8 Practical Time Management Tips For Realtors In 2023

Everyone, across every industry, occasionally struggles with productivity. Often, it can seem like there just aren’t enough working hours in the day.

But in the real estate business, productivity is even more important. Your income is directly related to how productive you are.

Today, we’re going to take a look at how a successful real estate agent can improve their productivity and reduce procrastination.

1. Start With a Good Foundation

Scientifically, consistency is always an improvement over inconsistency. That means getting to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time, and generally doing the same things throughout the day.

Real estate professionals lead inconsistent lives. There’s always something new going on. But living in a hectic, always-on fashion isn’t always the best choice for productivity or emotional stability.

When a real estate agent doesn’t pay attention to their health and instead is always rushed, they make mistakes. They perform poor task management. Ultimately, they end up forgetting important tasks and potentially losing money.

It’s better to take care of your health first. So, start with a good foundation. Get to bed at the right time, wake up at the right time, and make time for yourself.

2. Build a “Block Schedule”

Time blocking is one of the most important time management hacks for a realtor. Before you even start productivity hacking, you should understand this.

When you time block, you build your entire day out as “blocks” of time organized for your home life, for your hobbies, and your work.

And you stick to it. That’s important for someone in real estate. Busy real estate agents can easily run into issues with work-life balance.

But there’s another hack that you can add to this. Rather than trying to incorporate everything into a single day, you block out your week.

Mondays and Tuesdays are for showings, Wednesdays are for listings and listing pictures — and so forth.

One reason it’s hard for many real estate agents to schedule things is that they have so many different tasks. Learning to build a proper block schedule can be key to improving time management for realtors.

The impulse is to try to schedule them all as daily tasks, but that’s not realistic. Instead, you can have a block on your block schedule that’s “flexible,” and try to keep everything else for different days of the week.

3. Don’t Waste Too Much Time Online

Okay, the internet is important. But it can also be a time sink. You need to post on social media for lead generation, and it’s also easy to keep scrolling.

As you build your real estate career, you’ll need to find ways to automate and scale your online processes. You need to avoid wasting time online and make every moment useful.

Get an AI chatbot to manage your scheduling on your website. Schedule all your posts automatically, rather than having to post them yourself. Have your recent posts on your website automatically sent to your social media accounts. Find ways to build engagement that doesn’t require you to be “always online.”

Some of the most successful people in the world check their emails in 10-minute intervals throughout the day — not constantly.

4. Delegate As Much As Possible

You don’t have to be a one-person team. When you have tasks, even menial tasks, that can be done by someone other than yourself, don’t be afraid to outsource.

Find freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork. Work with a webmaster that can manage your website for you. Get a personal assistant to complete your scheduling tasks and manage your appointments, if necessary.

Part of being successful means understanding what has to be done by you and what can be done by someone else. Even if you aren’t in the position to hire people for administrative tasks, you can use virtual assistants and automated scheduling for quite a lot. Delegating, instead of doing everything, can greatly help improve time management for realtors.

5. Collect and Analyze Your Data

Is cold calling working for you? Are your past clients connecting with you? Are you generating leads?

Productivity isn’t just about working hard. It’s about working smart.

If you can generate just as much money in two hours as eight hours, why wouldn’t you work for two hours?

When generating leads and building up client success, you should also be collecting data on what did and didn’t work. This gives you critical insights into which marketing tactics you should actually be investing in.

It could be that Facebook is just outperforming every other venue for you, in terms of activity. It could be that spending a couple of hours on Facebook every day outpaces struggling to find an audience on Twitter. But you won’t know this unless you are tracking your metrics and remaining consistent.

6. Learn How to Effectively Collaborate

A real estate agent isn’t an island, although it may often feel like you are one. A great tip for time management for realtors is to join a team.

If you work with team members, there are multiple solutions that can make the process of collaboration easier. Slack, MS Teams, Google Calendar — they can all help you manage your connections more effectively.

In addition to a broker, you may need a mentor or a coach; someone who can keep you on task. You might even need an app that will hold you accountable for meeting the goals of your day.

Collaboration is as important as delegating. You might find yourself needing to shift an open house to another agent or refer a potential client. Collaborating effectively gives you a buffer — it gives you a team to lean on when you need to, which adds more flexibility to your life.

7. Build the Right Technological Infrastructure

Simply having the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite can improve your productivity. In addition to that, you might want an IDX website, a calendar app, a project management suite, and collaborative technology.

Your technological infrastructure will make it far easier for you to manage all your business tasks. But you also need to make sure your technology isn’t taking over your life — that you aren’t spending more time managing your technology than you are benefiting from it.

It can take some time to find the tools that work for you. But once you do find the right real estate apps, you’ll find that your entire process is significantly streamlined.

8. Invest in the Right Equipment

Finally, there’s merit to investing in the right equipment, too. This is one of the best tips for time management for realtors.

A lot of real estate agents want to improve their bottom line with affordable technology. And that’s great. But it’s only great insofar as that technology saves you money.

It’s better, for instance, to invest in a great camera that will sell your listings than to spend hours editing smartphone pictures.

Think about how you spend your time and whether there are ways to improve the amount of time spent. Whenever you can buy a specialized tool to save yourself time, it’s often worth it. As an agent, your time is the only thing that’s finite.

Conclusion

Productivity isn’t a magic trick. For the most part, time management for realtors is about discipline.

It’s also something that most people struggle with. If you go to a real estate coach, a lot of what they talk about is going to be about building productivity — simply getting things done.

Successful agents are able to build habits. They’re able to combine or automate similar tasks, focus on the tasks that make them the most money, and ensure that they remain consistent.

FAQs

What’s the best way to improve your productivity?

Automation and delegation are the best ways to “hack” your productivity quickly. Keep your essential tasks, delegate tasks that can be handled by other people, and find ways to use technology to automate routine or mundane tasks that don’t require a personal touch.

How can you become a more productive real estate agent?

Using simple tools, such as Google Calendar, is a great start to managing multiple tasks and a complex schedule. But from there, you’ll need to find automation and scheduling tools that work for you. Consider social media automation, online chat bots, and project management software.

What is the most important element of productivity for a realtor?

A realtor has to understand what to prioritize. There are certain tasks that are inherently more important than others.

Realtors can experience tremendous cognitive load as they try to prioritize tasks on the fly. Because of that, blocking out your time and building up habits are both critical.