Home Featured Articles 10 Reasons to use Estate Agent Software to Power Your Sales &...

10 Reasons to use Estate Agent Software to Power Your Sales & Marketing Ventures

October 18, 2016

Estate agent software is one of the sales and marketing essentials that help agents thrive even at times when the market is low and prospective home buyers are hard to reach. Indeed, it carries some great opportunities for agents to benefit from. So the big question is whether you’ve already discovered these opportunities, or are your clients still slipping through the cracks while you’re struggling with your sales.

Whether it’s about managing day-to-day operations or following up with leads, real estate technology empowers agents to grow their sphere of influence in a simple and cost-effective way. In case you’re still doubting if estate agent software is an option for you, here are a few big reasons that might urge you to reconsider.

Estate agent software is an effective sales & marketing tool – here’s why

1) House your business data in one central place

If you noticed that your real estate business is mostly run on scattered pieces of paper and unorganized spreadsheets, it’s about time to start treating your business data with more attention. This information is a valuable long-term asset which can help you with future sales in so many ways.

Well-managed estate agent software, or CRM software, serves as one central repository for all of your business information including your:

contacts;
properties;
transactions;.
projects;
tasks;
emails and conversations;
business reporting.

Update your sales information regularly so it stays fresh and clean up your database to keep it relevant. You’ll quickly discover how much easier it is to run a business when everything is stored in one place.

2) Keep your past data and use it to improve your marketing tactics

Predictive analytics might give estate agents a glimpse of what to expect of the market for a few months ahead, but they do fail to help you capitalize on first-hand knowledge and experience you already have. In fact, your real estate success hinges on how you’re collecting and extracting insights from your past sales data, not the forecasts.

Obviously, you’re going to need a more sophisticated system than spreadsheets to manage that data and speed up your sales cycle without having to cut down time on follow ups, listing appointments and prospecting.

Meanwhile, estate agent software stores records of all touchpoints with your leads, customers, past clients and lost opportunities. Moreover, you can then dig down to the core of these relationships to understand where you fell short and what can be done differently. Use these insights to improve your sales and marketing plans and deliver better customer service to start doing more business.

3) Organize your sales team efficiently

Estate agents have enough on their plates every day. From legal questions, marketing and on-going costs to sales tactics, taxes and performance overview, agents are left with more work to do each day than they can handle.

A great thing about estate agent software is it helps you build a sales team and hold every agent accountable without interrupting their work. Now you don’t have to be the only one responsible for generating leads. Give your agents access to the software and entrust them to find and nurture new leads on their own.

4) Track which marketing channels deliver the highest ROI

Once you start working in real estate, you’ll be quick to discover that leads come from various sources, for example online leads may come from Facebook, portals you advertise on or your website, or they may find you through print ads you’re likely to distribute in your area.

Of course, some channels perform better than others so it makes every sense to centre most of your marketing efforts exactly on these ones. However, without a good system to track performance of your marketing channels, there will be no way of knowing what works best.

On the contrary, estate agent software documents your costs and gains. You can now know for sure not only the lead source for every contact in your database but the effectiveness of every marketing channel you use. After that, it’s simple – invest more in the mediums that work best for you.

5) Uncover the challenges your prospects have and offer the best fix

There are so many factors influencing your clients; they might switch to another other agent anytime, even after bearing with you for so long. So not only is an excellent customer service important, you’ll need to have a great attention to detail too. In other words, you need to find out exactly what keeps your clients awake at night and offer the best property advice they’ll be impressed with.

While it sounds like it’s easier said than done, you can pinpoint these challenges quite easily. Carefully store all lead intelligence you collected in your CRM. Is this client only interested in fractional ownership? How many counter offers have you discussed before validating the perfect one? What specific requirements do clients have?

When you can suggest solutions to the problems that really worry your clients, they become interested in meeting you and hearing what more you have to say. Instead of selling off properties they don’t want, you can offer them answers to their most worrying questions. That is a strong enough reason for people to become your customers.

