Start With Why.

Your brand, your customer avatar, your prospecting methods, everything originates from your business mission.

Figuring out who you are, and who you are not, is an important first step in giving your real estate business a purposeful direction.

Once you have a mission statement, you can then begin building your business, value propositions, and personal brand from those core values.

Mission v Strategy v Value Proposition v Unique Selling Proposition

It’s easy to confuse missions, value propositions, and strategies. But don’t!

It is important that your mission be a short and concise statement that you can memorize. If you have a team, everyone on your team should be able to recite it from memory.

It does no good to have a mission statement saved in a Word document somewhere. If you and your team cannot remember your mission from memory, then you do not have a mission.

• Mission. A single-sentence summary of the reason you exist. Answer this question: What do you do that is better than what anyone else does and why?
  • EXAMPLE: Hood Homes Blog is the most trusted authority on Killeen, TX single-family real estate investing.
• Values. Your values are the principles you want to embody and your clients can come to expect from you in the pursuit of your mission.
  • EXAMPLE: Knowledgeable, Local Expert, and Investor Savvy.
• Strategy. A strategy describes the big picture of how you as a business can meet your mission. It may inform which lead generation strategies you select, and probably is not public-facing.
  • EXAMPLE: Hood Homes Blog creates blog content on all topics Killeen, TX as well as real estate in order to earn trust in local knowledge and expertise. Posts regularly in Bigger Pockets to establish oneself as a local investor expert. Attend local auctions.
• Value Proposition. What value do you provide to customers that serves your strategy? Are you available 24/7? Are you investor-savvy? Are you a local native who knows the history of your area better than anyone? Do you specialize in VA loans? These tie closely to your mission and strategy but are subordinate to both. They should serve your mission and strategy.
  • EXAMPLE: Hood Homes Blog performs commercial grade underwriting on SFR assets for investors.
• Unique Selling Proposition. A USP is specific to a particular offer or service. Free aerial photography for listings over $300,000 might be a USP. Something you provide that disinguishes you from your competition and might push a prospect over the edge to choose to do business with you. USPs should be consistent with your mission, strategy, etc., but are also more flexible and specific to situations.
  • EXAMPLE: Hood Homes Blog offers discounted commissions for repeat customers like investors.

Remember, your mission is not “to make money”.

Yes, real estate is a business, the purpose of which is to be profitable and provide income for yourself and your employees. But you earn income when you trade something of value. Clients hire you and pay you because you are giving them value.

What is the value you are selling? That is how you should think about your mission, and money comes later.

Examples (Written)

Halton Pardee + Partners

• Knowledgeable. We strive to understand our markets and our clients’ needs.
• Connected. Relationships are everything to us; we connect people to their homes and to their communities.
• Passionate. We love what we do. We believe that working with “all heart” can change the world.
• Playful. We never take ourselves too seriously. Real estate can be, dare we say, fun!
• Upstanding. Our clients’ needs and best interests are at the heart of everything we do.
• Effective. We set a high bar and move mountains to exceed expectations.

We work as a team.

Our concierge brokerage model made up of specialized departments provides our clients with an unparalleled experience in buying, selling, or leasing a home.

DeLeon Team

DeLeon Realty values teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration as a path to insight and excellence in our work. Our company’s team of committed professionals embrace the following core values:

• Quality: We deliver only excellence and aim to exceed expectations in everything we do.
• Integrity: We conduct ourselves in the highest ethical standards, demonstrating honesty and fairness in every decision and action.
• Agility: We execute expeditiously to address our clients’ needs.
• Courage: We make decisions and act in the best interests of our clients, even in the face of personal or professional adversity.
• Respect and Trust: We treat our clients and each other with dignity and respect at all times.
• Fun: We believe in having fun at work and with each other.

Ben Kinney Companies

The Ben Kinney Team strives to perfect the systems and strategies that get more homes sold for the most amount of money in the least amount of time.

We tap into our team’s unparalleled knowledge of the local real estate market, real estate tech tools, and aggressive marketing and search engine strategies to help sellers achieve the best possible success in pricing, showing and marketing their properties.

What Sets Us Apart

At Ben Kinney Companies, we have a defining culture of doing much more than just selling real estate. As a Keller Willams affiliated organization, we share the KW culture of serving each other, our communities and our planet. Our mission, vision, values and culture differentiate us as industry innovators and leaders.

MISSION

Delivering the dream of home ownership everywhere.
All branches of the Ben Kinney Companies have this same goal, because owning real estate provides security, safety and opportunity for individuals. The technology we build helps real estate agents become more efficient at their job and find more customers to deliver on that mission. Our training prepares agents to be even better by utilizing exceptional techniques and systems, and the Ben Kinney Teams constantly help families find and sell homes.

VISION

Win, Make, Give, and Do Good.

We want to win at what we do, and we do all we can to help our customers, agents and employees build wealth. We love to work with people who are passionate about working hard and also giving back to their communities in a big way.

VALUES

H.E.A.L.T.H.

