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The real estate industry lends itself well to order, process, and organization. But it takes effort for agents and brokers to live up to that ideal. The good news is that technology is making it easier than ever for real estate professionals to handle multiple tasks at once through the power of automation. From gathering leads to scheduling a time to close the deal, these day-to-day tasks no longer have to be limited by the number of hours in a day. Here are five to-do items that can and should be automated to maximize the efficiency of your real estate business.
1. Social Media Posts
Because consumers already spend 30 percent of their online time on social media, it is one of the most efficient ways to connect with a client base. However, the posting, managing, and monitoring that goes into making these connections can be a time-consuming process, even for those with a great deal of social savvy.
Because of this, real estate professionals can benefit from using a tool to schedule social media posts in batches. This helps ensure the posts occur on a regular time frame, keeps the audience looped into the latest updates, and provides you with a high-level view of social content as a whole. Scheduling social posts in batches will take a few hours out of the week, as opposed to having to think about this task each day, meaning you’ll have more time to invest in the valuable leads that are a result of social media activity.
2. Email Updates
A business newsletter is a fantastic resource; it helps subscribers stay up-to-date and aware of the status of the local housing market, and it can serve as a great touchpoint to reengage stale leads. But writing and sending newsletters can quickly become unmanageable due to the inefficiency of the process.
Email management software companies such as HubSpot or MailChimp offer templates that can be used over and over again. This means less typing and formatting while still allowing for every email to have a personal touch. Since each draft doesn’t have to be made from scratch, automating email updates can get real estate pros from thought process to inbox in a much more manageable time frame, allowing for more regular updates to the mailing list.
3. Home Value Assessments
According to the National Association of REALTORS®’ digital trends report released last year, 95 percentpdf of consumers begin the real estate process online. That means having the right online tools will help agents and brokers generate and convert more leads.
Think about the automated tools that you can make available to online prospects. For example, while an online home value assessment will not be 100 percent accurate (and there should be a disclaimer alluding to this), it will give sellers an estimate of what they are able to ask while providing buyers with an idea of what they will be able to afford.
While building a value assessment into a website requires some technical skill, the process after the setup is entirely automated. Clients are able to provide their emails in exchange for their estimate, and agents and brokers are provided with preferred email addresses for valuable leads. This brings interested parties right to a brokerage’s virtual door.
4. Blog Posting
Blogs are important for any business practice, and real estate is no exception. Because blogs increase search engine rankings and make websites more well-rounded with information, small businesses can benefit greatly from this website add-on. For instance, HubSpot found that businesses with blogs garnered 126 percent more leads than those without. However, the time you invest in writing blogs can make them a less-than-lucrative endeavor when you already have more than enough tasks on your to-do list.
Thankfully, the rise of the gig economy has made it easier than ever to outsource specialized work such as writing and blog management. Using a service to find freelance writers will allow a real estate professional to source independent content without having to sacrifice valuable working hours to the writing process. PropertySimple is just one of many companies that offers this service to agents who do not have time to write their own content. Order evergreen content in bulk and schedule posts to automatically publish at regular intervals.
5. Scheduling
In general, your clients are in major transition periods of their lives, meaning scheduling conflicts are bound to happen. Determining availability, scheduling, and rescheduling can lead to a back-and-forth interaction that pulls valuable hours out of the workday and leads to an inefficient, interrupted workflow.
Using an automated scheduling tool such as YouCanBookMe or NeedToMeet that allows clients to see your availability in real time will circumvent a good portion of this complicated process. Both calendars native to email services and third-party apps will allow clients to pick a time that works for them from the beginning, omitting the back-and-forth availability requests.
While many real estate tasks are still manual, automating where possible will allow agents and brokers to reallocate those valuable hours where they’ll make the most impact. For every stage of the sales funnel, there is a chance for all of those involved to become more efficient—something every busy real estate pro is sure to appreciate.
