Real estate management can be challenging in current times, as the pandemic has severely disrupted face-to-face selling and has required agents to adopt virtual selling methods overnight. Managing contacts, following up with leads, scheduling home viewings and closing deals have all been required to take a digital shift, which can be an incredibly overwhelming experience for some. Digital transformation has now become a necessity for businesses to strive in the post-COVID-19 era. To help real estate agents boost sales during these uncertain times, we came up with 3 Ways to Hone Your Virtual Selling Skills to Attract Real Estate Buyers: Â
1. Make Use of Virtual Tools and Collaboration Solutions
Buying a house sight unseen requires a huge leap of faith and not everyone is willing to take that jump. However, the idea of buying a home without seeing it in person is less daunting nowadays with all the new solutions readily available at your fingertips. In fact, 45% of recently surveyed homebuyers made bids on a home without any physical viewings, compared to 28% in 2019. Whether your clients have busy schedules, or they’re stuck at home sick or simply are social distancing during the pandemic, you can offer virtual home tours and open houses with advanced video conferencing software such as Zoom and Skype. Alternatively, virtual 3D real estate tours have also gained traction and provide prospective buyers with an immersive experience that allows them to easily glide from room to room with high-resolution, interactive views from every angle inside a listing.
Anticipating your clients’ needs before they are aware of them is key to up your professional virtual selling skills. Use all five senses to give the buyer an accurate and detailed account of the viewing, pointing out small factors that often go unnoticed over video. For example, testing out the light switches and water pressure, explaining where rooms/features are in relation to one another, and sharing neighborhood insights and proximity to neighboring facilities, will highlight to your client that you are placing yourself in their shoes. Delivering a completely remote, extraordinary homebuying experience to your prospects is still possible as long as you have the right tools in your arsenal to close deals virtually.
2. Win the War for Attention
With all the time saved from not being able to travel or meet clients, take this opportunity to refine your digital marketing strategies. Now more than ever, people are spending their time in front of their screens, whether it be on social networking sites, streaming platforms, or real estate listing portals and websites. Provide relevant experiences that attract and hold the attention of each buyer and seller by ensuring your website, social media, and other digital touchpoints are delivering timely, informative, and creative messages. Your online presence should also be structured and refined to create lasting emotional connections with your audience. Property firms must gain deep contextual knowledge about each lead and prospect to create persuasive experiences at every point of interaction intelligently. This allows them to be relevant at scale and allows them to continuously engage prospects as they move seamlessly from one interaction point to the next.
Alternatively, if you do not have the time or knowledge to level up your online brand presence, leverage leading digital transformation agencies to transform your business model and turbocharge your real estate marketing and branding through agile, data-driven initiatives. These companies not only execute tailored digital marketing strategies to achieve personalization at scale, but also help convey your brand values and convince leads to buy-in to your services in an overcrowded marketplace of property agents and agencies.
3. Drop the Hard-Sell Tactic and Focus on Referrals
One of the biggest challenges in the virtual sales process is gaining buyers’ attention and keeping them engaged virtually and subsequently developing and nurturing deep relationships with buyers. So why not leverage your existing customer base and take this opportunity to engage and capture additional value from these existing clients and turn them into new leads? Acquiring a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one, and yet, the post-purchase phase of the sales funnel is exactly the one that real estate agents tend to neglect.
Personalization is the key element to increase revenue and customer retention. By adapting your real estate website content to your buyers’ interest and personalizing their journey, you are adding tremendous value to their experience. With over 4 million real estate agents in the market, customers will connect with those who resonate with them. So, it is critical for real estate professionals to constantly look at existing clients and discover innovative and captivating ways to nurture them so that they ultimately become your brand ambassadors and increase your leads pipeline through real estate referrals. To be more precise, 41% of buyers choose a real estate agent based on a recommendation. Referrals from your best clients are often your best source of quality leads.
Choosing the right enterprise technology solutions for your business needs
Real estate companies endeavor to be more agile, build digital-first marketing and sales strategies, and drive actionable change. And they are looking to their technology vendors and partners to help them navigate the path forward.
Property Raptor is here to help you achieve it all and excel in the real estate industry. We provide the best sales and customer management platform precisely to help you convert leads, deepen customer relationships, and analyze customer data. Our advanced AI machine learning algorithms help to optimize sales channels and data utilization so that your agents have more time to do what really matters – nurture leads effectively to convert them into qualified sales opportunities.
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