Our values are what everyone who works at Ben Kinney Companies strives for each day, and they are applicable to any companies we work with. These values are also the metric we use to decide to invest or get in business with others. We believe our team’s success is determined by our ability to maintain our HEALTH, which is defined by our core values:

• Hard work
• Extraordinary results
• Accountable in all things
• Leaders only
• Teamwork
• Humble

The Loken Group

Mission Statement

Our mission is to inspire a positive, lasting impact.

TLG VALUES

• HUMBLE. We never forget that we owe everything to the efforts of each team member, our families, and our clients.
• GRIT. We persevere in our efforts no matter the obstacle with a high sense of urgency and always keeping our team and clients top of mind.
• INTEGRITY. We promise to always do the right thing for our team, our business, and our clients, resulting in mutual success.
• SERVANT LEADERSHIP. We are passionate about giving back in the communities we serve.
• ACCOUNTABLE. We operate with a high level of accountability, taking full ownership in delivering on our commitment to excellence.
• INNOVATIVE. We pursue excellence by pushing each other to be better every day and seeing possibility instead of limitation.
• SOLUTION-BASED. We are resourceful, always seeking to discover a solution and providing options for any concerns that arise.

Chantel Ray Real Estate

Mission Statement

To glorify God by putting our clients’ interests above our own.

Vision Statement

To change the lives of the communities we serve through abundant giving.

Our Core Values

1. Think win/win
2. Be a go getter
3. Follow up and follow through
4. Address issues head on
5. Do the right thing
6. Let your yes be yes and your no be no
7. Drive the bus, land the plane

Jeff Cook

We hold all of our team members accountable to embrace the following core values:

• CRUSH IT: We are committed to excellence and embrace change
• COMMUNICATION: We seek to understand and communicate clearly
• RESPECT: We respect the thoughts and time of those around us
• INTEGRITY: We always choose to do the right thing and operate professionally
• LEADERSHIP: We seek to edify, motivate and inspire others
• HUMBLE: We are grateful and check our ego’s at the door
• OWN IT: We are accountable and are accountable for our actions
• WELL BALANCED: With our commitments and our temperaments
• PROACTIVE: We innovate and constantly improve
• UNITY: We have fun, encourage and celebrate the journey TOGETHER!

VISION

To redefine the method in which real estate is sold.

MISSION

To empower our team to deliver the best service and to empower our clients to reach their real estate goals.

The BREL Team

We think that you should expect more from your real estate experience.

• More services and inclusions
• More experience and expertise
• More marketing power and exposure
• More expert guidance and truth

As a team, we’ve pooled our talents and resources and invested in specialized in-house experts focused on staging, marketing and administration. Which means our agents are left to….service our clients.

How does that benefit the Buyers and Sellers who work with BREL?

• More time
• More attention
• More competent agents
• More communication

Our agents sell homes. They build relationships. They problem-solve. They negotiate. They go into scary basements. They discover neighbourhoods. They obsess over prices, market values and the newest, hottest listings. They make sure our clients don’t buy the wrong home. Meanwhile, the rest of the BREL team does what they do best: Next-level staging. Killer photography. Powerful marketing. Rock-solid paperwork. Concierge services for our clients.

It’s Win/Win. And it’s all included in our commission: Solid Experience. Real Results. Full Transparency. Communication Guaranteed.

We Believe In:

• Embracing fresh ideas and bold thinking
• Being real and transparent
• Being responsive and available
• Obsessing about the details
• Doing the right thing for the long term
• Doing what we love and outsourcing everything else
• Being ourselves

Ryan Smith Home Selling Team

OUR CORE VALUES

As our team has grown, it’s become more and more important to identify and outline the core values that guide everything we do. Our core values develop and define our culture, our brand, our business strategies and who we are as professionals in today’s corporate world. It is our goal to consistently live these core values out in our lives on a daily basis and we encourage both our teammates and our clients to hold us accountable to these values.

• Innovate and lead
• Embrace accountability
• Focus on solutions
• Build relationships and have fun
• Be great and never settle

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

In addition to our core values, our mission statement more clearly defines our true purpose as an organization and further enhances our team culture. We are unified in consistently living out our core values and performing our professions in direct alignment with our mission statement.

We are dedicated to providing world-class service and market-leading expertise to our clients. We are passionate about providing the extra value that others simply will not. Fanatical integrity and consistently impressive results will be the signature of our service. Our collaborative spirit and desire to grow will help us achieve the goals we set. We will make the families we serve feel special, creating raving fans, and help them truly win. We will succeed because we will not let our clients fail.

Examples (Video)

McKinnies Realty

Realty Austin

Movementum Realty

Stovall Realtors

Real Estate Heaven

Compass

Next Steps to a Great Mission

Good mission statements are one of the most important elements of good leadership.

The Army knows this. The entire world of military tactics and operations revolves around “Mission Command” and the 5 paragraph operations order (OPORD). The most important element in an OPORD is paragraph 2: The Mission.

Your business needs to start with the why. Start with the mission.

Conclusion

A mission is much more than a feel-good kumbaya slogan to paint on your office wall.

Hopefully, these are some useful starting points to build your company mission and setting goals for your real estate business!

Updated March 18, 2024; Originally published September 27, 2018.