How to Juggle a Growing Real Estate Business and a Growing Family

Balancing your personal life with your growing real estate business is a challenge at the best of times. Add babies to the mix and things become a little — okay, a lot — crazier.

But it can be done. 

Your business doesn’t have to suffer while your family grows. And your family doesn’t have to miss out while you grow your real estate business.

Have little ones at home? Expecting a bundle of joy in the coming weeks? Looking ahead to a child-filled future?

This post is for you. Here are five strategies for successfully juggling a growing real estate business and a growing family.

1. Enforce Working Hours

Real estate agents don’t exactly keep regular hours (hello, late nights and weekends). But if you want to ensure you’re not missing precious time with your young family, you’re going to need to create a semblance of a normal schedule.

This doesn’t mean refusing to meet clients after 5 p.m. or avoiding Sunday open houses. It just means you can’t be willing to meet clients after 5 p.m. on any day of the week or committing to open houses for four straight Sundays.

First, decide on your availability. Maybe it’s 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This creates some room for late meetings while also protecting your personal time.

If you need to switch this around some weeks, that’s okay; just don’t let your working time cut into your time at home.

Then, let everyone know. When you’ve finalized your working hours, communicate them to those who need to know, such as your team, your brokerage and your current clients. It’s the best and most respectful way for real estate agents to create boundaries.

2. Get Assistance

With a young or growing family at home demanding your attention, there’s a good chance that your real estate business will develop a weak spot or two.

Maybe it’s your rate of reply to leads. Maybe it’s your social media activity.

It doesn’t have to take a toll on the health of your real estate business, so long as you “plug the holes.”

This could mean hiring a social media assistant to spend a few hours each week creating and scheduling content for your social media platforms, and engaging with your followers.

Or using a real estate chatbot to respond to inquiries from potential clients and capture their information for you to follow up on.

Or even subscribing to a meal delivery service so you can spend less time preparing food for your family and more time enjoying it with them.

3. Use Your Family As Your Motivation

This strategy is a mental one.

Instead of looking at your family as the source of your stress and an obstacle to your business success, think of them as the motivation and momentum.

Motivation. What drove you to work hard in your real estate business before you had kids? Money? Status? Picture the health and comfort of your family as the carrot you’re running towards now.

Momentum. Raising young kids means no sleep and a lot of work; parents often run on pure adrenaline to get it all done. Bring that adrenaline to work and let it fuel your day.

4. (Radically) Rearrange Your Schedule

Parents and real estate agents have something in common: their time is not entirely their own. Someone else is usually demanding it.

But even with family and business demands challenging your balancing act, you still need to make time for you. It’s key to avoiding realtor burnout.

How do you make time for you amidst crying babies and difficult clients?

You squeeze it in.

Get up at 5 a.m. instead of six so you can do an hour of YouTube yoga before feeding your baby and getting ready for work.

Schedule therapy or a massage or a haircut over your lunch hour.

When you have to work late, take a couple hours off in the afternoon to do errands or take a nap.

5. Redesign Your Business Priorities

Life changes when kids come along. As an entrepreneur, your personal life and business life are hard to separate; it only makes sense that a growing family changes your real estate business, too.

What was important pre-kids might not be the most important — or feasible — post-kids.

For example, maybe you were focused on trying to break into the luxury real estate market before. You might not have the same amount of time, energy and flexibility to focus on that same goal now.

If that’s the case, it’s time to redesign your business priorities to keep your real estate business moving in the right direction while also being realistic about what you can feasibly handle.

For the time being, those priorities might be building your real estate referral network, or enhancing your personal real estate website.

Let us know in a comment: how do you maintain business momentum when your personal life is demanding more of your time?