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One of the most common complaints I hear from new agents is that there just aren’t enough hours in the day. My advice is always the same: you don’t need more time; you need a better schedule! A real estate agent’s schedule should be flexible enough to deal with last-minute emergencies yet rigid enough to complete your mission-critical tasks. Time blocking, setting realistic goals and boundaries, and prioritizing your personal and family obligations are crucial for every real estate agent’s schedule.
Sticking to a schedule isn’t easy when it feels like you spend half your day putting out fires. To make it easier, I leveraged my nearly two decades of experience as an agent and broker owner to walk you through creating a schedule that will make you more productive and ensure a healthier work-life balance.
Summary
- The ideal real estate agent schedule + 12 time management tips
- Getting started: Building a solid foundation for your schedule
- Schedule your daily & weekly priority tasks in your calendar
- 9 Time management tips to boost your productivity
- Use time blocking
- Automate your appointment scheduling
- Set boundaries with clients & coworkers
- Replace it if you erase it!
- Save time by automating your lead generation & nurturing
- Avoid burnout with a realistic (and flexible) schedule
- Find an accountability partner
- Create a content calendar
- Delegate tasks that aren’t moving the needle
- The full picture: Creating the ideal real estate agent schedule
Step 1: Build a solid foundation for your schedule
While many agents think that day-to-day tasks like lead generation and showings should be the foundation of their schedules, there are three key elements I believe are more important:
- Personal life and family commitments — One of the best ways to stay motivated is to prioritize friends and family in your schedule. Put these items into your calendar first!
- Identify your most productive hours — You don’t have to get up at 5 a.m. to be productive (unless that’s your thing!). You know when you are the most focused and which hours of the day you will be the most productive. Choose your most important activities and schedule them during those hours.
- Dedicate time each day to business activities — Scheduling time each day for goal-oriented business development activities will help grow your business. This is separate from the typical client activities in your daily grind.
Step 2: Schedule your daily & weekly priority tasks
After you’ve built a solid foundation, the next step to creating your ideal schedule is adding your daily and weekly priority tasks to your calendar. To do this effectively, decide which tasks will move the needle for your business and then choose how often you should do them.
How often you engage in your priority tasks will vary depending on what stage of your career you’re in. Here are my suggestions that will work for most agents:
Personal time (suggested frequency: daily)
With a busy real estate career, it’s easy for your personal time to slip away. Taking time for yourself doesn’t just feel good; it’s also necessary for your job. Having some downtime to recharge your batteries helps you avoid burnout and ensures you’re at your best when you are working. As we suggested in Step 1, prioritize your personal time alongside your business and give them both equal importance.
Lead generation & prospecting (suggested frequency: daily)
Lead generation and prospecting are the most important activities in building your business. Whether you make phone calls, go door-knocking or follow up with potential clients, this is the bread and butter of your business and is where you should focus a lot of your time. Since lead generation and prospecting are so crucial to your business, schedule them for your most productive hours you identified above.
Appointments (suggested frequency: daily)
While you may not have appointments scheduled every day, setting aside time for showings, listing appointments, new client meetings, final walk-throughs or anything else that requires you to leave the office is essential.
This achieves two goals: First, since most of your showings will probably be in the same farm area, you can take out multiple clients without schlepping back and forth from your office. Second — and this is the best part — if you get showing requests for times you set aside for lead generation, marketing or any other activity, you can simply move that activity into your appointments time block without missing a beat!
Social media marketing (suggested frequency: daily)
Social media is a necessary evil in real estate — it can be an invaluable marketing tool for agents, but it can also be a huge time suck. Managing your time on social media can help free up your time for other activities. Schedule time into your day to manage social media, and hop off when you find yourself scrolling aimlessly. Check out our social media marketing strategies and post ideas in the links below.
Administrative tasks (suggested frequency: daily)
Administrative tasks for real estate agents include responding to email, text, and phone communications, contracts or paperwork and transaction management. If you aren’t a fan of paperwork or compliance, you can outsource these tasks by hiring a transaction coordinator or a virtual assistant.
Marketing and networking (suggested frequency: weekly)
You will likely be doing marketing and networking activities every week, depending on the time of year and your book of business. It’s crucial to both marketing and networking activities to foster your relationships with other professionals to help generate referral business. It should be a combined activity that you prioritize.
Training and professional development (suggested frequency: weekly)
Working on your professional skills and learning new things is as important to your business as any other task. The real estate business and the market both change. Those changes sometimes bring new regulations that agents must follow or new strategies for working your business. Scheduling time to stay on top of the market and the industry will ensure you remember that training and professional development are a priority for your business.
Podcasts are an excellent (and free!) way to knock out your training and professional development. You can even listen to them in your car while you’re driving to that last-minute showing. Here are a few of our favorites:
Real Estate Training and Coaching School:
Hosted by celebrated real estate coaching duo Tim and Julie Harris, this podcast offers agents actionable training, scripts, and interviews with top-producing agents.
Keeping It Real Podcast:
Host DJ Paris’ interviews the top 1% of Realtors for a deep-dive into how they became successful.
Real Trending by HousingWire:
Our own Real Trending podcast offers trends, analysis and success stories from the brightest minds in real estate.
Related article
9 time management tips to boost your productivity
Now that you have the framework to build your real estate agent schedule, here are some helpful time management tips to help you accomplish everything you just added to your schedule.
