With the first sharp chill of fall, the crisp, clean air, it can be tempting for your mind to already start checking our for the year and looking forward to lazy holiday afternoons with friends and family, late mornings avoiding the increasingly cold weather outside and all the bad decisions to be made at vendor holiday parties. What's probably not running through your mind is that this is the most important three months of the year for real estate professionals. And that's not debatable.

Coasting through the fourth quarter will effectively demolish your chances of hitting next year's goals. There just simply isn't enough time to rebuild the momentum you need to maximize the busiest seasons and build the kind of pipeline that's going to...

I'm not going to repeat the same, tired adage about all of us having the same 24 hours in a  day. Yes, technically that's true. It's also decidedly untrue that we have all an equal amount of responsibility, freedom, burden, leverage, inherent talent etc., so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to compare ourselves to others based solely on the usage of time. What I think makes more sense to discuss is the way in which elite performers maximize the time that they do have, however much that may be, by directing their focus, blocking out distraction and overcoming their insecurities to keep pushing towards their big whys.

In any industry there is a top 1% of performers. The ones that just seem to 'get it' and have a natural ability to...

I'm not going to lie to you and write some fluff piece about how holding mega-open houses is going to dramatically increase the chances of selling that particular listing. The truth is that open house traffic has slowed over the last decade, in part due to technology and the amount of information available online, and equally because of a  fundamental lack of effort the part of the average agent to properly market and host them. It's for this second reason that going above and beyond with your open house strategy can truly set you apart from the other agents in your area. But the benefits to your listing business are the real reason to knock it out of the park at every open house.

Think of an open house as three things: A marketing...