Being in the real estate business can be a tough challenge for new entrants and established businesses alike. To keep up or even get ahead of competitors, you may need to make some changes and apply strategies to boost efficiency across all levels of your organisation. This article will give you an overview of what these strategies are and how they can help you keep up with a rapidly growing market.
Use Tools for Streamlining Workload
A real estate agency’s workday can be quite hectic. Each day, your staff may need to source and coordinate with buyers and sellers, create listings, handle staging activities, follow up on leads, and perform many other tasks including legwork and various administrative activities. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the ins and outs of the business. Fortunately, if you have the right tools, you and your staff can better manage each task and focus more on meeting client demands.
To optimise your workload, you can implement tools such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system designed to keep everything organised: your contacts, appointments, contracts, email templates, and even onboarding documents for new team members. Other than that, it may help to use a team chat app to make internal communications smoother and more streamlined. A consolidated chat app centralises team communications and eliminates the need for lengthy email threads, which also decreases the risk of misplacing important files and data. You can also use this app to coordinate team schedules and route planning, which are both important parts of any real estate agent’s job.
Instil a Culture of Proactivity in Your Company
If you’re in real estate, it’s important to be anything but passive. Landing those sales isn’t achieved by simply sitting around waiting for clients to come to you, after all. Additionally, potential leads can change their minds about doing business with you or can potentially be wooed by a competitor, so you need to regularly follow up on as many of your leads as possible.
So, in addition to using a CRM system to make lead management easier, encourage your team to be proactive when it comes to everything they do at the company. For one, proactively sending emails that showcase your expertise in real estate and the local area can keep you at the top of your prospective clients’ minds. When creating these emails, advise employees to include a call to action (CTA) that invites viewers to contact your business, visit your website, or check out a deal your business is offering.
Create a Comprehensive Marketing Plan
While promoting your business may seem as simple as typing up whatever comes to mind, effective marketing is so much more than that. And with how busy things can get in a real estate company, winging it when it comes to marketing your business is a recipe for disaster.
Rather than thinking of it as a side task, consider creating a marketing plan as one of the core aspects of running a real estate business. Essentially, your marketing plan must revolve around what makes your services different from or better than your competitors. By really thinking about your marketing’s core messages, you’ll increase your chances of actually attracting the right clients and maximizing your ad spend. Additionally, by giving your team or an outsourced ad company enough time to plan ahead and properly prepare your ads, you can keep your marketing running consistently rather than having ads go live intermittently—or even end up with no ads to run at all.
Automate Your Social Media and Digital Advertising Tasks
With its infinite potential for brand-building, the internet is a highly useful tool for connecting with customers, showcasing listings, and automating the process of buying and selling properties. Most likely, your prospective clients are already shopping around on the internet for real estate services. The best you can do is to increase your web presence and establish yourself as a credible business in a sea of competitors.
To help improve customer engagement, make it a habit to consistently post high-quality content such as tips for finding a dream home or some quick guidelines on the buying or selling process. The best part is that you don’t necessarily need to have someone manually publish these posts at specific times. Instead, you can use social media automation tools to draft and schedule posts in advance.
That said, it’s a good idea to hire someone skilled at using such tools, in case you don’t already have someone. Fortunately, there are plenty of social media managers or virtual assistants out there who should be able to get the job done for your real estate business.
Gather Data from and Seek Potential Leads During Events
While you can certainly gather data using online marketing tools, there’s still something to be said about actually having conversations with your leads and clients in person. Consider asking some of your staff to attend festivals, conventions, and community events to get a clear idea of the area and locality for each of your properties.
There, you can strike up conversations with attendees to find out what they’re looking for not only in a property, but also in a real estate company. What are their pain points? What do they wish more real estate companies would offer? This should give you plenty of information to work with regarding how you could improve your business’s operations and services.
With the global real estate market poised to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.8 per cent, your business must be able to meet the demands of a highly competitive industry. While real estate work is not always smooth-sailing, as long as you have the right tools and an enterprising mindset, you can strategise your way to success and explore different ways to deliver value to your clients more efficiently and effectively.