One Way to Make Your Real Estate Practice Profitable

Today I want to share with you a very important, yet easy model to adopt for making your real estate practice more profitable.

Part of what we do every day is help prospective and current clients combine services. The most common things we hear is that somebody has a CRM, transaction management system, online lead system, as well as an array of AdWords or ad retargeting systems in place, and neighborhood specific landing pages--and they are bleeding them dry. They desperately want to lower their overhead, but don't know how. Even worse, they can't really draw any lines as to how any of these things are driving business for them.

This is a MAJOR "no no" with us, as EVERYTHING we plan in life has to be measurable. Even worse, as we've said time and time again, the real estate Industry is full disjointed technologies. Clearly, there has to be a fix for this.

Most times, real estate professionals are looking for a quick fix to solve all these problems. Is this realistic? Usually not. Can I blame them for this? Of course not. Agents and brokers are busy professionals and have to cram tons of stuff into a single day. If there were a way to make things easier, though, how could you fault someone for wanting to make life easier? You cannot.

Because of that, I'd like to propose that the easy way to do more with less is to simply put in a little extra up-front work and combine your technologies. Today, I'll give you some easy suggestions on how to make this happen.

1) Let your CRM run your transaction management

Most quality real estate CRM systems these days include automated workflow. The workflow automation in these systems will actually allow you to run 100% of your transaction management through your CRM.

While it is true that it will require a little bit of up front work, once you've set your procedures and triggers in your CRM, you will never again have to worry about jumping from one system to another. Jumping back and forth between systems wastes time and makes you less effective. Even more, many transaction coordination systems bill their subscribers on a per transaction basis. CRMs, on the other hand, charge per seat (user), so once you've locked and loaded your management rules, you will be able to realize significant savings.

2) Online leads are only as good as the follow-up you put into them

Online lead generation can be a great thing. The basis of this type of lead generation is having online engines direct leads to you, while you are out taking care of other things in your day to day business. While in theory this is a great thing, many times in reality it ends up a total waste.

Setting aside the quality of the online leads that are coming in, the biggest problem is the lack of a sort of structured protocol in place for how to follow up with these leads. Even those that do have some standard practice often have nothing in place for after that first contact is made. The net result, then, is that you are spending money on something that is not going to turn into actual business.

Whether you choose using the workflow in your real estate CRM or whether you have an offline method of lead follow up, always consider the following:

• Online leads are very fickle. You have roughly three minutes to get in touch with them before they move on to the next agent or broker. We've seen cases when an agent follows up even fifteen minutes later and the lead actually has no idea who that agent is and why they would be calling. That is because they have already gone on to at least a half dozen other real estate websites in that time.
• When you do get in touch with these people, your job is not done. You HAVE TO have either some sort of automated drip follow-up system or a manual "stay in touch" method to cultivate these leads. Depending on the lead service you are using, you may be getting tons of leads. In that case, I would strongly recommend using some sort of automated drip follow-up campaign, such as those available in your CRM.

3) AdWords are "yesterday." Consider Inbound Marketing.

The quality of leads you get is VERY important. After all, if you are involved in an AdWords campaign, you are paying for each time your ad is clicked on. What if though someone clicks on that ad, goes to your landing page and decides what you are offering isn't important enough for them to offer up their personal information? Even worse, what if they fill out your capture form, but you find out they are totally not interested in anything you were offering, but were simply "just browsing the web"? Both of these cases result in you wasting your hard earned money.

Consider inbound marketing. Inbound marketing targets the long-tail keywords that real people that are really interested in your services and are your ideal clients would type into Google. They find you doing these online searches, and when they click on your blog post or landing page link, it costs you NOTHING.

Of course, it's not truly nothing. You have to create content on a regular basis. As they say, time is money. That said though, there are firms out there that can even handle the content generation for you.

Now I bet you're asking, "Isn't that just swapping one expense for another?" While technically that is true, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. With AdWords marketing, you are targeting "any possible customer." With inbound marketing, you are targeting and attracting your "ideal customer."

So there you have it. These three tips will not only help you save money, they will help you be more effective, generate the right kind of leads and manage your business with lower overhead than you ever thought possible.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.