There are effectively six key database categories that you’ll work:
- Buyers
- Potential sellers
- Market appraisals
- Current clients
- Past clients
- Referrals
If you think about your database, it’s effectively a little bit like an hourglass in its shape. You’re always going to have a lot of buyers that you funnel through your system, and you sort them out by asking one basic question: “Is this your first, second or third purchase?” Then you cascade them into the six categories listed above according to their answer to that one defining question. If they say it’s their second or third purchase, then your buyer also becomes a potential seller. Some potential sellers will then come into your market appraisal list. Remember, you’ll always have far more potential sellers than you do market appraisals.
The key distinction between potential sellers and market appraisals is that potential sellers are people who own a property in your area, but you have not yet been down to the home. With a market appraisal you’ve now been to the home and you’ve got a deeper relationship with the client, as you have provided them with an idea of what their property would be worth in the marketplace today.
Those market appraisals then come to the thinnest point of actually being your current vendors that are actually listed today. Those current vendors who are listed today then become your past clients, both people who have bought from you and people who have sold through you. The reason that past clients who have bought from you are so important is that they now own property in the area that you service. And of those past clients who have sold property with you, some may have since moved on, but others still live in the local area, and they might have purchased their property from somebody else. So that’s a pretty critical group of people to be working.
This then finally comes back into your referral group. Many of your past clients will actually become some of your key referrers. But also think about other people who might refer you to potential clients, like restaurant owners, or anyone who is in any type of business where they meet a lot of people. These people could be some of the best referrers inside of your business.
Now, when you look at each of these categories, one of the biggest challenges is that agents don’t actually know how to work them. For example, the best thing you can do with your buyer database is to add them to your email alert system. Some of the best databases in the country right now have automatic buyer alert systems.
Your database needs to connect with your website buyer registration system so that when buyers register on your website and are entered into the database, the database automatically sends them properties that suit their criteria.
Next, you want to send these buyers a list of sales in the area at least once a month. There are two ways to do this: You can send them a list of all of the recent sales that have closed inside of your brand, or you can send them the list of sales that have closed in the post code. This is a fantastic thing to do with buyers because it gives them real property values they can work with, thus giving them confidence to make offers on other similar properties.
With both potential sellers and market appraisals there is nothing more relevant than speaking to them around new properties that have been listed as well as properties that have sold in the area, in addition to sending them the monthly report of sold properties.
Finally, it is important to track on a weekly basis the total number of people in each category with the aim of growing each and every single one of those categories. It is important that you don’t have an over-inflated category that isn’t fit.
In real estate, there are so many things that you can do, but only a very few things that you actually should do in order to achieve incredible results.