Real estate agents: Make your drive time work for you

Let me ask you something. How much time do you spend in your car each week?

If you’re like most real estate agents, the answer is a lot. Showings, appointments, closings, more appointments — this business keeps you moving. Here’s what I want you to consider: that drive time is either working for you or it’s being wasted. Right now, for most agents, it’s being wasted.

Here’s the math. Even a modest 30 minutes each way adds up to roughly five hours a week. Over a year? We’re talking several full work weeks. Can you imagine knowingly throwing several weeks of your career out the window? Of course not. But that’s exactly what’s happening when you treat your windshield time as nothing more than getting from Point A to Point B.

So, what do you do with it instead?

Feed your mind something that builds you. Load up a training program, an audiobook on negotiation, a coaching session. Put something in your ears that makes you sharper. In this business, nobody is handing you continuing education after you get your license. That gap between the agent who keeps growing and the one who plateaus? A lot of it comes down to self-directed learning. Your car is a rolling classroom. Start treating it like one.

Focus on the positive. I’ve always said, be informed, not infected. There’s a real performance cost to spending your most focused hours absorbing stress that isn’t even yours. Stay aware of what’s happening, absolutely. But don’t let your drive become an hour of other people’s negativity draining the life right out of you.

Use the quiet for actual thinking. Turn everything off and be present with yourself. Think through your pipeline, your clients, where you want to take your business. The car is one of the rare places where nobody can interrupt you — no inbox, no ringing phone. That’s gold.

Dictate while the ideas are hot. When a great thought hits you, grab your phone and talk it out. Have a client email you’ve been putting off? A campaign idea bouncing around in your head? Dictate it. When you get back to your desk, hand it to an AI and clean it up into a polished draft. You did the hard part — the thinking — in time that would’ve evaporated otherwise.

Make it stick

Here’s the thing about good intentions: they fade without structure. Decide in advance what each type of trip is for. Queue up your training material. Check in with yourself periodically — what did you actually learn this week? What did you capture?

The goal is to turn a passive habit into an active system. Because the time is already being spent either way. The only question is whether it’s working for you.

I’ll leave you with this: two real estate professionals can log the exact same miles every week, serve similar markets, and look identical on paper. But over a few years, one of them emerges sharper, better prepared, and more current — and the other is right where they started. The difference often comes down to what happened inside that car.

The time is already yours. Cash it in.

Darryl Davis, CSP, is a real estate coach, speaker, and bestselling author with more than 40 years in the industry. Through his POWER AGENT® Coaching Program, he helps real estate professionals build careers and lives worth smiling about. Learn more at DarrylSpeaks.com.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

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