The Business Planning System For The Real Estate Professional (Book Review)

In good times and bad the failure rate among real estate professionals is discouragingly high. That's particularly true among newly licensed agents. Statistics vary from state to state and from time to time, but frequently well over fifty percent of licensees fail to renew their initial license. There are a number of reasons for this distressing fact of real estate career life.

Several years ago, in doing research for my real estate career book, I did a survey of managing brokers around the country. The purpose of the survey was to get their opinion on why the failure rate of new agents was so high. Near the top of the list of reasons they identified was: "inability to plan and to manage time." To oversimplify a very complex issue, many folks who enter our profession simply do not realize that, no matter how supportive the real estate brokerage with which they affiliate is, they are, in fact, a one person business operation.

Success or failure will depend almost entirely on their realization of that fact and their ability to adapt. This educational package by Carla Cross is aimed directly at real estate professionals operating in the trenches. You'll recognize Carla as a long time contributing columnist to the Real Estate Professional. You can get detailed information about this product and many others at www.carlacross.com.

Here's a brief description of this package from her web site: "In a more challenging, competitive market, you've got to have a plan! But, here's much more than just forms to fill in. This is a comprehensive strategic planning system, suitable for the multimillion dollar producer as well as the agent with one year in the business.

Carla Cross, CRB, MA, gives you a complete 'tutorial' on 2 audio CDs on how to make a business plan to reach your real estate goals. Who better to advise you? After all, she wrote the only internationally published book on planning, wrote the CRB (Certified Real Estate Broker) course to teach managers how to coach agents in their plan and taught Strategic Planning for CRB for 12 years. As I was reviewing and interacting with this product I put myself in the place of a real estate professional attempting to get a handle on how to plan my career to achieve long term success. I was very positively impressed.