Real Estate Elevated Reviews: The Power of Setting Goals

Almost nothing important is accomplished without someone setting a goal first. Goal setting is crucial in real estate investing. Responsible business owners don’t start work without a business plan—especially with thousands of dollars on the line. 

And a business plan is just a major goal broken into subgoals and steps on how to reach them. If you’re running a series of house flips, you shouldn’t be less well-prepared. You should set goals that: 

• Give you motivation and purpose
• Will give structure to your days, weeks, and months
• Are really big but can be broken down into small objectives and actions
• Are easy to track and finish

If your New Year’s resolutions hardly ever work out, how can you set better goals? Real Estate Elevated reviews the steps below that have worked for us. 

Set Goals that Excite You

Do you find yourself thinking “should” a lot about your goals or tasks? The word “should” is a clue that you’re not interested in what you’re doing. You need to instead set goals that are truly important to you.  

Business educator Marie Forleo advises using this two-step process for setting better goals: 

1. Brainstorm

First, write down everything you want to experience or accomplish in the next 12 months. Use the following categories to help you think of ideas: 

• Growing your skills
• Improving your finances
• Relationships with business partners and vendors (contractors, etc.)
• Improving your renovations
• Upgrading your team
• Networking
• Building your portfolio of projects

Write down every possible idea without criticizing any of them. Just get them out onto a piece of paper or into a document. 

2. Prioritize

The way to achieve excellence is to focus your time and energy on just one or a small handful of goals. That’s why your next task is to decide which goals will give you the greatest rewards and to prioritize those. 

For each goal, ask yourself these questions: 

• What benefit will it eventually bring to this business?
• How will it improve my relationships with my team, family, vendors, etc.?
• What skills and habits will I have to learn in order to accomplish it?
• If I could only accomplish this one goal, would I be truly excited about it?
• Am I interested in the process of accomplishing this goal, not just getting it over with? 
• Is finishing this goal important to me personally, or do I want to satisfy someone else’s agenda?

If any goal doesn’t seem worth it after these questions, delete it or put it off for later. Try to find the smallest number of goals you can accomplish with full attention, rather than trying to work on as many as possible. 

How to Use Your Real Estate Investing Goals

Goals are only valuable if you act on them. With your highest-priority goals, your final task is to plan your next year. You’ll need to: 

• Split those goals into 12 objectives (one for each month).
• Write each objective in a different month on a yearly planner. 
• Divide each monthly objective into weekly and daily goals (starting with just the next month or two).
• Put your goals and subgoals up somewhere you can’t miss them.
• Refer to your goals constantly.
• Take daily or weekly action to advance your highest-priority objectives.

Also, you can adjust your goals if feedback from your actions suggests it.

Learn more about how to set goals, renovate homes, and build a real estate investing business. Register for a Real Estate Elevated event to learn from the principles of Tarek and Christina.