You either adapt or will not survive

This frase couldn’t be any more real to the market that we are living today. Just like Sean Black mentioned in his article in Inman:

“You can argue that 89% of buyers work with an agent because they want to have a partner with hands-on experience and local expertise, but that doesn’t mean they will endure the pain of the traditional transaction to get it. No client loves the uncertainty, inconvenience, and cost of buying and selling the old way. The COVID-19 pandemic only proved that digital is the way of the future. Consumers embraced digital closings, video tours, virtual open houses, and the like. That’s the expectation from now on, and there’s no going back.”

We are fully loaded and surrounded by tools for Real Estate Agents, but very few of them can actually keep you competitive with what the proptechs out there are offering. Sending pretty emails, having a website, a database of clients and a good marketing campaign is just not going to cut it.

Here are some steps that any agent or Broker looking to make an impact in todays real estate market needs to go through:

1.- Formalize the way they run their business. And I don't mean formalize in the sense of legal entity, I am talking about setting long, medium and short term goals and committing to them. Grab those Goals, and cut them into bite size to-do’s of the actions that you need to do every single day. Is doing a detailed business plan for your business. I like to use OKR methodology for goal setting. This is very important, if you do not set this pathway you will for sure get overwhelmed with all the new technology, creative marketing campaigns and/or new ideas that will pop in front of you everyday.

2.- Define your niche. The days of “the jack of all trades” for the real estate market are definitely gone. You need to be an expert, you need to provide value to your client and that you can do by becoming an expert. What can that Niche be? A specific area, a specific type of property in an area, a buyer’s agent, a sellers agent, and others, but very important to define it.

3.- With 1 and 2 defined, define your technology needs. What are the functionalities that you need for your CRM? You have to make sure that the tools that you are selecting, stand-up to the market, and will be responsive to your future growth. In this point we also evaluate the proficiency of the users. We can dream on having an amazing All-in-one Real Estate Platform, but if the user doesn't have the skills, we need to find an alternative for it. Hire an administrative assistant that compliment this skills that you are missing, maybe partner up with a tech-savvy real estate agent or bring a Real Estate Technology Consultant into your business.

4.- Efficiency; with the speed and level of service demanded from the clients of today, if we are not taking advantage of technology your clients will feel it. User experience is not just having a pretty website and/or email anymore, is being responsive, proactive, keeping your clients informed throughout the process. And for you to be able to do this today, you will need to embrace technology.

5.- Evaluate, Optimize, re-strategize and implement FAST! With the correct tools in place you are going to be able to see where you are at, where are your clients coming from, is it what you were planning on? Where are you standing base on the plans that you made? What adjustments do you need to make? You can have a lot of suppositions on "what works" for your market, but until you implement and start gathering data on it, you wont be able to keep improving and truly customizing your business to the needs of your specific market.

If you are interested in growing your business lets talk. We work with top producing agents and teams looking to take their business to the next level.