Tag: Goals

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2/3 of 2016 is Over

More than likely, if you are reading today’s entry, you don’t collect a salary.  Like me, your ability to put food on the table is a function of how many deals you put together.  Since I like to eat, and have four growing boys at home who really like to eat, I have a pretty good responsibility to make sure that there’s something of substance on their plates at least three times a day.

To that end, I set goals at the beginning of each year.  I track closings to be sure.  But closings are dependent on applications, which are dependent on pre-approvals, which are dependent on leads.  To get leads, I make phone calls.  I know that to accomplish my income goal for the year I need to make 2,500 phone calls, which is just over 200 per month, or 10 per day.  That’s really the only thing over which I have any control.  I can’t control the number of applications or closings that I have directly, but I can exert myself to make a few extra phone calls to complete my 10 per day.

After doing this for 19 years, I have a pretty good handle on how the number work out.  Individually the percentages of conversion ebb and flow, but collectively I know that to get one closing I need to make about 15 phone calls.  What’s always interesting to me is that the formula works.  Since tomorrow is the first day of September and the year will be 2/3 of the way over, I decided this morning to see how I am coming along.  And since we are friends I thought I’d share my progress with you as a percentage of completion of my goals for the entire year.

Calls: 66.92%
Leads: 70.8%
Pre-Approvals: 85.6%
Applications: 70.8%
Closings 67.3%

I can see that I have gone through the pre-approval process for a larger percentage of people this year who for whatever reason have not purchased a home.  But in the end my call percentage, statistically speaking, matches my closing percentage.  And what makes me amazed, is that both are 2/3 of the way along to path toward my goal for the year.

There is still a lot of year left and I hope that you are accomplishing your personal objectives!  If I can help you in any way, let’s get together!

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Housing and Baseball

Out of the 19 seasons that Yogi Berra played professional baseball, he was in 15 All-Star Games and competed in 14 World Series–winning the championship 10 times.  With stats like that, is it any wonder that he is praised as one of the greatest players of all time?  One of my favorite sayings attributed to him is “you can observe a lot by watching”.  It resonates because that’s all I do to produce this column every morning; I watch and read until something interesting pops up and then I attempt to turn it into useful entertainment.  We do the same thing in our professional practices: listening to the client and asking key questions to better ascertain how we can help them accomplish their goals, while keeping them interested in using our services.

Speaking of stats, Weiss Residential Research reported that the number of appreciating homes has declined more than 12% over the last year.  They also said that there are three times as many homes losing value every month than there were the year prior.  Pretty sure that I saw this on my eighth grader’s homework last night: (x-0.12=3x)? No word on what type of homes these are, where they are located, nor the cause of the depreciation. Given the price appreciation of housing calculated by every other publication this year, a possible explanation for their conclusions could be that the exploited sampling is very small and the reasons could be fire, flooding, or possibly anywhere around Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia where the Phillies’ winning percentage is only 37%.