6) Automate and finetune follow ups

Follow ups are a core activity for any estate agent but following up a growing contact database is challenging when there’s so much work to do every day. And it’s crazy to expect your agents to remember about each next touchpoint with a big contact database, if it’s not documented somewhere.

Here are just a few great marketing automation things estate agent software does for you:

lets you integrate and schedule emails;
syncs your CRM account and inbox for timely conversations with clients;
lets you create a library of personalized templates;
sends out your email and SMS marketing campaigns and track results;
lets you setup drip marketing campaigns and more.

Add to this a real estate blog featuring some great information and aimed at your target audience, and you’ll have a sophisticated framework of follow up tools. You can now reach a whole pool of online audiences which would otherwise be lost.

7) Integrate your property website with your estate agent software

Have you ever wanted to run your website or network of websites from within one tool and stop switching between different platforms and logins? Or publish your properties onto your website with just a few clicks right from your property database? That’s what an advanced estate agent software like AgentDrive does for you.

Now you can:

run your website (or network of sites) via one central platform;
reward your top-performing agents or branches with their own websites run via your system (a tree-like structure will make it easy to set this up);
publish your properties onto your website in a few clicks right from your property database;
build unlimited XML feeds to submit your listings to world’s largest and most popular property portals and win powerful exposure for your properties.

As you can imagine, having a single platform that encompasses your entire business is such a relief. It makes it essentially easier to run and grow your business in a digital landscape. Not only can you can keep your sales cycle continuous and on-point, you can also do this at a fraction of the traditional marketing expense.

8) Eliminate manual tasks and save time

Top-performing estate agents love real estate CRMs because they’re irreplaceable when trying to:

schedule and automate follow ups;
keep all documentation on contacts, properties, customer requirements, transactions and correspondence in one place;
assign tasks to team members and get a calendar view of the work ahead;
easily share access to client records with the rest of the team;
setup automatic alerts and reminders;
automate recurring tasks.

In other words, you and your team can stay on top of things without overwhelming themselves with boring, time-consuming work nobody likes.

9) Stay in touch with past clients and get more referrals

You know all too well that past clients are your most generous source of positive word of mouth and referrals. However, research shows that estate agents aren’t quick on making the most of this channel.

In particular, a survey showed that 88 percent of respondents would gladly recommend their agent to others and would like to work with that agent again but only 12 percent actually did. So why this huge gap if people are willing to spread the word about you?

It turns out that plenty of estate agents just don’t bother asking for referrals. While they might have a big database of past clients, they don’t use it to generate more business. Meanwhile, the easiest way to get a referral is to just ask for it (provided your service to the client was excellent, of course).

Head over to your CRM, craft some great emails to your past clients, save them in your library of templates and remember to get in touch when appropriate (e.g., birthdays, wedding or moving anniversaries). Make sure to keep concise records in your CRM and use that information to stay connected with past clients in a nice, meaningful way.

10) Automatically generate insightful reporting

Estate agent software dashboards give you intelligent insights into your marketing and sales and let you customize this reporting to reflect on any of your activities. For example, a good CRM:

automatically generates reporting on all of your contacts, properties, customer requirements and transactions;
automatically calculates your sales pipeline progress so you can see how qualified your database is;
generates franchise reporting regardless of how many offices and locations you manage;
provides an easy way to get timely feedback – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.
tracks everything – properties added, proposals sent and printed, emails received, documents changed etc.

Stop overwhelming your team with end of the month reports. Generate whatever reporting you need automatically, analyze and compare it anytime to make better decisions.

What’s next?

There you go – 10 good reasons to start using estate agent software and land your business onto the top positions it rightfully deserves. You can now make your agents more productive, help them sell more and get more customer referrals. Flag opportunities that might otherwise be left unnoticed – and do that easier and smarter than ever before.