On the other hand, if you are not so tech-savvy you can also use pen-paper to prepare a schedule and block the time. Whatever you are comfortable with is more important.
Create a List of Goals
If proper goal-setting is applied for time blocking then it can give fruitful results. You can have proper goals for a day, week, month or even year. These goals can be generating a certain number of leads, achieving a certain number of appointments, attending a training workshop, attending a networking event etc.
All these goals can be achieved by giving a proper time through a time block. You will not delay your goals but work on them as per the schedule.
Plan Your Activities
Plan your activities well in advance. This will help you to manage your work in a better way. Meeting with your clients shall be given priority. A proper time shall be blocked for the same.
At times you may have unplanned meeting requests from the client. Try to adjust it at a suitable time. It shall not affect your planned schedule as per the time block.
Avoid Making Multiple Plans at the Same time
People at times make the mistake of blocking time with multiple activities. This is not at all advisable and it can affect your business. Suppose if due to these multiple activities at the same time, you miss out on some important meeting with the client then this may affect your relationship with the client. And disappointing your client is never a good thing.
Prioritize Your Work
It’s not possible to handle all tasks in a single day. So the best thing would be to prioritize the work by its urgency. For this, you need to prepare a list of work that needs to be done. Then determine the approximate time required for the accomplishment of each task.
Try to make the shortest possible time estimate. Block time on your calendar or notepad for this. Also, try to be flexible in this as at times work may have to be rescheduled due to some unplanned event.
Keep Your Schedule Flexible Enough
Time blocking allows you to keep your schedule quite flexible. It gives you enough time if the meeting with the client extends than the expected time. This is possible because you have kept already an extra time gap in the schedule.
Suppose you have an urgent call from one of your clients and he asks for an urgent meeting. Then you can schedule it soon as due to the time block you know when you are free for the meeting.
Set Deadlines for your work
Deadlines help a lot to manage your time more effectively. It gives you sufficient time to complete the work. So that you don’t have to be in hurry to complete the work.
Also, deadlines are a good way to monitor your work. It helps you to know how better can you organize and manage the work. You also become aware of your potential in this way.
Take the Help of Real Estate Virtual Assistant
Time Blocking is an effective method that can be used by real estate agents and make them more successful. But at times real estate agents still find it difficult to manage all tasks single-handedly. In this case, they can appoint a virtual assistant who can help them with time blocking.
A virtual assistant can help you schedule meetings with your clients and block the time for the same. They can also help you with a variety of activities like preparing a marketing plan, follow-up with leads, a lot of admin activities etc.
Have Time for Personal Work
Time blocking helps you to improve your professional work. But this shall not be at the cost of personal life. You can integrate your personal goals and block the time in the calendar for the same.
Time for family dinner outings, Playing sports with kids, Work-out, Attending church and more such kind of personal goals can be fulfilled by time blocking. A proper time shall be allocated to these activities also in the calendar.
Conclusion
Real estate agents can manage their time wisely with the help of the time-blocking method. This article has given a lot of tips regarding time blocking. Hope by applying these tips real estate agents can manage their time and be more productive.
