The real estate industry is booming right now, across Canada and the United States, in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic. House prices and demand continue to soar as the supply continues to fall. This means real estate agents are seeing an influx of prospective home buyers and sellers and have to manage even more clients than ever before.
Many agents have a manual way of keeping track of their clients and meetings, whether this is through calendar appointments or a physical notebook. However, with the sheer number of prospective clients requiring their attention, it can be difficult to remember and keep track of where exactly each client is in the home buying or selling process. This causes many real estate agents to rethink their business development strategies and figure out a way to make the process more efficient.
Typically, the general real estate business development strategy can be boiled down to these four steps:
- Capture real estate leads
- Send an initial engagement message
- Store prospective buyer/seller information
- Manage real estate leads
1. Capture real estate leads
The first part of any business development strategy, let alone a real estate business development strategy, should be determining how you will acquire your leads – in this case, your prospective home buyers and sellers. Part of this step will require the deployment of various real estate marketing strategies to get your company’s name and brand out into the world, but what about the actual intake of prospective client information?
Online forms are a tried-and-true method for many companies to gather contact information about their leads and real estate companies are no different. A digital contact form hosted on your website can be a very useful tool for prospective buyers and sellers to reach out to you and make that initial connection. This form should ask website visitors for general information about what they would like to do (for the most part this will be either buying or selling), the lead’s contact information, as well as any other pertinent information you need to know before you reach out to them.
A simple form builder tool is all you need to create this contact form for your website. With this tool you can create a sophisticated form using drag-and-drop field elements and CTA buttons to really make your form stand out.
2. Send an initial engagement message
Once your real estate company has created the initial contact form that buyers and sellers can fill out on your website, the next part of your real estate business development strategy should be to send an initial message thanking them for submitting the form. Manually sending out a quick email to every single person who fills out your form can become overwhelming, especially if you are capturing a bunch of new leads every day. This is where email automation comes into the picture.
Email marketing software allows you to create dynamic email templates that can be used to automatically send out an email every time your digital form gets submitted through a connection with your form builder tool. These email templates also don’t have to be the generic and vague emails you may be used to receiving either – ones with absolutely no personalized touches that simply thank you for your submission. The right email automation software can help you create engaging messages that include information you have collected on them, such as the lead’s name, address, and whether they are interested in buying or selling.
How? Merge tags are handy little pieces of code that can be included in strategic spots in your email templates and will automatically pull relevant information about each form submitter and fill it into the email, making it more personalized and therefore more engaging to the recipient.
3. Store prospective buyer/seller information
In order to successfully create engaging emails using merged contact information, your real estate company needs a way to store all the information collected by your signup form. This leads us to the next step of the real estate business development strategy: information management.
Many real estate agents already have a mechanism for storing their clients’ contact information, as was mentioned in the introduction, but in a lot of cases these mechanisms are of the manual variety. Using a notebook, or even a Microsoft Word or Excel document to store all the information you need to know about your clients can quickly become disorganized and ineffective. This is why an online CRM database can be a lifesaver.
Connecting an online CRM to your form and email software allows real estate agents to properly keep track of home buyers’ and sellers’ contact information, meetings, latest activity, and any tasks that may need to be completed by the agent. Every time the website form gets submitted, a new record will automatically be created in the CRM (or an existing one updated in the event of a return client).
4. Manage real estate leads
Knowing where all your clients are in their home buying or selling journeys can be a difficult thing to keep straight. While some prospective buyers are just beginning to visit open houses, others are in the middle of the closing process and may require more assistance from their agent. Thankfully, with the help of a good real estate business development strategy (and your online CRM), you can ensure all your clients remain happy and engaged in the process.
A business development strategy for real estate should include a plan for managing your various clients in an organized and ideally visual way. Real estate agents can do this easily through implementing a funnel (or pipeline) in their CRM for all their clients. Funnels allow for the simple segmentation of contacts based on which stage or step of a specific process they are in.
For example, real estate agents can create two separate funnels: one for prospective buyers and one for sellers. Each funnel will have a number of different stages depending on where the lead is in either process – from initial consultation with the agent to the closure of the home sale. Leads can be moved through these different stages either manually or automatically depending on how each real estate agent decides to operate. The use of these funnels in a real estate business development strategy can greatly improve the organization and management of real estate leads.
Looking to enhance your real estate business development strategy?
Automation and the cohesion between the multiple steps of this business development strategy are really what makes it an ideal solution for busy real estate agents. SimplyCast has developed an automated business development solution that will work for any industry, including real estate.
Combining the power of an online CRM, form builder, and email marketing software, our solution is 100 percent ready to implement and fully customizable. Request a demo of the solution today by clicking the button below and our team will show you how it can be used to enhance your real estate business development strategy!
