Paperless Real Estate Sales Professional Series – Customer Relationship Management

The next issue in our Paperless Real Estate Sales Professional Series addresses mobile CRM. You may or may not currently use a CRM - not all real estate sales professionals are, but those who do enjoy increased efficiency and sales as a result. This is why we decided to include a review of mobile CRM as the last blog in our Paperless Real Estate Sales Professional Series.

What is CRM? CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. Wikipedia defines CRM as “a system for managing a company's interactions with current and future customers. It often involves using technology to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.”

CRM has historically been delivered through software that you can access on your computer, the introduction of the cloud has also seen the emergence of cloud-based CRM. There are a vast number of real estate specific CRM, but is having a CRM on your desktop outdated, especially in this age of mobile technology?

Apps like ViMO have enabled real estate sales professionals to have CRM access on the go through their tablet. A CRM helps you keep track of your clients and prospects. Using your ViMO mobile CRM you can database information like the client’s birthdate, occupation, interests, personal anniversaries, anniversaries related to the home, names and ages of children, what their current home has and what their dream home would have, mortgage details, names of referral sources and much more…

By keeping this information stored in your ViMO app, you can now email-market to your clients easily by sending out:

·         Newsletters

·         Cards and calendars

·         Happy birthday messages

·         Anniversary messages

·         Congratulations through life’s milestones

Instantly you become more accessible and organized. Keep in touch and increase overall customer retention and increase promoters while being completely paperless.

Say no! Say no to flyers, paper cards, stamps, and letters, and embrace this new digital age that actually levels the playing field.

Customer relationship management is a crucial part of staying in touch, building vast and stable networks, and keeping clients happy. To find out more about ViMO’s CRM, please visit www.myvimo.ca today.

The Real Estate Sales Professional Brand – Does What You Know Really Matter?

This is an interesting topic. We have previously blogged on the topic of the real estate sales professional brand in connection with their brokerage’s brand, but what about perception of the real estate sales professional’s brand as a profession.

Some have written on this topic and whether industry best practices have begun to craft what one would represent as a brand in simply being a real estate sales professional.

Seth Godden offers our favourite definition of a brand in the context of professional branding: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.” http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/define-brand.html

Not only is that a great definition of what a brand is, it also highlights how brand perception can make or break an individual’s success.

An industry where professionals are not organized, aligned or following best practices is likely to establish a negative brand perception for the industry as a whole. There are many examples of industries where consistent business practices across the board have led the consumer to have a pre-conceived notion of what their experience will be before even picking up the phone.

Fortunately, most real estate sales professionals in Ontario conduct themselves with the highest in ethics and professional standards. OREA, RECO and other membership bodies have done a lot to support and shape what could be the perception of the real estate sales professional’s brand.

What would you like the public’s perception of the real estate sales professional as a profession to be? We don’t mean good or bad - we are talking attributes. We look forward to your thoughts.

Visiting a House in the Winter is Like Online Dating – How You Can Avoid Surprises

In the age of selfies and online dating, the internet can be full of surprises! Have you ever met someone online and they did not look as they advertised, or maybe they did, but once you got to know them more deeply, you learned that there were things about them that you did not like that much. Where are we going with this? It’ll make sense in a minute.

Morphing into an analogy on real estate, when you take your clients to see properties during the winter, it can be difficult to see what is under the snow. Not just on the outside of the home but also in the neighbourhood. In fact, getting a sense for the neighbourhood is extremely difficult, especially north of the GTA where there is more snow during the winter.

The winter with the cold and snow is one major reason why many people wait to buy and/or sell their homes until the spring. Not good news for you because you need to still move properties – snow or no snow.

Showing properties in the snow

The beauty of mobile technology is that you can now do more when you are out with your client. If you are showing clients properties when there is a lot of snow on the ground, there is a lot you can do to overcome this challenge!

·         You can run a report on the property that includes past sales and you may be able to retrieve pre-winter imagery.

·         You can look at aerial imagery to look at the property from above and identify things that may be desirable or undesirable to a client but are otherwise covered by snow.

·         You can look at Street View imagery to see not only the home from the street but also the surrounding properties.

·         Crossing your fingers that that Google truck passed the property when it wasn’t covered in snow, you can actually drop yourself onto the street on Google Maps, right from your tablet and virtually walk around the neighbourhood.

Running an open house in the snow

When people attend your open house, they may be thinking that they can’t see much outside as a result of the snow, but may not bother to voice that it is the reason that they may make the decision to buy once the snow melts and they can see more.

·         Be prepared – ask your clients for family photos outside of the home in different seasons – also photos at local parks and around the neighbourhood. Have them loaded on your tablet to show the client more.

·         Tend to outside – ensure that your client has removed as much snow from the front of the property as possible. The front steps, patio, driveway, walkways and sidewalk if there is one. If there is a deck out back, shovel and salt it. If there is a walkway leading from the front of the house to the back, ensure that the client has shoveled it and salted it as well.

·         Use your tools – Leverage the same tools you would when showing a property to help the prospective buyer visualize the home and community, making them potentially more comfortable to make an offer.

Help your buyer avoid an online dating style disaster by letting them know everything there is to know about the property they are considering starting a long term relationship with.

For more tips or to leverage everything ViMO has to offer as far as making winter showings a breeze, please visit www.myvimo.ca today. 

Paperless Real Estate Professional Series – Representing a Seller Paperlessly

Our next issue in our Paperless Real Estate Professional Series deals with the flow associated with representing a seller. We all know that the process of representing a seller is far different from representing a buyer. Your client’s expectations will be different and because the seller pays the commission, you will have to onboard your client slightly differently. 

This blog will take you through how you can leverage the most current technology to navigate the entire process of managing a new customer and listing – paperlessly. This relies on you having access to the ViMO mobile app.

You are contacted by a client. The first thing you do is prepare a profile for them in your ViMO app.

Next, before going out to meet with them, you need to ensure that the information disclosed to you is accurate and that the price they want for the house is reasonable.

You proceed to GeoWarehouse and perform an Enhanced Sales Report to look at: The sales history, registered mortgages and sales comparables. Everything checks out – the client has enough equity to cover their closing costs but the market value of the home seems slightly less than what the client indicated.

You set-up a meeting with your client to accept the listing.

At the meeting, you pull out your iPad and access your notes with respect to the sales comps you reviewed that indicated that maybe a lesser list price is best. The client advises you that there are other sales in the area that are higher and a neighbour listed for much higher than them and sold their home. To help educate the client, you pull out your tablet again and call up the property in question in ViMO – you are able to show your client that while the list price was much higher, they actually sold far under list and were on the market for much longer than they should have been. Impressed – the client indicates they want to list with you.

Immediately you generate a listing agreement in ViMO and the client signs electronically, on the spot.

The following day you register the listing on MLS and ViMO. The client lives a little bit out of the way so you are not expecting a bidding war – this one may take a couple of weeks to sell.

Not too long after the property was listed, you are electronically messaged by another real estate sales professional in ViMO. They have a client interested in seeing your client’s home – you book the showing.

The following day – boom, an offer comes through. Because the other real estate sales professional is also using ViMO, he transmits the electronically signed offer to you via ViMO to review with your client. You in turn electronically forward the offer to your client via ViMO.

Using technology to reduce or eliminate the paper makes you faster, able to offer a higher level of service, and saves you money on paper, toner, faxes and trips going back and forth to see your client.

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for the final blog in the Paperless Real Estate Professional Series, which will deal with mobile apps and customer relationship management – stay tuned!

For more on saving time and money by going paperless, please visit www.myvimo.ca.