Real estate agents must rely on building relationships with clients and positioning themselves as the go-to when it comes to buying/selling a home. The traditional way of meeting people at parties, door-knocking around neighborhoods, and calling people whenever you feel like it is near an end. Real estate tech is taking over!
Real estate has always been, and will always be about relationships. Understanding and relating to people is huge! But technology is advancing and new tools are coming out that are helping Realtors (and businesses in general) with their marketing to meet those clients so they can build those relationships.
If you’re a real estate agent, it’s vital to understand where the real estate and construction industry is heading so you can stay ahead of it and be successful.
How Real Estate Tech Can Benefit Your Business
Real estate brokers and agents are still a relatively un-digital industry. Because agents have always relied on their connections (or connections of their connections) to do business. And it’s usually never a problem…
It’s at that point agents realize they need to do something different. They need to start automating what they can. Then enhance their marketing. In fact, there many ways in which real estate tech tools can benefit their business.
Here in this piece, we’re going to go over the seven absolute most important tools to use as a real estate broker, to help them launch towards their success.
Let’s get to it!
1. Budgeting Remodeling/Construction Tech for Realtors
When prospective clients are planning on purchasing a property, they often consider remodeling. One of the challenges Realtors often face is having resources to provide budget pricing to their clients on the expected cost to perform a remodel or renovation.
With the advancement of digital takeoff and construction estimating software, estimating construction costs has become much easier. Often Realtors have contractors on their Rolodex to call on as needed. There are also estimating services for builders that can be a great asset to Realtors needing a quick budget. The latest software allows for quick estimates so that a Realtor can provide the client so they can make an educated financial decision.
2. Video Marketing Tools
Having videos on your social media accounts immediately builds the brand and lets you communicate with your audience. If you have an active Instagram account you already understand this. If you don’t, you need to start right away.
In order to keep up with other agents in your area and position yourself as the go-to who will help people the most, you must produce quality content regularly. It can be a video of you talking to your phone, or a high-production video with a professional set and camera, just make sure it’s not in the middle. From my personal experience, people in the middle of those two ends of the spectrum tend to get lost in the mix.
You’re also going to want to include a video for each of your listings. You can upload to your MLS or similar platforms, and you can market your listings with video on Facebook Ads targeting the right type of client. Facebook allows you target prospective clients by location and very specific demographics like marital status, likely to move in 6 months, and several others that would improve the likelihood of needing to purchase or rent a new property.
You can do these videos with your smartphone and minimal editing. There are also some apps available for editing where you can do everything right on your smartphone.
3. CRM Software
If you are a new real estate agent, you don’t have that many leads. But what happens when you have a list of 100 leads? Or 200? There aren’t enough hours in the day to handle that, and even if you do manage to find the time to call every single person, how would you know who to call?
This is why having a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) is such a game-changer for top real estate agents. You’d be surprised how many agents I see that still don’t use it.
A real estate customer relations manager is a tool that records all the variables you need for your business. It allows you to treat your business as a business. It keeps track of everyone’s contact information, any notes about their wants and desires, and more. The best part is that it tells you exactly when to follow-up with specific clients so you can nurture every relationship into future business.
Whether you’re a busy real estate agent who’s not organized or one begging for business, CRM software can definitely help you.
4. Boomerang for Gmail
Boomerang is the simplest real estate tech tool on this list, but also one of the most practical and one you’ll probably end up using every day. It lets you schedule when to send your emails so you can be ahead of the game for your real estate business.
For example, you can schedule a follow-up message with a potential client 14 days from a meeting. That way your message arrives perfectly on schedule. This reduces the chance that you forget to send it in the future.
This handy tool is perfect for people with busy schedules, it lets them stay afloat in a sea of unlimited tasks.
5. Email Marketing Software
This is one of the biggest money-makers for any broker. Having an email sequence to send out to clients can help improve their trust level and gives you a way to get in front of them so that when they need to sell their house, you’re the first one they call.
You can gather your entire list of leads and send emails in a specific order to guide them along your marketing funnel.
One of the things I’ve seen that works wonders for agents is to have a weekly email. Pick any day of the week (preferably a weekday) and send one mass email to all your leads about market information, updates in the housing market, etc.
This builds the brand and lets your leads consistently see you and more importantly, get value from you. This builds trust and makes it more likely you’ll be the one they call when they need an agent/broker.
There is a lot of emailing software out there. A few I would recommend you evaluate are Constant Contact, iContact, and Mailchimp. Each comes with its own set of pros and cons.
6. RedX Geo Leads
This is a super useful tool I see agents using every day to get phone numbers and contact info of people in specific areas to prospect.
The most foolproof way of getting real estate leads is to talk to people and build genuine relationships. GeoLeads gives you all you need to go do that.
This is a modern tool, one of many, that exist solely to help real estate agents see success with their business in an industry where the failure rate is so high. So, if you have the opportunity to use tools like this, take it.
7. Periscope
This adds on to the video production mentioned earlier in this article. Periscope is an additional video tool, but different in that you can live-stream yourself whenever you want.
Giving value to your leads can’t hurt, especially when it’s specific to them. Live-streaming through Periscope and social media lets people tune in to your content and watch you give house tours or talk about the housing market.
Your branding as a real estate agent gets more and more important by the day in an increasingly competitive market. So having an audience on social media and giving them value through tools like Periscope will help you tremendously.
Conclusion
The fundamentals of being an agent or broker will never change. It’s all about the relationships you develop with your clients. The latest real estate tech tools help you succeed in that very important task.
