When you begin to understand your business processes more completely, you can realize much greater success in the way you execute them. This is what our Coaching Tips email series is all about.
You know your database is central to doing business, but you may not be as actively engaged with it as you could be in your existing real estate campaigns. For instance, when you list a property you search your database for the buyers you know will likely be interested in it. What you may not think about, though, are all the people who live around that new listing, or who own property in the area, who also might want to know about it.
While you are doing the basic initial search for potential buyers, also use your database to list potential sellers, market appraisals, past clients, and landlords in the same area as your property listing. Contact those people, tell them the property is for sale, and ask them if they are interested in its value and final sale price. Also check on their own situation, because they just might be in need of your services, too.
When you start to think about your data this way, you are addressing three basic concepts:
How relevant are you to your customers?
It is quite relevant to contact a potential seller, a past market appraisal, a past client, or a landlord near this property to tell them about your listing in their area.
Are your customer contacts frequent enough?
Act according to the balance between frequent enough and too frequent by evaluating sales volume in a given area.
Are you building relationships through consistent communication?
By contacting all the key people in the area of each property you list and then sell, you stay relevant to all the people in your database and maintain those all-important relationships with them.
Agents have a tendency to focus on making new contacts, but it is vital that you stay in contact with the people you already know and keep those relationships active. It can mean the difference between a warm to hot campaign, or a cold campaign. As soon as you initiate the actual sale of a property, start prospecting: Make those calls to all potential sellers, all market appraisals, all past clients and all landlords in and near the area of the sale, and let them know how much the property sold for.
Staying active with current customers as well as new prospects keeps you relevant and drives the value of your business. You can also increase your open for inspections attendance by inviting all these people through during your conversations with them. This ensures that there will be other people present in the homes when an interested customer comes through, thus increasing perceived competition and sense of urgency to make a decision to buy. As a business building technique, understanding the process of geographic and relationship-based farming through expanded use of your database is clearly important.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip. If we can be of assistance to you at a coaching or training level, feel free to email us. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.