6 Ways Digital Home Management Platforms Help Agents Keep Clients Forever

Welcome back to our "Tips and Tricks Tuesday" series, which highlights articles around a monthly theme. October's theme is "Never Lose Another Client." Read on for tips and tricks on maintaining long-term relationships with your clients:

The real estate industry naturally focuses on finding active buyers and active sellers, which runs between 4 to 6 million home transactions in any given year. But what do agents, brokerages, and the industry do to help the other 115 million homeowners who either recently completed a transaction or are happy in their current home? The challenge for agents and brokers is staying relevant, providing additional value, and maintaining brand presence during the long-term span between transactions in the hope of getting repeat business.

Sending emails via a CRM wishing them a happy holiday is a nice gesture, but doesn't go very far. Sending them reports about market conditions in their neighborhood is nice, but not really relevant if they plan on living in their new home for five to seven years. Digital home management platforms are a relatively new concept that helps homeowners manage their home while providing agents and brokers with a way to never lose them.

Let's dive into six ways these new digital home management platforms work for agents and brokers.

Help Clients Actually Manage Their Largest Financial Asset

An agent's client just moved into and set up their new home. Now what value is the agent providing? Homeowners need a maintenance schedule with reminders over what tasks to do to minimize repair costs on the home's building materials, appliances, and equipment. They need to keep energy costs low by having a home that operates efficiently. Homeowners need guidance on how to budget and plan for home remodel projects  and advice on how to hire a contractor.

Homeowners need to budget and track their total cost to own the home, including insurance, property tax, utilities, mortgage, and other regular home services such as landscaping, pool maintenance, security monitoring and other services. Homeowners need to track their mortgage balance and their home equity to understand how their financial investment in their home is performing.

Digital home management platforms like HomeZada bring all these things together into a single platform that empowers homeowners to manage everything about their home in one place. Homeowners can also save all their documents about the home including closing docs, mortgage docs, insurance policies, receipts, invoices, etc. Proactive and personalized reminders and emails keep the homeowner engaged and knowledgeable on what and how to manage their home.

Help Homeowners Become Climate Resilient

Every homeowner across the country faces changing seasons and weather conditions that create risk for their home. How many agents have clients who have had to deal with hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, thunderstorms, deep freezes, blizzards, hail storms, flooding, heat waves, etc. over the last few years? Probably just about everyone.

Digital home management platforms such as HomeZada have integrated with the National Weather Service to provide real time alerts and push notifications based on your home's address of severe weather events that can significantly impact your home. In addition, every insurance company recommends a home inventory. Home management platforms provide homeowners an easy way to upload videos and photos and process it via AI to make sure your clients are properly insured and prepared in case disaster strikes and they need to file a claim.

Be Relevant, Personalized, and Engaging

Agents and brokers can build their branding inside of some digital home management platforms. Depending on the platform, the branding can be displayed on any device including desktops, tablets and mobile devices. This is important because homeowners, from millennials and gen z, expect mobile access while many boomers and seniors still prefer desktop access.

Digital home management platforms often times create personalized pre-populated data about their specific home at sign-up and send out regular monthly email and push notifications. This combination of personalized and relevant information keeps homeowners engaged, on average, two to three times per month where agents get the benefit of automated branding at every login and every email.

Be Innovative and Deliver AI to the Homeowner Clients

ChatGPT and other generative AI technology has exploded in the marketplace. Consumers and professionals know it will change the game but are not exactly sure how. Think about all the questions a homeowner has during the five to 10 years of owning their home — from home finances, home improvement projects, research on which brands and types of products to put into the home, to home maintenance questions and more.

HomeZada has integrated ChatGPT as a Home AI Assistant into its digital home management platform, empowering consumers who use it to become smarter homeowners. The benefit for agents and brokerages is that your brand is the one delivering the AI technology to your clients. You are the hero over multiple years, with no effort after the initial onboarding process.

Opportunity to Market Other Home Products and Services

Many brokerages offer other products and services such as insurance, mortgage, home warranty, and more either that are company owned or via a preferred partnership. Some digital home management platforms have built-in ad and content platforms that allow brokerages to market these other lines of business within the user interface. This gently influences engaged clients in the digital home management applications to do more business with the broker's companies and partners. You may not have won the first year of the customers home insurance or home warranty business, but ad content platforms mean you could get clients to switch and generate new business opportunity while they are still living in their current home.

Build Brand Preference for Future Listing Opportunities

All 120 million current homeowners in the US are potential leads to win when they decide it's time to sell their home. Some consumers are planning on selling in the next three months, or the next year, in three years or in 10 years. The real estate industry's challenge is how to get their brand in front of those current homeowners so when they are ready to sell, the brokerage and/or agent has built their brand preference in a value-added way.

Use digital home management platforms to help any current homeowner you are in contact with or in your marketing sphere. They all need these platforms to better manage, maintain, protect, and improve their largest financial asset. Brokerages and agents who use digital home management platforms will have built up a brand preference for several months or years and are likely to get a listing agreement because they have been helping homeowners manage their home for years before.

Summary

Homeownership is a lifecycle that never ends. It starts with buying your first home and owning it. Then comes the time to sell it and buy another one. This happens many times over the course of most people's lives. Agents and brokerages provide the core of their services for people buying and selling. But the owning phase is the longest in duration and one where consumers need help managing their homes, and the real estate industry needs to be value-added and relevant to keep clients for life.

John Bodrozic is the Co-Founder of HomeZada.