Project Management provides you a with a list of capabilities (tasks) that (when managed properly) achieve your intended goal. That’s almost exactly the definition of a project.

What is a PROJECT?

A project is a list of capabilities that achieve an objective within a temporary set period based on the constraints of scope, time, and budget.

Let’s take the example project of SELLING A PROPERTY– here are the benefits of adopting a Project Management model.

• Start with a list of tasks that ended with a successful closing–estimate the actual duration of each task (this is an estimate, at first it might be +/- 20% accurate, but actual durations will improve as your model gets updated).
• By creating a list of tasks (Project Plan) and their durations, you can now estimate costs of the project–so for each property sold you will have an estimated budget for each project (or sales activity for each similar property).
• Once you have ALL THE TASKS, in their order of sequence and priority, you can identify which tasks have deliverables, or products of the task, like offers, contracts, or written notices. Many tasks are only deliverables
• What have you got? You’ve got a list of tasks, with their durations, and their associated deliverables–add people resources who can do the tasks, and you have a basic Project Plan model.
• Give your Project Plan model a start date–and all the tasks with fall into a schedule based on task durations–important–now you will have an estimated actual date for each task start–AND–an estimated end of the project (CLOSING DATE). This is your Project Schedule–and this is something that is easy to manage.

Project Management will give you more time to focus on the revenue generating aspects of your business–because your project team is following the steps that were successful in the past for the same kind of project.

Project Plans provide an ARTIFACT of the project activity that can indicate to you what tasks are slipping, which are ahead of schedule, and which aren’t being worked.

One topic I didn’t address is QUALITY– and the way you manage scope, time, and budget affects the quality of the project–we can discuss that in person.

Can you see how Project Management takes the guesswork out of the process of selling a property?

Can you see how having a Project Plan will provide a way for you to delegate steps in a process without the daily interaction from you?

Of course you will ultimately be responsible for the process; however, now you will have a written Project Plan to assess the progress of the steps to meet your goals–no more guessing or relying on someone elses to give a “status”.

The more property sales you make the more accurate your Project Plan model becomes–because it’s updated with ACTUAL information–it only takes a few cycles to get an accurate (+/- 10%) model that takes into account your specific market, resources, and actual tasks durations.

There will always be an “unknown”, and “unknowable” element to your business–this is mitigated through Risk Management–but wouldn’t you like to know exactly what 95% of your business is doing with an error of maybe only 5 to 10%?

I’ve worked with many Real Estate Brokers and Property Investors who start off the discussion with, “I want to implement systems and process”–because we all know systems and process work–it’s a way to replicate your efforts and increase productivity.

A lot of Real Estate professionals I’ve worked with spend hours of untracked effort to establish a process because they still see much of what they do as “sales”–Project Management is the key.

The most successful Real Estate professionals are their own Project Managers–and this takes a lot of effort.

If you’re interested in hiring me as your Project Manager or setting up systems and process to increase the productivity of your team–or if you would like to start talking about a systematic approach to managing your transactions–let’s schedule a meeting.