The digital age has transformed nearly every aspect of our lives. Digital marketplaces, online courses, video conferencing, social networks, movies, and music streaming—all these online activities have become an integral part of our everyday routine.
The same goes for buying property: buyers can now search online by location and neighborhoods, take virtual tours, and look at a bunch of potential houses while sitting at home and drinking morning coffee.
And you, as a real estate agent, also want to work as quick and efficient as you can to keep up with the newest digital trends and stand out from the rest of the competitors.
No wonder that 48% of all real estate companies cited keeping up with technology as one of the biggest challenges that will face their firm in the next two years.
Digital technology brings not only challenges but also many amazing opportunities. Whether it's for real estate or, for instance, technology for law firms, it comes with many benefits. This also includes property accounting, which helps landlords and real estate businesses manage finances from any location. So, today, we’ve decided to talk about how you can use these opportunities to the fullest and make your real estate business more efficient.
Lead Generation and Management
Digital technologies and online presence create new horizons for lead generation in real estate. You can generate leads through all types of channels – for starters, social media, a CRM, a company website, a newsletter, an MLS site, online listings, and more. Just look at the data below – impressive, right?
After you’ve generated online leads, real estate digital tools come into place. New leads, active leads, and scheduled appointments are all at your fingertips and just waiting for you to start working.
Tools
Follow Up Boss is a CRM that boasts leading systems and technology to help you to respond faster and nurture your leads, turning more contacts into listings. It focuses on lead distribution, which makes the platform useful to real estate teams and brokerages. You can manage email, lead auto-responders, and see social information all in one place.
CallAction is a marketing automation platform, which can be used for your offline or online lead generation efforts, to respond to inquiries from the three primary forms of communication – phone calls, emails, and text messages. It allows you to easily capture, track, and respond to your clients for increased engagement and conversions.
Online Presence
Being present online, everywhere your clients are, allows you to reach a wider audience and find more prospects. Statistics speak for itself: 40% of Millennials (who make up the largest group of first-time home buyers at 65%) searched online for information about homes.
Another interesting fact: 58% of Millennials and 46% of Generation X found their home on a mobile device.
So, prepare your company website, social media accounts, online listings, and brochures for a great reading experience on any device. It can give you a nice competitive edge and lay the foundation for all your sales activities.
Digital Format
Digitizing your marketing and property brochures, listings, and presentations is a great way to speed up communication with prospects and make it more efficient. Here are the benefits that it can give:
- Online content is easy to send over email. Just imagine some of those large PDFs that are impossible to attach to an email. So, sending a link instead of a file is a huge advantage.
- Document tracking allows you to learn exactly what happens to your documents when you send them: when the document was opened, how many times it was opened, and what pages were the most popular. Lead capture form is a great way to do it. It helps you get a sense of the prospect’s engagement and know when it’s the best time to follow up.
- The digital format helps you to present your listings and brochures in a professional way and create a nice reading experience with the content. It is a crucial moment because the sales materials are actually studied and referred to, not just scanned.
- Professional presentation of listings and brochures allows them to stand out from the rest of the competitors. The real estate industry is still on its way to digitizing documents, so you have the chance to be among the first. Don’t miss out on this chance!
Tools
FlippingBook Online is a service for converting PDFs into online documents. It helps you create interactive sales brochures, proposals, and listings that are easy to share and open on any device. FlippingBook Online allows you to track how your documents perform, create unique trackable links for your brochures, and add a lead capture form to qualify high quality leads. According to our research, 90% of emails submitted through the FlippingBook Online lead capture form are valid. Thus, you get high-quality leads right from your flipbook!
Check out a short video to learn how FlippingBook can help you outshine your real estate competitors with interactive brochures and newsletters:
Virtual Tours
Going beyond photos, digital technologies allow buyers and sellers to take a virtual tour of any property, making it feel as if you were walking through the space in person. It can make the whole process much more efficient and people are more likely to purchase the property.
Tools
Matterport is even more than real estate descriptions. It allows you to create virtual tours easily – from photos to floor plans, in 3D and VR. This 3D media platform also helps navigate, modify, and share interactive 3D and virtual reality spaces for multiple industries.
Zillow is the real estate and rental marketplace that is dedicated to empowering consumers with data, inspiration, and knowledge about the houses, and connecting them with the best local professionals. So, you need to be there if you want to be discovered, because Zillow also offers the ability to advertise as an agent on their website.
E-signing Services
New technologies can be a good way to make paperless real estate transactions, save time, and stay organized. From secure and legal e-signatures to personal task lists, this type of technology is not only improving efficiency but also changing how agents respond to their clients.
Tools
DocuSign allows you to handle the paperwork from anywhere. This makes it convenient to get signatures and manage your contracts from one location. By using DocuSign, you don’t have to worry about keeping your books organized and forgetting a signature. If you forget to get something signed, just send the contract off.
PandaDoc is known for its streamlined user interface and ease of use. Its eSignature solution is offered as part of a larger document management tool that includes drag-and-drop form integration, automated workflows, online documents with an online notary, and full audit histories.
Jotform Sign is a great tool you can use to collect electronic signatures by creating custom legally binding documents. Start to create a document using one of 600+ templates and customize it to match your brand. Create an approval flow and automate your processes with cloud integrations, embed your documents in your website, and get notified whenever a change is made.
Jump-Start Your Real Estate Business with the New Digital Technologies
The shift to digital technologies represents an enormous opportunity to you as a real estate agent – it helps to increase your efficiency, provide better customer experience, and close more deals successfully.
It means that you can now go beyond standard sales tactics and make more impact on your prospects and clients.
Just don’t be afraid of the unknown. The good news is that digital technologies are here to make your life easier, and there’s no better time to start going digital than now. So, use this chance and get out there!
