Shifting Digital Strategy in the Real Estate industry

Real Estate is an ever booming and flourishing business of all times. Despite the low time during 2008-10, the market quickly turned around. First-time home-buyers or existing homeowners are actively looking for prospective property. This is a promising development for real estate firms, and the agents always rely on, high intent consumers shopping in the market. Let ‘s run down a list of everyday scenarios :

1. If you are a real estate agent you know it takes a ton in time, money and effort to get connected with a consumer. A prospective consumer looking for home can reach out to you by different channels – email, advertisement, paid source, referral and several others. When these (“consumer”) flow into the system you usually approach and handle all prospects with the same rule-book and protocols as a high-intent consumer. There is no real-time filtering, sorting or prioritization that you can apply so that you and your team is working and assisting the most urgent( “high intent”) consumers based of historical through put.
2. You call the consumer – ”BUSY”. Consumer calls you back, you are – ”BUSY”/”AWAY”. Tag-tag-lose-lose!! This most certainly has happened very often and something that cannot me avoided. Could you email and schedule time? Yes for certain. Does is work 100% of the time? Definitely NOT. What is the email contact rate for your team and agents? 0.5%, 5%, 15%, 50% or 95%? Every % counts. When was the last time you checked these numbers? Did you have the thought to consider to improve these rates?
3. In case of agent(s) unavailability , it is possible that the high-intent lead that just came in has no one to answer or cater to. If it is an impatient customer needing assistance right away, what happens? They move on to someone else! Internet is a BIG pool of contact information. One search for your competitor and the consumer is now taken by competition free of cost.

Let’s think out loud and out of the box while taking a leap out of the current state. Just a few years ago , to the time before computers. Agents relied heavily on flyers and mailers to get new, non-referral based consumers. Soon with websites every agent and firm needed online presence with a website, even if it were just one static page displaying the #800 and email-address, a website was a must. Next the consumer adopted social media for news, recommendations and reviews. What did business agents do? Got familiar to the changing trends and adopted to twitter, facebook, instagram, paid marketing and other digital strategies.

What ‘s next? The new and promising upcoming digital strategy is CHATBOTS. What, How, Why Chatbots?

WHAT – Chatbots, are what they read. Chat (talk/communicate) Bot (automated) – these are customized and curated set of instructions put together to substitute some of the tasks that you manually perform. Tasks like schedule an appointment, send emails, assist consumer with viewing/searching/exploring real estate and related information.

HOW – Chatbots are not “one-size-fit-all”. Chatbots can be as simple or as complex and personalized as one way wish for. The underlying bot platform can be very intricate and elaborated to suit your teams specific needs. Once you have an army of chatbots to meet your need to attend to mundane, repetitive and manual tasks such as scheduling or sending reminders, you can use the valuable time to connect with the right consumers and help them with their necessities.

WHY – Chatbots helps to connect the service provider and consumer better. Chatbots are not to replace the “one-to-one” relationship, chatbots in fact make you independent and free you of repeatable, manual tasks. The best suited chat platform is one that will provide Live Chat + Bot capability.

Let’s revisit the 3 bullets above, now with chat platform strategy in place:

1. Prospective consumer visits one of your online assets – website. You have a Chat platform that they can interact with to look for listing, property information and other common exploratory tasks. The consumer is engaged on a conversational platform and remains interested. Today ‘s millennial consumer prefers space and online “self-serve” options. A consumer’s interest can be determined based on different analytical data models that rank and classify consumer intent – HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW. Based on the classification and historical conversion data, you make prioritize in-person interaction or promotional engagement with the consumer.
2. You may be with a consumer in person or on phone discussing about a property of interest. During this time a new consumer comes to the website. This new consumer can explore and request for more details via the Chat platform renders assistance while you are busy with a HIGH-er intent consumer. The new consumer may gather information or even schedule a time for call that suits an agent of your team and the consumer. CUT down the time and effort to schedule and manage calls manually. Spend better time with the onsite “face-to-face” meetings with the consumer.
3. Don ‘t lose a customer ever again! YOU have put $$$ to a acquire the consumer and you want to be sure you serve every consumer that seeks your services. A chat platform will ensure the consumer is helped with their needs and connected with you at the right time in the process.

So, learn more about chatbot platforms and check out how they facilitate with your firm’s needs. Don ‘t wait for your competition to adopt chatbots and realize the benefits. Act now  – Fast and First.

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