Surviving your first ninety days

What to do in the first two weeks

Administration first, and not because it is satisfying. Because every item on this list will otherwise surface during your first live transaction, which is the worst possible moment for any of them.

Confirm your registration is actually complete rather than in progress. Get access to the CRM, the portals and whatever system your firm uses to pull advertising permits, and use each of them once on something harmless so you have done it before it matters. Find out who actually processes a listing when you bring one in, and introduce yourself to them, because that person will determine how fast your first deal moves far more than your manager will.

Then choose your patch. Not a strategy document: two communities, written down, that you are going to know better than the portals do. The instinct in week one is to stay open to everything on the theory that opportunity could come from anywhere. It does, and the agents who convert it are the ones who could speak credibly about somewhere specific.

1. 01

   Registration complete, not pending

   Confirm it rather than assume it. Discovering an incomplete registration during a transaction is a bad way to learn the difference.

2. 02

   Systems used once, harmlessly

   CRM, portal upload, permit process. Do each once before a live deal depends on you knowing how.

3. 03

   Two communities, chosen

   Written down and committed to. Breadth feels like opportunity in week one and reads as vagueness on a call.

How to learn a community properly

The portals already list every building and every price. Repeating that back to a buyer is not knowledge and they can tell.

What is actually valuable is the set of things not in a listing. Which towers have a service charge that surprises people. Which buildings look identical from the road and are not. Where the handover has slipped and where it has not. Which side of a development gets the noise, the sun or the view that the photographs imply everywhere gets. Which stack in a tower is worth the premium and which is priced as though it were.

That comes from viewing property you are not selling, walking the community rather than driving through it, and asking the people who work in the buildings. It takes weeks, and it is the difference between an agent who answers questions and one who anticipates them.

It is also the only durable asset you build in the first ninety days. Leads run out, allocation rules change and firms are left. What you know about two communities travels with you.

The habit that matters more than any other

Answer first. Not better, not longer, first.

Portal enquiries reach several agencies at once, and the person on the other end is comparing. An agent who responds in minutes and one who responds in hours are not competing for the same enquiry, because by hour three it has already had a useful conversation with someone else. Nothing else you improve in the first ninety days compensates for being third.

This is unglamorous and it is measurable, which makes it the right thing to focus on when nothing else is working yet. Track your own time to first response for two weeks. Most people are considerably slower than they believe, and the gap between belief and the number is where the early deals go.

The second habit is what happens after. Most agents treat a lead that does not convert immediately as closed. The deals in a first quarter overwhelmingly come out of second and third conversations, so a follow-up list kept from week one is worth more than any single lead in it. Start it before you have anything to put on it, because the discipline is harder to install later.

What to ignore

Two things absorb an enormous amount of early energy and return very little.

Comparing yourself to the top producer. Their pipeline was built over years, a good share of their business is repeat and referral, and none of that is available to you yet. The comparison produces urgency without direction, which is how people end up chasing every enquiry across the whole city instead of building anything.

Personal brand production. Content has a real place later, and in the first ninety days it is usually procrastination with a camera. An agent with nothing specific to say about anywhere in particular has no material, and making it anyway consumes the hours that would have produced the material.

There is a third, gentler one: waiting. Waiting for the allocation to improve, for the market to turn, for the manager to notice. Ninety days is long enough to build a patch and short enough to disappear in, and waiting is the most common way it gets spent.

How to tell whether it is going badly

Not by whether you have closed anything, which in a first quarter tells you less than people assume.

The signals worth watching are whether your enquiry count is rising, whether your response time is falling, whether your follow-up list is growing, and whether you can say something specific about your patch that you could not say a month ago. All four are within your control and all four precede results.

If those are moving and nothing has closed, the picture is usually fine and early. If none of them are moving after three months, something structural is wrong, and it is worth establishing whether it is the firm's supply, its allocation, or your own conversion before drawing a conclusion. That diagnosis has its own piece in this section.

The thing not to do is decide at week six on the basis of a feeling. The first quarter feels like failure to most people who go on to do well in it, which is precisely why the measurable signals are worth keeping.