For real estate agents, marketing and sales tools are invaluable. Today, agents have amazing technologies to reach homebuyers and enrich their experience. Moreover, these technologies are not a luxury available only to the big brands but tools every agent can afford. How about you: where do you stand when it comes to real estate software?
We couldn’t leave this topic unexploited and decided to trot out a list of all the tech you’d definitely find useful. Here are 6 essential real estate software innovations that stop your marketing and sales from being an unbearable challenge to your team.
Real estate software that instantly gets you up and running
1) A real estate website that sells
As obvious as this may sound, a real estate website is the first technology you should master. That being said, your real estate website must be a live platform that connects you to your customers round the clock, rather than just a place to randomly update your listings.
In fact, a real estate website today has so many functions to serve. Make sure your own website has:
- easy to find info about your services and your contact details;
- links to all social media profiles;
- beautiful, eye-catching and mobile-friendly design;
- unique listing descriptions that vividly picture your properties backed up by stunning photography;
- simple search tools including map search, property alerts, school checkers, calculators, etc.
- informative and interesting content which is strongly focused on the local area and frequently updated;
- easy to find opt-in forms inviting people to join your community by subscribing to your blog or property updates.
If you managed to build and optimize your real estate website properly, the most important step towards a healthy and professional online presence is taken. Next step is to make on-going improvements to it.
2) Mobile apps to engage with your leads easily
By their very nature, real estate agents manage everything on the go. Moreover, their customers do the same. So part of your strategy should be providing your audience with a native real estate app to catch up with them easily and always stay in sight.
A lot of agents think that to connect with mobile users it’s enough to have a mobile website. In part, it’s true. 88 percent of local searches are made via mobile devices. However, when it comes to engagement, it’s native real estate apps that produce the all-important touchpoints like calls, messages, and emails from potential homebuyers. Complete info about everything you have to offer is right at your customers’ fingertips and that is what every real estate agent has always wanted.
We did a big post explaining how exactly a native real estate app works, how it’s different from a mobile website and why it’s crucial you use both so make sure to check it out too.
3) Big data and analytics to get real insights
As a real estate agent, you’d want to be on a fast track to getting real-time info about how your marketing and sales perform.
You also need your entire marketing funnel to be measured quickly, accurately and without much effort on your part. The great news is it all narrows down to just using the right software that provides the data already served up in a format so simple that it’ll take you minutes to analyze.
We’ve observed that too many real estate agents lack the most important marketing data that could help them plan their next move better. Marketing automation does a great job of showing how customers go about looking for properties online. Armed with this knowledge, you can then effectively target your marketing campaigns and close more deals.
4) A real estate CRM to help you stay on top
If there’s one tool which is irreplaceable for every real estate agent, it’s a real estate CRM system. Not using a CRM means losing motivated leads every day, while having it incorporated into your work totally transforms your marketing and sales performance.
Here are just a few great things a good real estate CRM software application provides to make your life as a real estate agent ultimately simpler:
- totally simplifies building personal connections with your customers;
- provides one home for all info about all leads, prospects, and deals;
- automates and personalizes contact management;
- automates your marketing campaigns;
- provides a single dashboard for all documentation and contracts, and loads more.
Still using spreadsheets to keep your customers data organized? It couldn’t be a better time to move on and start using a real estate CRM.
5) Property portal software to gain huge online exposure
Your website is not the only place to promote your properties online. In fact, people are more likely to search property portals for their next homes, rather than use your website (let’s admit that most of the customers won’t know about you yet and your organic rankings may not be that high).
Those real estate portals which are popular and trustworthy are the ones that should go right onto your to-do list. There are a lot of them which makes it hard for you to manage all your listings efficiently. This is where property portal software comes in.
While serving the purpose of helping you strengthen your online exposure, it also ends the tedium of manual submissions, uploading and updating properties that can drive anyone crazy. Another huge benefit is you can manage data from all property portals within one dashboard, and that frees up loads of time for much more important things.
6) Master local search
Real estate is all about the local area. Why should people buy properties in your city or neighborhood? What is so great about living there? For that matter, why should they buy from you?
We did another big post on everything you need to know about local real estate SEO. You might find it helpful too.
Your major concern is to make yourself a local authority, a company local folks know about: what you sell and why you are different from the other real estate companies. 50 per cent of customers say they use their mobile devices to search for local businesses and review them. This means people can decide whether you’re trustworhy or not while standing in the queue to a nearby grocery store.
To make the most of it, make sure your business is listed on Google Maps, Google My Business, Bing Local, Yahoo! Local, etc. This way you can build a solid online presence faster and compete with large property portals. You will also signal to search engines that your business is all about this specific geographic area and that you’re a real influencer here.
What’s next?
That’s quite a few tools to learn, right? Chances are good, however, that you already use some of them. Take a look at this list and ask yourself what else can work just for your agency. Moving forward, part of your strategy should also be making sure all real estate software you’re using plays nicely together and works in sync with your business. This way you’ll not only have a 360-degree view of your business but actually sell more.
Lots of things have changes since the article was written but one thing remains the same – the use of custom Real Estate development services.