Written by Wes Snow, president of Ascendix Technologies
Efficiency is the cornerstone of success in the real estate industry. However, many real estate professionals may struggle to maintain efficiency in the face of labor-intensive tasks that consume valuable time and resources. From inputting information to juggling spreadsheets, these tasks can hinder productivity and impede transaction timelines.
Fortunately, with the rise of technology, digitalization, and AI, agents can bid farewell to inefficiency and embrace a future where automation reigns supreme. Cutting-edge innovations can simplify the lives of real estate agents by optimizing the outdated way of handling tasks and streamlining the operations.
In this article, we are going to discuss the most labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks of real estate agents and introduce the ways technology can improve real estate operations, making them more efficient and optimized.
1. Keeping Track of Clients and Deals
Many agents still do this in the old-fashioned way – by putting the information about all clients, including names, contacts, and deals they are interested in, on an unpretentious Excel spreadsheet. It might even be a matrix with colors and formulas on the Excel sheet, which might prove effective at the beginning of your business.
Ultimately, tracking information in this way becomes arduous and tedious because inputting client details and updating deal statuses is done manually, which quickly takes up all agent’s valuable time. Moreover, even if spreadsheets are good for keeping information, they are not convenient for retrieving the data, sorting it based on the set parameters, filtering, or finding information about a deal 5 years ago. Typically, the agent must scroll through thousands of records or remember the client’s exact details to recall the essence of the deal.
Tracking clients and deals may be simplified using software, either a basic free tool like Zoho CRM or a comprehensive real estate CRM like AscendixRE or Buildout. Both types, whether simple or real estate-focused, provide structured databases where agents can easily input and access details about their clients, such as property preferences, requirements, and transaction history. Also, sorting and filtering functionalities allow you to find specific records fast, saving valuable time and ensuring efficiency. But most crucial is that all your data within a CRM becomes interconnected and live.
2. Calculating Agent’s Commissions
Calculating agent commissions is a crucial yet time-consuming task. It might be repetitive as well as difficult, still it is absolutely required for the company to understand how much they made on each deal. The manual process of tallying commissions based on sales figures and contract terms can be prone to errors and consume valuable time due to its difficulty and sometimes large scale.
This complex process can be streamlined and made more accurate with the advent of automation and digital technologies. Modern CRM systems have the possibility to simplify this labor-intensive task and make it become a thing of the past.
They typically integrate robust features such as automated commission tracking, which accurately records transactions and calculates commissions based on predefined rules and agreements inserted by the user. This way, complicated calculations are left for the technology, which can deal with them even better than humans, saving effort and time for agents.
3. Generating Marketing Materials
Marketing materials like email templates, appealing property flyers, and attractive images play a crucial role in showcasing properties to potential buyers or tenants. Unfortunately, the process of creating marketing content can be labor-intensive and time-consuming, often involving manual inputting of property details, uploading photos, and formatting text.
Moreover, not everyone has a creative personality and vivid imagination, which is why generating several dozen similar property brochures or emails to possible tenants will feel like a horrible burden. With the appearance of technology, especially generative AI, the task has become much easier.
Generative AI like ChatGPT or Dall-e can create various types of content requested through the chatbot prompt – from cold email texts to property descriptions and summaries. Furthermore, some advanced CRMs have an in-built document generation tool which allows agents to create marketing materials, like emails, property flyers and overviews, as well landing pages, without even leaving the platform, leave alone spending money on extra software.
4. Team Management and Productivity Tracking
Real estate companies may face numerous challenges when it comes to managing teams and tracking productivity. From assigning duties to tracking progress, these tasks require meticulous attention to detail and can be time-consuming when managed manually.
Agents often rely on spreadsheets or handwritten notes to keep track of team activities, which can lead to inefficiency in team’s work, overlapping tasks, or errors. Team members may find themselves juggling multiple responsibilities, from coordinating client meetings to tracking their performance, which will then cause burnout and decreased productivity.
This can be avoided by introducing an organized system of task management. It will help the team to understand who is responsible for the deal, at which stage every deal is, which deal requires more attention, when the appointment with the client is, and hundreds of other minor things it is usually hard to keep in mind simultaneously.
5. Generating Property Comps
Real estate agents rely on property comps to determine accurate market values for their listings. However, manually generating comps can be a time-consuming and tedious process, often involving hours of research and data analysis. Agents must search for comparable properties, collect data on recent sales and listings, and analyze market trends to arrive at an accurate valuation.
Technology can be used to leverage data analytics and machine learning algorithms to identify comparable properties and generate reports. By automating this task, agents save valuable time and resources while ensuring accurate and reliable property valuations.
In conclusion, real estate professionals may face various challenges in their work, from disorganized operations to inconvenient and labor-intensive processes of client management. The reality is, though, that technology like CRM software can help optimize these and many other tasks and improve both the quality of the job and the efficiency of the agent.
