Real estate agents are on the run. Nearly half the real estate workers in the US end up working more than 40 hours a week. Also, a whopping 53% of those surveyed mentioned that they are working longer every day than they were a year back.
From day one, they have to transform into masters of multitasking and have a razor-sharp eye on metrics in order to hit their win rates for the month. In addition to managing customer databases, they also have to draft emails, design campaigns, speak to new leads and the list goes on.
A Day in the Life of a Real Estate Agent
Here are some of these tasks that a real estate agent encounters on a daily basis:
1. Generate leads and manage relationships: There is no defined target audience in the real estate industry. A client needs to buy or sell a house for different reasons like moving to a new city, buying a property as an investment, selling off property to make a huge profit due to high demand, etc. For real estate brokers, this can be a double-edged sword.. On one side, they can generate a lot of leads because the demand is usually high. On the other hand, they have to manage and engage with hundreds of leads on a constant basis. Since the buying behavior is quite unpredictable, the real estate agent has to be on their toes all the time to identify and convert leads.
2. Keep up with the real estate trends: The real estate agent is supposed to be apprised of the current trends that affect the market. Rise of mortgage rates, rise of home ownership by millennial, growth of Tier II & Tier III cities and renting vs housing ratio in any given month are some of the trends that have a high impact on the real estate market. Tracking these trends and their respective impacts on the market comes as a part of their job description by default. Following such trends needs constant monitoring and hence consumes a lot of time. Real estate agents can read such trends on Forbes Real Estate Council, Opendoor’s guides and blogs, Zillow Porchlight, Housing Wire and the like.
3. Perform mundane tasks and hover between tools: On any given day, a real estate agent is juggling 3-4 tools to manage daily administrative tasks. Consider a housing real estate agent. The agent starts the day by going through a database and manually adding leads to the real estate CRM software. Then the agent starts contacting prospects from the CRM software to schedule house visits and manually sends out a promotional email with price-drop to existing leads Suddenly, the agent gets a task notification to send as ales contract to a prospect. Then the agent has to open a transaction management software, create the contract, downloads it and heads back to the CRM to send the email before heading out for house visits.
4. Communicate with Colleagues: Real estate agents spend most of their working hours on the field. Usually, one agent is in the office performing administrative tasks and a colleague is out there in the field, chasing leads,attending open houses and distributing property collateral. It becomes difficult to communicate. Every time a new lead enters the CRM, one agent has to reach out to the agent on the field and let them know all the details relating to the lead. explaining all the details to the field agent can be very difficult since they are almost always on the move. Without a proper channel of continuous communication, you might be losing business.
5. Engage with clients: This is a common problem for all real estate agents. They are never sure of the ‘right time’ to contact a lead. A day after the house visit is too early whereas 3 days later might be too late – competition has already walked in. The mode of communication is also debatable. Dropping a text may be perceived as informal for some leads whereas a LinkedIn message might be better suited for other clients. All these depend on how engaged a lead is, and that can be quite difficult to determine and hence this problem.
For real estate agents, the ultimate goal is to educate leads about the property and take an interest in the property. This requires them to be extremely productive, manage multiple tasks simultaneously and be a master of time.
However, with the above challenges at play, it severely hurts the productivity of the agent which in turn affects the monthly/quarterly/yearly targets.
With 2020 expected to be the peak year for millennial home buying, agents have to be more productive than ever before, spending most of their time selling than on administrative tasks that eat away their time. In order for real estate agents to take on these challenges and make the best use of their time, CRM software for real estate has evolved to meet the specific requirements of the real-estate industry..
Here’s a fun fact: Real estate agents earning $100,000 or more in gross commission income are more than twice as likely to use advanced technology tools like a customer relationship management tool (CRM) than agents who earn less.
How a CRM Software for Real Estate Can Improve Productivity
A CRM software for real-estate can enable agents to work smarter every day. It helps in,
1. Keeping Track of Prospects: Your prospect can come from anywhere. It can be through the website, LinkedIn page or a web form. It’s difficult to keep track. A CRM software for real estate can easily help with this. The CRM has the ability to capture the clients’ information automatically no matter where it comes from. It also tracks your client’s activities on your website and share valuable insights which gives your agents the much-needed context for their initial correspondence.
2. Knowing What to Say When: If the agent sends an email without having context on the prospect’s buying journey, you might lose the deal. But with access to data, you’re in the safe zone. On a real estate CRM, a single panel can show you all the communication your agents have had with your prospect. Other than that, you would be armed with metrics like email open rate, email reply rate, response analysis and whether the prospect has clicked on the link or downloaded an attachment. Besides that, you also have a visual map of how they are visiting and interacting on your website. With all this information at your disposal, real estate agents, agents will now be able to craft meaningful message and send it across at the right time via the right medium.
3. Predicting Close Rates: You would obviously put thrice the effort if you knew that the deal is just a step away to conversion. That’s exactly what a CRM software for real estate tells you. Within an intuitive CRM solution, you can see the number of deals created, your targets, and how many more deals you need to convert to achieve the same. Additionally, it tells you which deals are warm, hot or have gone cold which allows you to tune your efforts appropriately.
4. Reduce Manual & Repetitive Tasks: Let’s face it. Real estate agents end up doing a lot of repetitive tasks which steal a good amount of time from their work hours. Automation can take a good chunk of tasks off their list. With a specialized CRM software for real estate industry, they can easily automate tasks like mailing buyer contacts, sending property brochures and following up on payments. By doing this, they can actually focus on converting prospects into customers instead of getting caught in the web of administrative tasks.
5. Always be Connected On-the-go: A real estate agent is always on the run, either attending customer calls, or meeting a loan officer or signing the deal with a customer. A real estate agent never stops. It’s difficult to access client or deal information on the go. A CRM software for real estate comes with iOS and Android apps which are equipped to instantly access any kind of information. The agent can seamlessly make calls, send emails, schedule calendar invites and even record and send voice messages to customers or their teammates. When an agent updates information in the app, the web application is also instantly updated. The CRM application can also be integrated along with customer support software, invoicing tools, marketing automation software and more seamlessly.
While most real estate agents may be tech-averse, it is only a matter of time before they realize the benefits of implementing a productivity-enhancing tool like a real estate CRM software that will improve their win rates by leaps and bounds.
