Your database is one of the most vital elements inside of your business. Whether you have been in the industry for 30 years or are just starting out, understanding how to categorise and evaluate your lists of buyers, sellers and clients can really maximize the growth of your business.
The largest category in your database is Buyers. This includes buyers who are also property owners. Some of them are likely landlords of properties you manage. You want to use your database to regularly keep in touch with these people. In order to make that process most efficient, you want to maintain a current database, which means maintaining only currently active buyers in that Buyers category. But you don’t want to lose track of those people completely. Instead, buyers who are not actively buying need to be moved to a different category.
When a buyer completes their real estate transaction they can usually be entered into a new category inside your database called Potential Sellers, which also includes all the people who attend your open for inspections and who own property in your areas. Your long-term goal is to get to know all of the potential sellers in your marketplace. Potential sellers will eventually move into a new category called Market Appraisals once you actually meet with them, see their property, and build enough of a relationship with them to know something about their reasons for selling. From there these people can become your Current Clients.
You need to know how many current clients you can comfortably and effectively work with without overloading your capacities. One way to gauge this is by average days on market. If your days on market tend to be longer, then you can carry more stock at a time. If you turn over properties more quickly, then you can afford to carry less stock. In either case, you always want to list more stock than you sell.
The final category inside of your database is Past Clients. These are the people you have actually bought and sold property with. They can be the most valuable people in your database because they become clients for life. Your Past Clients category is one that you want to keep growing year after year.
You will use all these database categories to measure your progress because the success of your business is reflected in the size and quality of your database. It’s a good idea to review the numbers of buyers, potential sellers, market appraisals, current clients and past clients every week and compare those numbers with the past week to keep up with what is happening with the growth of your business. It all comes down to the simple fact that working with those people is what turns them into your buyers, sellers, and clients for life.