What Separates Six Figure Earners from Everyone Else?

Last year the median income of real estate agents was $36,600, which means 750,000 people in real estate earned less than that.

Only 18% of licensed agents earned six figures.

I’m willing to bet most of those 750,000 people had hopes and dreams of success, bills to pay and families to feed. What’s missing for them?

Floyd said it best, “Top producers consistently work high priority activities. Low and non-producers do not.”

One of the most telling things we have learned from 16 years of coaching is that when agents follow the SMART Week system consistently, they produce more; and when agents get out of the SMART Week habit, they produce less.

SMART Week is a simple three step process.

Step 1

Block out your appointments and commitments on your weekly activity plan at the beginning of each week. Block out your time off, and then block out your prospecting and call back time. Do these three steps first to make sure you can fit everything in.

Step 2

Color code money-making activities in green, non-money making activities in yellow, and personal time in pink. Green means go. Yellow means caution. Pink means happiness and balance. 

Step 3 (and this is the critical one)

Before you start your work day, and before you start looking at screens, take out the list of all the things you have to do this week. As you read through it, think about what’s important. Select the one most important thing you need to get done today to get closer to your goals and write it down, marked #1.

Think some more about what’s the next most important task, select it, write it down, marked #2. Repeat the thinking process until you have 5 tasks selected and written down.

Barring life threatening emergencies, work on these 5 things to do in order of importance until they are done.

Anything that isn’t completed, resolved or finished, carries over to the next day’s list.

What most people discover is that when the big important things get done first, there is almost always time for the less important. Conversely, when you start the day with the less important tasks, they take up all your time and leave little if any for what’s most important.

How do you know what’s most important?

Look at your goals and that will help you clarify your priorities.

Goals give you energy but they also crystallize your thinking, and that’s the point. Thinking about what’s important is the step most people hurry through or skip altogether. 

Six figure earners have very few characteristics in common.

Are they ambitious and hard-working? Yes.

But one of the most democratic things about real estate is that almost anyone who really wants to can succeed.

What really separates the bottom from the top is that top producers consistently work high priority activities because they take the time at the beginning of the day to think about what’s important.