Most agents think surviving two weeks away from the business is the hard part. It’s not. Anyone can MacGyver an out-of-office reply and a favor from a colleague. The real, mostly unspoken problem is that almost none of us have built a business that could survive two months away — and that gap is driving a lot of the burnout and attrition this industry doesn’t like to talk about.
I found mine the hard way.
I have strict rules around notifications. DND on my phone. All the boundary-setting advice you’ve read, I’ve done. And I was still burnt out — resistant to picking up the phone, dreading my own inbox, flinching every time my phone buzzed because what if it’s the deal falling apart?
I’d been “on” for so long — showings, offers, client texts at 9 p.m., more client texts at 6 a.m. — that my nervous system had decided it had had enough. A bubble bath wasn’t going to fix it.
Here’s the myth I bought into the hardest of anyone: If you stop, it all falls apart. Your pipeline dries up. Clients forget you exist.
But is that really true? If you had systems that kept going while you were gone, backup agents to help out, and your clients felt solid and taken care of, then what’s the worry?
Meanwhile, the actual catastrophe, the one nobody warns new agents about, is what happens to you after years of never fully stopping. I didn’t build a business. I built a hostage situation, and I was both the hostage and the guard.
That’s the part our industry skips over. We treat availability as a proxy for competence: the agent who answers at 11 p.m. must be the committed one, the reachable one, the one who deserves the referral. So we make ourselves permanently reachable, and we call it work ethic. It isn’t. It’s a business with a single point of failure, and the point of failure is us.
Two weeks off is a scheduling problem. You line up a backup, write a good out-of-office and grit your way through. Two months off is a different animal entirely; it’s a systems and trust problem.
- It means clients have a real relationship with more than just you.
- It means your pipeline doesn’t stall because you’re not the only person who can move it forward.
- It means you’ve actually built the coverage, the communication and the compensation structure for a colleague to step in and do more than just hold the phone, well before you ever need them to.
Most of us haven’t built that. I hadn’t, for most of my career. I’m rebuilding mine now, deliberately, and figuring out what real coverage looks like, what backup agents actually need to succeed while I’m gone and how to be honest with high-touch clients who may not love the idea of someone else on the ground.
Some of them won’t. That’s a real cost, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
Here’s the truth I landed on, after way too long: Rest isn’t the reward for a successful real estate career. It’s the infrastructure for one. The agents who last 15, 20 years in this business aren’t the ones who never stopped moving. They’re the ones who figured out how to build something that didn’t require them to be available every single hour to survive.
I’m not telling you to book a two-month sabbatical tomorrow. I’m asking a smaller question: What if that wasn’t even a real option for you right now? What would need to be true about your business, your systems, your team, your client relationships, for two months away to be survivable instead of unthinkable?
6 steps to building a real estate business that doesn’t need you 24/7
Here are my six tips for taking two months off and avoiding burnout.
1. Systems and processes
Develop them now. Utilize your schedule-send features, auto-responders and other technology to help you take time off. Think about what will break if you are not around. Start documenting your processes. Create a system for who and how incoming leads are handled along with your current book of business.
2. Build your runway before you go
This takes some planning upfront. Identify your backup agents. Talk to your manager or broker to see if there are agents who are hungry for business and wouldn’t mind opening doors (and getting paid for doing so). Find agents who have a similar work style to you.
3. Be OK with the fact that you may lose clients
Don’t negotiate on the time you committed to taking off. Know that you will lose some business. Come to terms with that ahead of time so you aren’t scrambling trying to do “just one more thing.”
4. Tell clients the truth before you need to
The No. 1 priority and duty is to our clients. If you know you are going to be gone, tell them. And then tell them how they will be taken care of while you are out-of-pocket. Who’s the backup? Where are their files stored? Create an email intro to the backup agent.
5. Work out compensation ahead of time
How will you compensate your backup agents? Are you going to pay them a flat fee or a percentage of your commission? What about work they do that doesn’t end up closing? Work out a few of these scenarios ahead of time before you head out of town, and make sure the compensation feels fair to you both.
6. Practice the short version before the long one
Don’t attempt a two-month sabbatical cold. Practice with a full week off first, and see what breaks. That will give you good information for how to tweak your systems.
You can do this. Our industry can do this, and we can start to normalize what it means to take time to tend to and care for ourselves and our community.
Sumina Bhatti is the team lead for the Good Deeds Group at Compass. Get connected on Instagram.
