Continuing Educación

Continuing Educación
This is my first time doing my continuing education requirements. It's a lot more than I expected, haha. Online, classes are much more demanding and complex. It's mostly putting me through scenarios and asking me what my response would be. The whole thing is multiple choice, though, so the answer is in front of me... I just have to know it. I'm doing well, over all; it's mostly review!

There are also a ton of legal questions, inspections questions, ethics questions and agency relationship questions.

I'm working my way through the hours. It says I'm required to be on for at least 14 hours, but I can take as long as I need.... within reason. One of the modules covered ethics and requirements for ads and giveaways and social media schemes in general. It was an excellent review and I'm going to tie it into TR-L's class assignments, too. Ill keep you posted!

CE Suggestions

One of the action steps for my continuing education course was to create a free google business page for my real estate business. I had already been working on that, but Google requires a lot of extra steps in order to verify your ownership of the business. I was finally able to complete my verification and launch the business page last week, for free! 

Here's a little presentation on what the google biz page is, why it's beneficial and how to set one up - 

Free Google Business Page?!?!?

In addition to leveraging the free google business page platform, another action step for converting our office space to a digital one was suggested. Quarantine pushed most agents this direction due to the shutdowns of our physical office locations. As licensed Realtor's we are required to keep client files for a number of years. That still holds in the world of virtual documents, so it's important to find a way to stay organized, digitally.

I've researched and explored several platforms.... However, one thing is clear to me. I prefer not to pick up an additional expense when it comes to online conversion. That being said, I was pretty limited as far as free options go. Essentially what it comes down to is storage; while there are several free options, they will eventually require additional storage to be purchased. You know, like, cloud storage. My initial gut feeling on platform choice was Google. Google drive is pretty versatile, easy to use and gives you a fair amount of free storage... 25GB for free to start, I believe. After that it's only about $1.00 for another 50GB or even larger amounts for less. 

Here's what I've been doing so far - 

These are my initial folders when looking at my drive. 

Abby is my newly hired personal assistant. Her folder is to keep track of pay, tasks completed, and a list of the duties I expect her to address. I also kept record of her interview, start dates and other pertinent information about her in the folder as well. 

The BHHS folder is comprised of my professional headshot photo, marketing material proofs, procedures checklists, market reports and farms-- neighborhoods I reach out to regularly. 

The calendar folder has the 12 months in it with important events, settlement anniversaries, birthdays as well as monthly mailer, e-report and newsletter deadlines for the month. Abby and I can both access this so that she can remind me when to start looking ahead to prepare monthly mailers, etc. The calendars also include my shifts for phone duty that month at the office.

I had Abby start the procedures folder to begin somewhat of an operations manual for her position. In the case that she ever wants to or has to quit, I would like there to be some sort of system created and put in place that will stay behind after her time. This will save me time when training her replacement, and it really ads a valuable component to my business in general. Instead of just BEING the business, Ill have a little bit more to showcase for my experience in the industry so far. It will be a record of my progress, mistakes and effort that will forever evolve and represent the method to my madness. Can't wait! 

The social media folder is probably the most important of all. I have a folder for each platform I use within the social media folder, like so - 

The first 3 folders are general post idea folders, organized into specific meme, holiday post or general post categories. Following the first 3 are folders for each of the social media platforms I use. Within each platform folder (FB, IG, Twitter... etc) I have the 12 months and copies of each post I made during each month for that specific platform. This way I can see my track history of posts, optimize them, increase consistency, reference them for future use, recycle them to be posted on another platform and just overall fine-tune my social media protocol. 

For example, see inside the Drive > Social Media > FB folder - 

Last, but not least, is the pop-by folder. Pop by's are small client gifts that I like to do around fun holidays or near the start of the school year. The idea is that your 'popping by' to visit someone, catch up, and that you should always have a little gift. It makes people remember you! So this folder is dedicated to different pop by ideas, a record of what I've done in the past, and who I've given pop by's too. 

I'm not finished, by any means. I have definitely made progress, though! It has taken a lot of careful consideration and planning to decide exactly how to organize everything. Only having to consider my own convenience and preferences is definitely nice, but I don't ever want to have to RE-organize. So I want to craft this virtual office very..... meticulously. My next step is to import all of the clients files I already have on my laptop desktop. After that, Ill need to create digital copies of all the files that only exist physically! Definitely have my work cut out, stay tuned.