As we roll into the end of the year, the thing I hope is on the horizon for you is a proper break. Some time away over Christmas and the New Year with your family, and the same for your salespeople and your property managers. After a challenging year, no doubt everyone has earned it.

If you are anything like me, though, you do not just fall into a good holiday. You plan it. If you are flying somewhere, you are already thinking about what time you need to be at the airport, what you are taking, and what you want to be doing once you get there. You lay a bit of a plan out so you get the most out of the time away. Well, I certainly do.

That got me thinking about planning of a different kind, and it is the question I want to put to you as the year winds down. What planning are you looking to put in place for 2027, with your team and with your business?

At Smartre Training, we cover many elements of a real estate business, and in Essential Element Five, which we call Team, one of the key behaviours of a successful business we talk about is planning.

Planning the outcomes and the strategies you want for the year ahead, whether you run to a calendar year or a financial year. Given the time of year, it felt like the right moment to ask what your plans are for your planning.

Our suggestion: put an annual planning meeting in the diary sometime in December.

The meeting itself does not need to be complicated. Start by getting your entire sales team together with you for half a day. Sit down as a group and work through what you want to be doing as a business next year, the results you want to achieve, the campaigns you want to run, where you want to focus your prospecting and your marketing.

Look backwards, although a challenging year – there have to be wins from 2026 that you can focus on. What are some of the strategies you want to carry forward into next year?

Then do exactly the same with your property management team. Give them their own half-day session, and talk through the processes you can refine and where you want to focus your growth in new properties coming onto the portfolio. There is a good discussion to be had there with the whole team.

Then bring everyone together, your salespeople, your property managers and your support team, and look at the business as a whole. This is where you talk about the things that sit across all of it. What you want your culture to look like next year.

The events you want to run together as a business, so you can keep building and strengthening the culture you have been working to create.

An annual planning meeting is a great opportunity for a business to step back and think properly about the year ahead. But do not stop at the meeting. Over December and into early January, take the ideas that came out of it and turn them into your 2027 Business Plan.

Towards the end of January, hand that plan to your salespeople, your property managers and your administrators and tell them, this is the plan we have put together as a team. You already have buy-in from everyone, because they helped build it. From there, it is a matter of going out and executing.

After that, every month or two, sit down and have a shorter planning meeting to see how you are tracking against the targets you set. The efficiencies you wanted to bring in, how your processes are changing, the targets you set for the March quarter and the June quarter and how you are going against them.

That rhythm lets you course-correct along the way, rather than getting to the end of the year wondering what happened. Planning at this time of year, with your key team members, is one of the best ways to set your targets for 2027 and get real buy-in from the people who have to deliver them.

Planning is just one of the many things we work on at Smartre Training. You’ve already had the overview in our webinar, How to plan for success in 2027. The Smartre Management Seminar is where you build it: five days working through all six Essential Elements with your own numbers, so you leave with your 2027 plan built, not a page of notes to build it from. If you’d like to talk it through first, book a time with our team to see if it’s the right fit for your business: book a consult. Or if you’re ready to make 2027 the year you plan properly, take the leap and secure your seat: register here.

If you’re a regular reader of our newsletter, thanks for joining us throughout 2026. Have a great end to the year, and we look forward to seeing you in 2027.

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