10 Daily Habits of the Most Successful Agents

1. Wake Up On Time

The first entry on our list of the daily habits of the most successful agents is waking up at a designated time. Because the first step in having a productive day is actually getting your tush out of bed. And I think most of us can agree that’s easier said than done.

Back when I was training for my triathlon, I had to be out of bed by 4:45 to give myself enough time to train before work. I specifically remember brushing my teeth each morning and thinking to myself, ok, the hardest part of my day is done! I hadn’t run, swam, or biked a single mile yet that day, hadn’t completed a single daily task for my master’s studies yet, and hadn’t put in 8 hours at work yet. But I had managed to drag myself out of my cozy bed. So it felt like I had won the day before I’d even started!

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the snooze button is harmless. Snoozing is a dangerous habit that gives you a slow start to every day and can leave you feeling defeated before the day even begins.

Commit now to your wake-up time. Then follow through.

You can even start with a simple one-week commitment. Pay attention to how much more productive you feel during that week, and you might just find the motivation to continue.

2. Set Yourself Up For Success With a Solid Morning Routine

What do you normally do when you wake up?

Is your morning routine helping you? Or is it hurting you?

I read a book last year that changed my life. I had recently started my own content creation business, and I was feeling both overwhelmed and completely lost. The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod helped me focus my daily efforts on my larger goals. And within a month, I had doubled my income!

And there’s a Miracle Morning just for you: The Miracle Morning for Real Estate Agents will teach you to set yourself up for personal and financial success every single day.

The concept is deceptively simple: If you just spend 10-20 minutes each morning on a few key tasks, you’ll be more productive, more focused, more fulfilled, and generally happier. I’m going to let you in on the task list I follow:

1. Silence: 5 minutes of prayer, meditation, or other quiet reflection.
2. Affirmations: 5 minutes reading my personal affirmations aloud.
3. Scribing: The Miracle Morning recommends writing for a few minutes each morning. I spend this 5-10 minute period filling in my Daily Action Plan.
4. Visualization: 5 minutes of picturing my day, imagining myself accomplishing my daily goals.
5. Exercise: Since I generally hit the gym after work now, I just spend 10 minutes stretching each morning.
6. Reading: The Miracle Morning recommends reading just a few pages of something stimulating each morning. But since I read every evening, I skip this step in the am.

All of this only takes around half an hour. But the impact these simple practices have on my productivity for the rest of the day allows me to accomplish more in 6 hours than I used to accomplish in 8-10.

3. Eat Well

Here’s a pretty standard real estate agent meal plan:

9:00 Breakfast: Coffee.

12:00 Lunch: Too busy, forgot to eat.

3:00 Snack: Something quick and convenient. And probably too sugary or fatty because your body is desperate for calories.

6:00 Binge: After zero nutritional value all day, you end up eating 2,000 calories between dinner and bed. And it’s typically comfort food to sooth your nerves after a busy day, right?

No wonder we sleep poorly and feel physically run down so often!

Instead of putting business first, savvy agents know that prioritizing their health will naturally boost their business. They’ll show up with more energy and more focus so they can be more productive.

And eating well doesn’t need to be difficult. Here’s a totally simple meal plan you can fit into your schedule:

7:00 Breakfast: A 2-minute egg and veggie scramble. Wrap it in a tortilla if you need to eat on the road. Plus your coffee of course. And grab a piece of fruit for a quick am snack.

10:00 Snack: Enjoy your fruit.

1:00 Lunch: Give yourself time to take a breather and enjoy your lunch. Turkey and swiss on wheat with carrot sticks is my go-to.

4:00 Snack: Protect yourself against the afternoon slump with a handful of almonds. Keep a stash in the car and in your desk drawer.

7:00 Balanced Dinner: Protein, veggies, and a healthy carb. Super versatile and easy. Quick-cooking meats like chicken or sirloin chunks + frozen veggies + 10-minute rice = a complete, healthy meal in about 15 minutes.

