Digital First Series: The Tech-Enabled Agent
Our increasing reliance on digital platforms and tech-based applications is impossible to ignore. The ability of smart tech to streamline complex or highly repetitive tasks, is perfectly-suited to tackle the unique challenges of the real estate industry. The question is how?
With literally thousands of property-focused products in the market already, and more on the way, industry experts warn that #techfatigue in real estate is on the rise. The first all-important question to answer is how these innovations can provide value. As an agent, your time is precious. It is often best spent building relationships with clients, and sharing expertise.
Finding The Right Tech
The challenge for agents looking to embrace the benefits offered by innovative tech, comes in filtering the mass of options suddenly available to them. Categorizing Apps in terms of the benefits they offer helps to align tech-adoption with your objectives. The most useful Apps will usually be those designed to improve agenting, by amplifying an existing skill set or adding new capabilities. As we identified earlier, one of the key ways to do the former is through saving the agent time.
In our research with real estate agents, we found the following often coming out on top in terms of their requirements from tech:
- Any product that can reliably automate repetitive tasks. If this saves as little as 30 minutes a day, what difference could those 10 extra hours every month make to your output?
- Products that can reliably handle delivering regular tasks - like sharing results with clients. Guaranteed delivery of promised assets to clients, even in the middle of your busiest week? Sounds good to us.
- Smart products that help to share existing content with relevant audiences. These shortcuts can help to build overall traffic to your website without time-consuming editing and formatting.
- Products that help to build your brand - either your agency or your individual brand. This can save valuable time promoting yourself on other platforms, will help to build trust, and ultimately give your listings more appeal.
Let’s Go?
With the property market being so diverse, and brokerages and property agents being so different, it’s unlikely that one platform or technology will answer all your objectives in one go. The secret for the truly tech-enabled agent is to align their tech-adoption with their objectives.
Step 1. They start with the big, space-creating applications that will free up time and relieve pressure on their schedule - through automation of repetitive or regular tasks. This will help in preparing for step 2.
Step 2. Look to the areas with the most opportunity for improvement - The website? The social media strategy? Where could a calculated change make the biggest difference?
Step 3. They step back to assess, acknowledging the initial objectives may have shifted after implementing successful changes in steps 1 and 2.
Step 4. With steps 1 and 2 operating successfully to provide and protect essential growth, they can now look to implement smaller solutions that address specific issues to further add value.
If you’re enjoying our “Digital First Series” - join us November 8th-10th for a free, online event
Real Conf. 2021 - Adopting a Digital-First Strategy
Exploring how property firms can harness the power of digital to grow reach, revenues and market share.
