In this week’s real estate sales and technology news we look at How to be the most productive Real Estate Agent on your block in 5 easy steps, 5 Mistakes for Real Estate Technology Selection & Strategy, The Cutting Edge Jedi Trick for Real Estate Lead Response and the Quickest Way to Clean Up Your Inbox.
How to be the most productive Real Estate Agent on your block in 5 easy steps
Is time going faster? No, seriously. There never seems to be enough minutes in the day. I know I’m not the only one thinking that. MarketLeader just posted a great article on productivity for Real Estate Agents. Here are some of the top tips to help you take your time management to the next level.
- Schedule Prospecting First – Agents often make the mistake of prospeciting only when they have nothing else to do. Make it a top priority.
- Set goals not deadlines – Set your objective to have 10 conversations with new prospects. Don’t say I’m going to make phone calls for 2 hours. Make it tangible.
- Have a Business Plan – Create a structure for yourself to follow. If your plan is vague, you will get vague results.
- Eliminate Distractions – Yes, Facebook. Yes, Twitter. No excuses. For more eliminating distractions suggestions check out MarketLeader’s original article.
- Delegation, Delegation, Delegation – Your time is valuable. Don’t have your own assistant? You can work with other agents to share one or engage a virtual assistant at Zirtual, NeedTo, Odesk, or Elance. Focus on the tasks that only you can do. Ones that are directly going to close a sale.
For more productivity boosters to help you work smarter check out the Trulia blog and check out our Trending Tuesday article for the Top Productivity Tools for Real Estate. And for even more tips watch below Realtor.com & AGbeat’s Google+ Hangout on Real Estate Productivity which includes 52 Real Estate Productivity Tools You Can’t Miss.
5 Crucial Mistakes for Real Estate Technology Selection & Strategy
Inman just posted an interesting article addressing the rarely discussed “how to” process of Real Estate Technology selection and strategy. The 5 mistakes that brokerages often make in this area are: Lack of research, lack of long-term strategy, distrusting vendors, viewing technology as an expense, and a failure to evangelize.
Lack of Research – Usually one person is assigned in a brokerage to research and select the appropriate technology. Often this is an IT person but not necessarily someone who will be using the software every day. Consider interviewing current users of the software and by all means check references. This is consistently overlooked by brokers in the selection process.
Lack of a clear long-term strategy – Often brokers will not have a long-term strategic technology plan and are only thinking of quick tactical fixes. For more info on how to create a strategic technology plan & for an in depth study of each mistake, check out Inman’s original article.
The Cutting Edge Jedi Trick for Real Estate Lead Response ….using only an iPhone
You thought you had a hot new internet lead and now days later your emails have gone unanswered. That mounting excitement of possibility has now slowly started to drift away like an abandoned life preserver in the Pacific as the minutes tick on. Luckily for you, Tech Savvy Agent has just published the secret iPhone trick to break through the lead response “I’m interested, I’m not interested” barrier. While someone may provide a 555-1234 phone number or no phone number at all on your opt in form, they will always provide an email address. Here is a cutting edge strategy to turn that email into a text message for any lead that uses an iPhone or iPad.
More and more agents are leveraging texting in their business from responding to internet leads with a text. Why? Texting has an average “open rate” of almost 100%. Think about it, how many texts are currently unopened on your phone right now? How many emails? Right?
Next time you receive a lead with only an email address. Type that address into your iMessage on your Apple desktop, iPhone or iPad. When someone buys any Apple product, they always register with their email address which is linked to their Apple ID. So this allows you to text their email, and it will show up on their mobile device as a TEXT MESSAGE! Check out Tech Savvy Agent’s original article with screenshots on how to tell whether your lead is an Apple customer or not.
Clearview’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Unroll.me
I can’t tell you how many marketing & real estate email subscriptions I am subscribed to. For a long time they were holding my inbox hostage. Until I discovered the quickest way to clean up my inbox: Unroll.me. Unroll.me is a powerful yet incredibly simple free tool that identifies all of your email subscriptions and allows you to quickly unsubscribe from unwanted subscription lists & consolidate all of the subscriptions that you actually want to read. You can run it once and quickly unsubscribe from 100s of subscriptions with a press of a button. Go ahead, do it. And breathe a sigh of relief…
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