When analysing the success of real estate agents, people usually think of the agents who sell the highest-priced homes, or earn the highest commissions over the course of the year.

While a sizeable commission is an important end goal for many agents, there is a far more dynamic range of elements to assess when judging your level of success.

An important consideration to remember is that all agents are at different stages in their journey and career. A rookie agent shouldn’t be judging their success by comparing themselves to the top earners who have been in the industry for decades. Fortunately, there are a number of things you can look at to determine if you’ve had a successful year.

How Many Calls Did You Make?

In real estate, success doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it takes a significant amount of time to market, sell and settle on just one property. There’s a lot of time in the day, which should be filled with doing the simple things that will ultimately drive more business.

One of the most important metrics for most agents is the number of phone calls made. This metric is so important because phone calls to prospective vendors is a tried and true way of generating new business.

Each year, you should have a goal in mind for how many people you will reach out to, this can be broken down into a monthly or even weekly basis to be more manageable. Your success should be linked simply to how many of those calls you actually made. From there, you will able to establish conversion rate to learn how effective your phone calls are.

If you’ve exceeded your goals, you will likely have a solid pipeline of work ahead to set yourself up for success.

When starting out as a new agent, it’s important to prospect every single day and continue to drive that pipeline. You aren’t expected to be the top performed agent in your first year. But it is possible to make the most calls and that should be your goal for next year.

Did you Grow Your Network?

An integral part of real estate is networking. Every week, you should be going out and actively looking to expand your network to help drive more business.

This can be as simple as sitting down for a coffee with potential referral partners or even going to property-related events with the goal of building up new relationships.

Once those relationships have been established, you also have to continue to develop and nurture them. You can do this by looking to assist your network in any way you can. After all, creating a relationship only to let it dissolve by ignoring is counterproductive and a waste of time, energy and resources.

It takes time to grow a business network, and it is never too late to start. Set the goal of building your network by a few people each week and by the end of the year, you might have created over 100 new quality business contacts.

In many ways, the network you have in place is far more valuable than your other resources as it has the potential to sustain and grow your business for many years to come. It could be the most important indicator of success in the future.

Reviews/Customer Satisfaction

A recent survey from REALTOR Magazine found that around 30% of sales volume comes from past client referrals, and 30% are from repeat business with past clients.

If you are looking after the needs of the vendors well, it is going to see your business continue to grow. This is also very true of buyers and potential buyers as well. As an agent, ensuring you make a good impression and genuinely help and solve problems for people is vital, as it solidifies your relationships with vendors. Oftentimes, a personal touch or going the extra mile can be the difference between making and breaking a deal.

If you’ve only sold a few properties over the course of a year, but you’ve achieved outstanding results for your clients, that’s more important than going through the motions on a larger volume of transactions.

Link your success to the level of customer satisfaction. You can obtain this from client surveys that you should be regularly conducting and also from ratings and reviews.

Marketing Efforts

Building momentum as an agent takes time, but it all starts with small steps. Over the past 12 months, have you kept up with all you personal marketing efforts that you set out to achieve?

Did you grow that social media presence like you had hoped? Have you been sending regular email newsletters? Have you been doing regular letter drops? Have you been attending property-related events and networking effectively with potential buyers?

Whatever form of marketing you choose to do, it’s important that you have stuck to your plan. If you are unsure how to market yourself, read through our guide on How to Market Yourself as a Real Estate Agent.

Success in real estate is about turning up every single day and doing the small things. You will ultimately be successful if you break down those goals and focus on smaller daily activities. Then in time, if you do those daily activities, the transactions and commissions will come.