The trick to eating well is to plan ahead. Plan out your meals a few days in advance to make sure you have the ingredients you need, and you’ll never have to settle for the drive-thru again!

4. Review the Hot Sheets

You’re only as good as your market knowledge. To be the best agent, you need to be up-to-date with your ever-changing local market. That’s why top producers review the hot sheets every morning.

Here’s what you should be looking for:

• Inventory: How many houses are on the market? And how long are they staying on the market?
• Hot Properties: Are certain price points or home styles moving quickly?
• Emerging Neighborhoods: Are certain neighborhoods heating up? If you’re a real estate investor, checking hot sheets daily will help you recognize a solid investment. And if you’re not, you still want to recognize these neighborhoods so you can contact your investor clients about some of the gems you find.
• Expired Listings: You’re going to want to reach out to those homeowners to earn the listing.

Top Producers always have their finger on the pulse of the market. And the most efficient way to do that is to review your hot sheets every morning.

5. Plan Your Lead-Generation Tasks for the Day

How many times have you sat at your desk, knowing that you need to start drumming up some business…but there are so many possible directions you could take that you get overwhelmed and move on to a straightforward task instead?

Allow yourself 10-15 minutes to map out your lead-generation tasks for the day. Designating time to the planning process will give you a chance to sit with the overwhelm, knowing that you have time to sort through it and decide on your course of action.

Need a few ideas? Here are some of my favorite lead-generation tasks:

• Contact renters (in fact, here’s a whole plan for turning renters into your next buyers).
• Blog. Blogging is a long-term strategy, but if you commit to publishing just one blog post per week, you’ll start to see passive leads rolling in from organic website traffic!
• Old school and new school advertising campaigns for passive leads.
• Create a few social media posts. In fact, you can create a complete social media content calendar so you’ll always know exactly what to post in the future!

Lead generation is like meal planning. Spending a few minutes planning will dramatically increase the quality of your results.

Here’s why this is so important: being able to perform these scripts on auto-pilot frees your brain to focus on other things. If you’ve read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, you know that most people are trying to process too much information at one time. And that, by building good habits, you can automate your presentations to leave some processing power available for details most people wouldn’t notice.

Here’s an example:

For most agents, the listing presentation is mildly stressful. The agent is somewhat worried about what they will say next, how the seller will respond, and how they will respond to the seller. When you rehearse your listing presentation regularly, you don’t have to worry about any of that. And suddenly, you have the capacity to notice when the seller subtly mentions that the home will be difficult to leave because of the family memories.

Now you know the seller’s true pain point! It isn’t price…it’s leaving behind the family home where they raised their children. And now you can truly help your sellers. You’re not just another agent trying to sell their house. Now you can be the agent who’s helping them transition from family life to condo life. Now you can be the agent who helps them save those memories while moving into their new future. Instead of recommending that the sellers paint the door frame where the kids’ heights were measured over decades, you suggest that the seller remove that door frame and take it with them. They can replace the door frame for just a few dollars. That’s how top producers serve their clients.

So, what do you need to rehearse?

Well, you know what your market looks like today, and you have your lead-gen for the day planned out. So you can tailor your rehearsal scripts to mirror your day. Practice the more relevant scripts before you actually get on the phone and start setting appointments.

If you haven’t built your own scripts yet, check out The Book of Yes by Kevin Ward. This book is literally script after script of the most common real estate agent conversations. It’s a must-read for all agents and has been featured on our list of The Top 5  Books for New Agents and our Top 10 Books for Successful Agents.

Pick a script that fits your upcoming conversations, and focus on rehearing that script for 15 solid minutes. For bonus points, record yourself delivering your script on your phone, then watch it back (or listen to it). That will help you identify and correct any flaws in delivery as you go.

7. An Hour of Focused Appointment Setting

To keep your pipeline full, you need to set appointments regularly, right?