1. Use time blocking
Time blocking is a simple but powerful time management strategy in which you set aside the same amount of time each day to work on one specific task. Working on one task and one task only for a set time makes it much easier to get into a flow state and become wildly productive. Think of it like muscle memory for your brain.
A little trick we learned from reading Atomic Habits: If you block 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. every day to cold call FSBOs for a week or two, you’ll eventually go into cold calling mode at 9 a.m. whether you want to or not!
Here’s how I set up my time blocks in my Google Calendar. Like many real estate agents, I schedule lead generation as my first activity of the day since that’s when I am most alert and focused.
2. Automate your appointment scheduling
Once your calendar is time-blocked, the next step to building your ideal real estate agent schedule is to automate your appointment scheduling. This will give everyone clamoring for your time, attention, and, let’s face it, your emotional support an easy way to schedule appointments with you.
Automating showing requests
If you’re a Realtor, chances are you already know — and might even like — ShowingTime. For all the new agents out there, ShowingTime is a free app used by over 950,000 Realtors to schedule and coordinate showings between the buyer’s agent, the buyer and the listing agent.
Automating requests for phone calls and Zoom meetings
Calendly is your best bet for scheduling phone calls or Zoom meetings. This app gives you a link to add to your email signature, text messages, website or social media pages. Anyone can click on the link to book a time slot you’ve made available on your Google Calendar or iCal. You can set up multiple links that help you block time for different purposes, reserving certain hours of your week for phone consultations with new clients, meetings with current clients or calls with other real estate professionals.
3. Set boundaries with clients & co-workers
Like most agents, you probably think that you have to respond to clients immediately. However, most successful agents schedule phone calls, texts and emails. This helps them manage their day rather than letting their clients manage it for them.
Telling a high-budget client, “I’ll call you back at 4:30,” might be intimidating the first few times you do it. However, setting boundaries and managing expectations early in your relationship makes it easier for everyone. Your clients will learn when to call and when not to, and you’ll field fewer interruptions when focusing on other tasks.
Just make sure to tell your clients (and everyone else!) when to expect replies from you and when to expect radio silence. Of course, emergencies will always require immediate attention, so give your clients an alternate method to contact you should one arise.
4. Replace it if you erase it!
Urgent tasks and emergencies are par for the course in real estate. To keep your real estate agent schedule from going off the rails every time one arises, it’s crucial to move any tasks you had to skip to deal with them to another time on your calendar. For example, if you had to skip your lead generation time to deal with a needy client, you must reschedule it for another time on your calendar.
As one of my old real estate coaches used to say, “If you erase it, you must replace it.” If you get into the habit of deleting tasks instead of rescheduling them, you won’t stay consistent enough to see results.
5. Save time by automating your lead generation & nurturing
When managing your time, work smarter, not harder. One of the smartest (and easiest) ways to work smarter is to automate your lead generation and nurturing. This will save you precious time in your schedule and get you to the closing table faster.
While dozens of options are available, Market Leader offers the most well-rounded and affordable solution for most agents. They offer everything from exclusive seller leads from housevalues.com to social media leads for just $10 each from their Network Boost program.
6. Avoid burnout with a realistic (and flexible) real estate agent schedule
The key to setting your real estate schedule is to make sure that it’s realistic, that you can follow it and that it works for your lifestyle. A real estate agent schedule that’s too rigid or full doesn’t do you any good. You want to ensure you can do what you set out to do. Otherwise, your productivity will suffer.
If you don’t know where to start, try the “less is more” strategy. Put one or two of your mission-critical tasks in your calendar, then block out more time for less important tasks until you get to a place where you feel like you have enough time to meet your goals each week.
7. Find an accountability partner
Teaming up with another agent is a great way to keep yourself accountable to your business, hone your skills and have a cheerleader in your corner. Having someone who has your back and understands your challenges and the work that you do is an excellent way to keep you motivated and on top of your game.
Being there for another agent can help motivate you to stick to your schedule and develop ways to work together more efficiently. You can also hone your skills by role-playing so you can practice your scripts.
8. Create a social media content calendar
Regular social media posting is one of the most effective ways to be seen and generate business. The only problem is that figuring out what to post can be tedious. Creating a content calendar to schedule your social media posts for the week or month ahead is a great way to save time.
Coffee & Contracts makes it easier. They offer a monthly content calendar filled with high-quality social media content made for agents by agents.
9. Delegate tasks that aren’t moving the needle
Once you realize that you’ve hit your limit for what you can do in a day, it’s time to consider delegating tasks. Passing off administrative tasks to an assistant (or virtual assistant from Upwork) takes those activities off your plate and frees up time for more important things. Delegating can also mean building a team or collaborating with another agent in your office. The key to delegating is to identify the tasks that don’t require your involvement and assign them to others with that skill set, ensuring that your high-priority items get your full attention.
The full picture: The ideal real estate agent schedule
One of the things that I love about the real estate business is that every day is different. This doesn’t mean that the days fly by without planning. A real estate schedule that prioritizes your essential tasks and gives you a healthy work-life balance is one of the most crucial tools in your toolbox. Learning time management skills, such as setting realistic goals, blocking time, setting boundaries and finding an accountability partner can help you stay organized to build a stronger business.
