Real estate professionals need every minute of the day. Offers are submitted within minutes of a listing going live. A lead contacts multiple agents — and the first to call back wins! You don’t want to lose a dream house for your client or a lucrative lead because you finally took a lunch break.
Other aspects of real estate are slow-paced. Developing a personal connection with a prospective client can take weeks, months or even years. You want to be on their mind the moment they are ready to act. But how will you manage follow-up across hundreds of leads?
And let’s not forget work-life balance. As a real estate professional, your working hours run opposite everyone else’s. It’s not the typical 9-to-5. Life is weekend open houses, evening showings, and clients who need attention 24/7.
But you can manage all of this. You can manage the predictably unpredictable schedule, the mountains of paperwork, the constant interruptions. You can be that rockstar real estate professional doing deals and churning out high quality work. The trick: revamp your business with these three efficiency boosting hacks.
Can you relate to any of these situations?
Trouble keeping up with lead in-take and follow-up.
Losing prospective client contact information.
Forgetting past communications with leads.
Inconsistent communication and supervision with sales assistants.
No way to track data to identify trends in the sales pipeline.
Storing private information in unsafe or insecure locations.
Converting leads to clients is the life-blood of a thriving real estate career. Most of us spend thousands every year to create leads. Only a small percentage of leads convert to clients. Success in real estate will always be an uphill battle if opportunities slip away due to ineffective lead management.
Say goodbye to treasure hunting through old e-mails, miscellaneous spreadsheets, scraps of paper and random file folders. Instead, say hello to the modern Client Relations Management System (“CRM”).
CRM’s serve a few purposes.
Save detailed contact information and communication history in a safe place. Seamlessly connect with anyone in your organization helping with lead conversion. Improve sales with instant accurate data. Schedule contacts by e-mail, text, time, date, and team member. Prioritize activities to follow-up with leads at the right time.
There is no shortage of CRM options for real estate. The “gold standard” is Sales Force - though it higher priced and more complex than alternatives. Services like Zoho and Pipedrive are low cost. At under $50/mo, no need to worry about adding new team members.
Our second hack: electronic signature software like Docusign and Dotloop. These products make it fool-proof for your clients to sign documents. Gone are the days of printing, downloading, scanning and emailing signature pages. Electronic signature software reduces signing huge amounts of paperwork to just a few clicks. It simply couldn’t be any easier. You will save yourself and your clients a ton of hassle and headaches.
Other perks of having dedicated electronic signature software: being able to easily send documents from anywhere with an internet signal; immediate notifications when documents are viewed and signed; and safe and secure cloud storage for your documents.
Real estate is flush with miscellaneous tasks and constant interruptions. It is easy to lose track of things. As a real estate professional, you might be working on well over ten transactions at a time. Meetings, deadlines, closings, paperwork, showings - there is a lot to do. And dropping the ball by forgetting a task isn’t going to earn you any referrals.
Successful real estate professionals delegate to administrative assistants, freelancers, and even junior agents learning the ropes. Utilizing a team wide task manager to coordinate real estate transactions can add considerable free time to your schedule.
Modern task management systems allow you to invite people to “projects”. Projects keep tasks in one place. Collaboration is improved by assigning each other tasks, writing notes as to task status, and receiving immediate notifications on task completions.
You can easily monitor projects to judge progress. If team members slack off, you can identify and address the issue immediately.
Our favorite is Todoist. Some other popular task managers are Trello, Asana, and Microsoft To-Do.
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Meghan White is part of the real estate acquisitions team at House Heroes LLC, a Florida based real estate investment company. After a 10-year career as a corporate lawyer, Meghan switched to real estate full-time in 2018. Meghan enjoys writing about real estate, productivity hacks and parenting.