I’ve been working on updating some of the checklists that we use for buying properties (the link is for exclusive resources for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members). This process reminds me just why it is so important to use checklists when looking at and buying properties.
If I told you that committing know to using a checklist could save you, at a minimum, $10,000 would you do it? I hope so and it can save you at least that much and probably much more.
Think about it: don’t most of the life critical or extremely expensive processes you know of use checklists to make sure they are doing everything right, consistently every time? Think about your medical procedures or airplane systems. By following a well documented system and meticulously following the steps you significantly cut down on mistakes.
Plus, by taking the time to think through the entire process before hand (and improving it as you use it and make better distinctions) you can protect yourself from known dangers and cut out emotion in the buying process. Remember, you want to buy logically and sell with emotion and checklists allow you to do that.
Until my next post,
James
We can learn a lot about improving our real estate investing business by looking at businesses that use extremely well documented systems to increase capacity and profitability. As my personal real estate investing business grows, I find myself having to rely more and more on systems and less and less on my ability and the abilities of my team to think through each situation as it occurs.
For example, imagine you were hiring someone to help in your business to deal with new inquiries. Whether they are calls or e-mails or walk-ins, you’d want to train them on what to do or say so that they could replicate the same, better or, at least, very similar results to what you’ve been able to produce before you hired them, right?
If it was primarily new inquiries calling or walking in, you might teach them a script combined with a information form with the info you expect them to gather during the call or visit. If they are primarily e-mails, you may have a series of template e-mails that they can customize slightly to fight the specific situation.
In my business, with well over 100 new inquiries (and often more than 200 inquiries) from sellers, buyers, investors or dream team members being added to our contact management system each day and on-going conversations we had to create a system for handling that. Since, for reasons I’ll discuss in a future article, we primarily use e-mail to communicate, our system is based heavily on e-mail templates.
For instance, when a new investor comes in, we have a series of e-mails that we sent out to find out whether they are wholesaling, buy and hold, fix up and resell or any number of other flavors of investor. Wholesalers get asked different questions than buy and hold investors and so on. But I don’t leave it up to my assistants to write a new e-mail from scratch each time. Instead, they read each e-mail and answer questions they were asked with template based replies and ask new template based questions to find out more about how we might be able to work together.
We have very similar systems for buyers, sellers and dream team members of varying types because asking wholesaler type questions to your real estate agent might not be the best match. Just like asking mortgage broker questions wouldn’t quite work for a buy and hold investor or title company.
So, I highly encourage you, whether you are just starting out and implementing systems for yourself to use, or you are bringing in help, that you document what you’re ideal experience should be for the folks you deal with and see how you can systematize it.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. The Real Estate Investor Wiki is a compilation of many of the systems I’ve developed in my real estate investing business that you can start with and just change to meet the specific needs of your own business. The idea is: it is easy to modify something that already exists than it is to start over from scratch.
