As a realtor, you handle many duties — from connecting with new clients to scheduling open houses. If you try to handle every aspect of your business operation manually, you can’t maximize your productivity if you spend more time on administrative tasks than you do with duties requiring a human touch. Implementing technology in your day-to-day operations can help make more productive use of your time while providing an even higher quality of service to your clients. In turn, clients are increasingly looking for more online solutions these days. Using technology to streamline your business is a win-win situation.
Online Forms
Make it easy to stay on top of paperwork by keeping digital forms. Your listing inquiry forms, property paperwork, rental applications and other paperwork can be filled out online and submitted to you without requiring an extra trip to deliver them in person or depending on fax machines or scanned documents. You can then easily pair your online forms up with electronic signing (see below).
Online Scheduling
Trying to find a time when you and/or a colleague is free at the same time as your clients is time-consuming, not to mention, confusing at times. This is where online scheduling tools come in handy. Your clients can book a time that suits them from a list of times that you have previously approved. No need for calls and back-and-forth emails. Acuity and Calendly are great scheduling tools to try out.
Customer Relationship Management
Do you provide timely feedback when a potential client contacts you about listings? Do you have your clients’ contact details and preferences saved somewhere easy to find? A customer relationship management (CRM) tool helps you stay on top of your client contacts. You can sort messages, make notes, attach files and schedule follow-up contact through email, phone or in-person meetings.
Email Automation
Another tech option is email automation. You can auto-respond to emails, address common questions and reconnect with previous clients. You can also set up emails to automatically send clients new listings that meet their parameters and other time-saving configurations. If you use an email marketing tool like MailChimp or ConvertKit, you can also deliver regular newsletters to your clients to keep them in the loop and ensure that your company remains front and center in their minds.
Video Marketing
Video marketing can benefit your business in a number of ways. You might want to send your clients a quick video message introducing yourself – a personal touch and a great way to put a face to your name (and help you stick in their memory). Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are giving preference to video content which means that if you are including video in your marketing strategy, more people are likely to see that content over standard text and image content. You can also use video to showcase your properties that allow people to get a much better idea of exactly what is on offer and view it at a time and place that suits them.
Cloud Storage
Photos, videos and other media are likely just sitting on your computer’s hard drive, USB drives and SD cards. Instead of searching through multiple drives when you need a particular listing’s media, you can consolidate your media into a cloud storage service such as Google Drive. Using cloud storage also means that your team members can access and share those files from anywhere which will save time when you don’t have to keep searching for them or resending them via email.
Social Media Scheduling
Social media sites provide a valuable way to connect with potential clients, but you need to post at specific times to get the widest audience for your content. Instead of sitting at your computer to update your social content, you can use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to automatically post your message at a scheduled time. Most of these tools will recommend the best time of day for you to post based on when your audience is the most active and offer sophisticated analytics to help you figure out which strategies are working well and which need to be tweaked.
Automated Listings
Instead of manually inputting listings on multiple sites, you can use a service that posts your listing across all of them automatically. This will maximize your property’s visibility by putting it on as many sites as possible while also saving time in the process.
Floor Plan Software
You provide renters with plenty of property information through video tours, photos and descriptions, but it’s still a challenge for tenants to visualize being in the property before they actually tour it. To increase your chances of matching tenants with the best property for their needs, you can provide detailed floor plans to give them another way of sorting through properties before they request an in-person tour of the property.
E-Signature Software
If there’s one thing that is certain, it’s that any real estate transaction requires a lot of signatures. Trying to find a time and place to collect those signatures from different parties can be time-consuming and often frustrating for everyone involved. Using a tool like HelloSign or DocuSign means that you can send documents to the relevant parties, they can sign them electronically and then return them to you in a matter of minutes.
Maximize your working hours by putting technology in place to automate and streamline many of your day-to-day realtor business processes. Whether you need a way to find listing photos or quickly post new listings, these tools give you many choices. You can spend less time on repetitive, administrative work, allowing you to focus your energy on bringing in new business and wowing prospective tenants.
