Is your estate agency a decade out of date?

Not keeping up with how the world is working and more importantly understanding the convenience required to do business with customers today can be dangerous. Each day, week, month, or year that your business remains the same with its processes and technology increases the gap between you and the businesses who are innovating and adapting to change, to a point where it cannot be closed.

Over the past decade, with the development of technology, social media and new generations who want more convenience, is your agency now out of date? In what areas do you work in the same way you did 10 years ago?

Binge worthy?

Do you produce content that is interesting, which you put onto your blog so your customer can binge whilst they are doing research before selling or letting their home? With the development of recording live TV, Netflix and YouTube, the brain has been trained to enjoy binging on content at a time which is convenient to them. If your blog only has a few articles randomly published throughout the year, what does that say about your business?

Are you social?

With 45 million people in the UK using social media, what lead generation do you do on these platforms that has become standard to everyday life? Have you replaced your traditional newspaper or mass leaflet spend with similar social media budgets? Just by being on these platforms, without paying, means you are already behind the companies who have made an investment and are spending money on them over the last few years. With this type of advertising being pay to play, social media platforms will place paid first ad’s in front of your customers.

Are you convenient?

Do you still send letters to confirm appointments out and post valuation appraisal reports to your customers meaning they must wait for these? Do you send out paper contracts in the post for people to sign? When was the last time you had to sign for something manually as most businesses now apply a digital document signing software? Why doesn’t your agency do this? Why are you still making your customers lives difficult?

Do you respond quickly? 

Do you have technology in place that whatever time of day, responds to all your enquiries or do they have to wait for you to reply at 9am the next morning when you reopen? Do you have the ability for them to tell you in a form about their circumstances late at night or when its convenient for them, or are they having to do this during work when you call or email them the next day trying to qualify them? Customers are looking for quick responses and an easy seamless process when making an enquiry so make sure you have something set up that does this.

There are many ways to change your estate or letting agency, to bring it into the modern world and these will increase as new generations come though, whether as new staff or customers – one things for sure, the points mentioned above are now just expected by your customers as standard. If your estate or letting agency is a decade out of date, you can guarantee your customers will find one that isn’t to work with.