If there’s anything the last few years of living through a pandemic (among other events) has taught us, it’s this: Real estate is resilient. While it comes with its complications and challenges for brokers, agents, and consumers alike, it has persevered.
Think about your own goals or pain points, and how they have changed in the last three or four years, or even before that. Do you resonate with one or more of these challenges?
- Building trust with buyers and sellers and understanding their needs and fears in uncertain times
- Finding new buyers and sellers in a market with dwindling inventory
- Trying to grow a solid client base with referral marketing
The list goes on. And the fact is—your agents are right there with you. Fortunately, there are straightforward ways you can help your agents face these challenges head on, all while instilling confidence in their clients, too.
Challenge #1: Building trust with wary buyers and sellers
Whether someone is new to the real estate process, or a second- or third-time seller or buyer—it’s not a simple or light decision to make. It’s not just the money, but also the very personal nature of finding a new place to call home, or selling a home filled with decades of memories. If there’s lack of trust or uncertainty on a client’s side, that makes everything else even more difficult.
Help your agents:
Nurture new relationships simply and quickly
Agents are busy, and so are their prospective buyers and sellers. With the help of a good customer relationship marketing (CRM) tool, not only can agents organize and manage all interactions and communication with their prospective and current buyers and sellers—they also have the marketing tools to find new qualified leads online and on the go, too.
With a CRM tool in play, your agents have access to resources like easy-to-use website builders, the ability to launch drip and text campaigns to connect with promising prospects, the means to create eye-catching marketing collateral, and a plethora of other features that really brings them to where their buyers and sellers are.
Tip: Look for a CRM that automates key functions to run in the background while your agents focus on other areas of running their business. Automated texts, emails, and other touches with their clients are still very personalized and authentic.
Be the community expert
It takes time and experience to truly become an expert in any industry, and real estate is no exception. On top of candidness, honesty, and friendliness from their agent, buyers and sellers seek agents who really know their stuff. What better way to offer that than proof in the numbers?
We’re talking data and insights agents can use to give their clients that extra nudge of confidence. Knowing how to tap into the data and turn it into valuable insights—so that they can strategize and help their clients make smart decisions—takes time and effort.
Tip: With Agent Metrics in BrokerMetrics, you can help empower your agents by giving them access to pricing data, supply and demand information, and listing and sales activity.
That way, agents can help their clients make the best possible decisions around buying or selling. From handling multiple offer situations, how to win a listing, or showing their buyers they know the market in and out, this is a big piece to help them win over new clients and even boost their sales.
Challenge #2: Finding new buyers and sellers in a dwindling market
Buyers and sellers rely on agents to take the leads. Many buyers and sellers out there aren’t sure where to start the process, but you can’t always count on them to take the first step in reaching out to find out how to get started. That’s why it’s up to brokers and agents to proactively take that step and find those buyers and sellers who are looking for guidance. And lead generation software isn’t the only way to find new buyer or seller leads.
Help your agents:
Turn their neighbors into clients
Home sellers look to agents who are experts at advertising. Nothing is more important in an agent’s business than them getting their marketing out consistently, because that feeds into every other activity they use to grow their sphere and their business.
Help your agents be the first to show their neighborhood that they are the go-to real estate experts, who can help their neighbors buy or sell a home by targeting sellers and buyers in their own backyard.
Instead of blasting ad-hoc ads out to a mixed group of qualified and unqualified leads with information regarding a listing, help your agents run automated and organized ad campaigns across popular websites like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more.
Tip: With a digital ad solution like Boost, branded listing ads are automated with information pulled straight from the MLS and displayed only to leads who are most likely to click on an ad, or who are in the market to buy or sell. That could be a radius of the address or zip code, current income, career type, and more. There are even other customizable criteria, too!
Challenge #3: Growing a solid client base through referrals
In many cases, your agents probably prefer to get referral business than having to spend time finding leads and nurturing them. But in order to do so, they must go above and beyond to provide clients with such an experience that they jump at the chance to refer your agents to friends and family.
Help your agents:
Make a memorable first impression
How can you make sure your agents are the ones who win those listings? While recent just-sold data and word of mouth may be winning tickets—so are insightful, accurate, and beautiful comparative market analysis (CMA) reports that show sellers how much their home is truly worth.
Printed reports take a lot of time to create as agents pull local market data and comps, compile photos, and create graphs. But what if agents could generate more insightful CMA reports that win clients in a fraction of the time? They can with Cloud CMA. In less than two minutes, your agents can create a customized, impressive CMA report with all the information needed to prove to sellers that they’re the local market expert!
Create a wow-worthy, modern experience
The best thing about real estate referral marketing is that once the groundwork is laid out and you or your agents have a solid base of past clients—those happy clients will do the marketing through word of mouth to their friends, colleagues, and family members. It requires little effort to convert those new leads, because they are ready to buy or sell.
Once your agents have nailed that deal and are in the throes of completing the transaction, going above and beyond by providing their buyer or seller client with an unforgettable experience that’s as stress-free as possible is key to growing their referral base.
In every deal, there are scores of smaller, equally important moments, including seller disclosures, home warranties, lease commission advances, moving services, digital titles, and much more. For instance, the free plug-ins in our Transactions software can help your agents give their clients an over-the-top real estate transaction experience during and after the deal’s closed.
The economy is in constant motion. With the right set of tools, candor, and insights, you and your agents have the power to stay on top so you can continue to make plans and grow your business. Whether a rock-solid market, or a rollercoaster market—buyers and sellers depend on real estate pros to guide them.
We’re here to help you show them the way.
