Start preparing now for this summer’s mid-year real estate business audit and review so you can finish the year on a high, writes coach Darryl Davis.
The best time to prepare for your mid-year real estate business audit is before mid-year. Once July rolls around, you’re either on track or you’re not. The results are already in motion. The plans you need to make should have been made a quarter or two earlier.
That’s the part most agents miss. They wait until they feel the year has slipped and then rush off. By then, the momentum is against them. A proper mid-year audit is not a panic button. It’s a habit. And the agents who get their work done a quarter faster are the ones who don’t have to scramble in the first place.
How to conduct an honest mid-year audit
Whether you’re performing an audit now or at a check-in point within your business, here’s how to do it honestly.
Start with listings instead of GCI
Most agents open the wrong spreadsheet. They pull year-to-date closed income and try to read the current year from there. The numbers already show what has happened. It is a lagging indicator.
Listed inventory is a leading indicator. The list predicts the next 90 days for your business. Show active list. Pull up the pending pipeline. That’s where the truth lives. If your pipeline looks thin, your completed revenue in three months’ time will also look thin, no matter how busy you feel today.
Now look at something else that almost no one tracks: the gap between conversations and promises. Count the actual conversations you’ve had with potential customers in the last 30 days. Then count how many of those resulted in actual appointments. If you have a lot of conversations and few commitments, your funnel is broken somewhere. Usually it’s not where you think.
Your calendar tells the truth more than your bank account.
Bank accounts report the past. The calendar predicts the future. When agents perform an honest audit, they start with a calendar.
Database health check
After lists and conversations, the third thing to audit is the database. It’s not that big. its health status.
Most agents brag about the number of contacts they have. That’s the wrong number. The real question is how many contacts have you had meaningful conversations with in the last 90 days?
Run that number. For most agents, that’s difficult. The database they thought they had was actually a list of names, not a community of relationships. Trust collapses if it is not maintained. A past client you haven’t heard from in two years is not a past client. They are strangers who knew you well.
An honest audit will reveal that reality early enough so you can fix the problem.
Signs that you are busy but not productive
Being busy feels like progress. it’s not. And agents who can’t tell the difference are the ones who end most years frustrated. It wasn’t because I didn’t work hard, it was because I worked hard at the wrong thing.
Here’s how to tell it: A busy agent can describe all the tasks they did yesterday. Productive agents can let you know which tasks generated appointments.
Instructions are consistent throughout the coaching call.
Your inbox will display the day instead of your calendar. Every ping gets a response. Important work waits until tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. People spend more time on social media than on their phones. When you scroll, it feels like marketing. it’s not. Marketing works are always “in progress” and are never actually shipped. Perfectionism is about putting off getting better clothes. Tools and courses are collected like trophies. Meanwhile, the CRM I’ve already paid for hasn’t opened yet this week. Promises are light. Activity is heavy. Schedules are full of preparation, administration, and content creation, and no real human conversations that could turn into business.
The last one is a dead perk. My calendar is full. The pipeline is thin. When the calendar is clogged but the pipeline is empty, activity replaces production. And activities don’t make money.
Productivity questions
There’s one question that categorizes all the tasks, all the meetings, and all the time on your calendar. Will this put me in front of people who can hire or refer me?
If the answer is yes, then it’s productive work. If the answer is no, it may still be necessary work, but don’t confuse it with work that actually generates business.
Most agents have the ratio reversed. They spend 70 percent of their week on tasks that no one can see, and 30 percent of their week on tasks that no one can see. Inverting this ratio also inverts the year.
What does an honest audit actually look like?
Honesty is the key word. Actual audits can be unpleasant. If hearing a mid-year review gives you peace of mind, you’re not doing it. You gave a pep talk.
An audit is honest if:
The actual number of events will be displayed accurately, not the number of events from last month. You can see that there is a clear gap between the conversation and the closing. Identify three or four activities that feel productive but don’t result in a dollar of income. You are faced with the fact that you know who your most important past customers are, but you also know that you haven’t called them.
None of this is shameful. It’s about clarity. You can’t solve what you don’t face.
Please do it early. do frequently
The agents who end the year on a high aren’t the ones who had a perfect first half. They are the ones who performed honest audits before they were needed, discovered breaches while they were still small, and made adjustments without panicking.
The interim audit in June is a reaction to that. The strategy is to conduct an interim audit in May. Quarterly audit is a system. The sooner you make it a habit, the less you’ll have to rescue the year.
This is the shift. Stop treating audits as once-a-year events. Start treating it as a regular check-in that happens often so you always know where you are.
If you always know where you stand, you won’t feel so busy. Your productivity will start to increase. And the year will no longer be something that happens to you, but something that you will intentionally create.
May is Inman’s seventh annual Agent Appreciation Month. Find profiles of top producers, their thoughts on the state of the industry, and concrete takeaways you can implement in your career today. Additionally, the prestigious Real Estate Future Leader Award is back.
Darryl Davis is the CEO of Darryl Davis Seminars. Connect with us on Facebook and YouTube.
