- Respond to leads within five minutes, follow up relentlessly and market open houses thoroughly. If you're not mastering these things, switch up your system.
Looking for ways to spark major real estate business growth? Before you start making big changes, consider tweaking a few of your current practices.
Martin Bouma
Martin Bouma did just that and has managed to grow his business by 25 percent or more for two consecutive years.
Last year, Bouma’s team of 14 people sold 315 houses. Read on for three of the tweaks that helped Bouma boost his team’s production to such an impressive figure. To hear them all, listen to the podcast below.
Improve your team’s lead response
If you aren’t calling your leads within five minutes, your conversion odds drop drastically. In fact, according to a Lead Response Management study, you’re 100 times more likely to contact a lead successfully in 5 minutes or less than you are at 30 minutes.
By not responding to leads quickly, you’re essentially throwing them away.
Once Bouma realized how important it is to respond to leads quickly, he sat down with his team and had a serious discussion.
He told his agents he was unwilling to spend a dollar more on marketing until they were able to respond to real estate leads in an acceptable amount of time.
Adjust your follow-up strategy
A common complaint about real estate agents is that they have poor follow-up skills. Bouma says this isn’t entirely untrue.
It’s not that agents don’t care about following up, it’s just that they tend to be busy. Despite their best intentions, most agents simply get distracted and are unable to follow up as quickly as their clients would like.
With that in mind, Bouma decided to shift follow-up responsibilities away from his agents. He asked his administrative employees to follow up with existing clients instead.
This made it easier for his agents to focus on what they do best and improved his clients’ satisfaction levels.
Utilize the best tool for real estate business growth
With all of the marketing strategies and services available to agents these days, it’s easy to lose track of what works. The best marketing tool for real estate business growth is and always has been listings.
Although listings may not produce as many leads as a lead-subscription service can, the percentage of quality leads they generate is so much higher.
To maximize the number of high-quality leads generated by his team’s listings, Bouma has agents put extra effort into marketing open houses.
In addition to sending invitations to neighbors the week prior to an open house, agents are also expected to call around the area to get extra exposure with potential sellers.
Interested in other ways to grow your real estate business? Be sure to listen to the complete podcast with Martin Bouma.
Pat Hiban is the author of the NYT bestselling book “6 steps to 7 figures: A Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Destiny,” the founder of online real estate sales training site Rebus University, and the host of Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, an agent-to-agent real estate podcast with Hiban Digital in Baltimore, Maryland. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
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