Designating one hour per day to focus all your efforts on landing new appointments will work wonders for your business.

Like it or not, classic phone calls (not emails or texts or DMs) are still the best way to set appointments. Here’s what you do:

1. Stand up and smile. Proper physiology makes a big difference in how you sound on the phone. Standing and smiling will make you instantly more confident and warmer.
2. Open your CRM.
3. Call your recent seller leads to land listing appointments.
4. Contact your recent buyer leads to land buyer consultation appointments.
5. Call a few people in your sphere of influence “just to check in”. How are they? Anything new and exciting going on? When they ask what’s new with you, explain how current market conditions are keeping you busy, and ask if they’re looking to take advantage of the current market by buying or selling.
6. Contact Expired Listings from your hot sheet. Every time you make contact with an owner, add them to your CRM.
7. Call FSBOs to set an appointment to view the home so you can discuss it with your buyer clients. Then offer your FSBO Guide so they can see the realities of selling a home and reconsider hiring an agent.

If you commit to spending one hour making phone calls to these key groups every working day, you will have a different business by this time next year!

Now, if you have clients who generally prefer to communicate via text or social media or email, by all means, reach out to them via their preferred method! Just know that those methods are less likely to result in an appointment or even a reply.

And, by the way, 8:30-10:30 am is typically the best time in the morning to reach people by phone. So schedule your Power Hour during this window. I know this is Thing #7 on your daily to-do list, but those other tasks can all be completed fairly quickly. This is the first task of the day where you’re really settling into a longer-duration task.

8. Actually Go On an Appointment

This might sound like an odd item to include on a list of daily habits of the most successful agents. But it’s a fact: successful agents go on appointments every day. Because you generally can’t land business without actually going on an appointment.

If you’re spending one hour every day setting appointments, as we just discussed, you’ll have at least one appointment every afternoon or evening.

Get out there and crush it!

9. Express Gratitude

When you’re always busy and living under the pressure of the commission-only lifestyle, you don’t always remember to take a beat to focus on all the great things in your life!

I love that some Daily Action Plan templates, like the one I use, include a spot specifically for expressing gratitude.

The act of writing down something that you are grateful for every day lifts your spirit and helps build the habit of looking for the positives and taking a moment to appreciate them.

It’s a small thing, but successful agents make it a daily habit.

10. Treat Yo’Self

Another small thing that can make a huge difference in your quality of life? Treating yourself!

Look, most days the tasks themselves are not sufficiently motivating. But what if you plan a small reward at the end of every productive day? Suddenly, life becomes a lot more enjoyable!

And this can be almost anything! A new book, a bubble bath, a glass of champagne, a walk along the water, a manicure, an episode of your favorite guilty-pleasure show, a message, a piece of the really good chocolate…whatever makes you smile!

Imagine how much nicer life will be when you have a little piece of happiness waiting for you at the end of each day!

Need a Little Help Tracking All This?

You can always schedule these 10 daily habits of the most successful agents in your calendar or journal them to keep yourself accountable. But my favorite way to keep track of these daily tasks and make sure I’m doing them every day is to use a Daily Action Plan. You just spend a few minutes filling it in every morning (as part of your Miracle Morning routine, perhaps?), then check the items off as you move through your productive day.

The Daily Action Plan I use is now available as an instant digital download on Etsy.

Here’s what a standard day looks like:

Get a Quick Win

Great victories are made possible by small wins. Before you move on with the rest of your day, get a quick win!

Your Quick Win Challenge is to add these 10 daily habits of the most successful agents to your schedule. Put them in your calendar, write them in your journal, create your own Daily Action Plan, whatever method works for you. Because “A dream written down with a date becomes a goal. A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan. A plan, backed by action, makes your dreams come true.” -Greg Reid

Put yourself on the path to making your dreams come true right now by writing this plan down. Then you just have to back your plan with action. And you’ll be unstoppable!

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