Real estate is a relationship-based business. You’ve likely heard this before: it’s a statement that is ingrained into the core beliefs of many real estate professionals. But one of the most common mistakes many professionals make is they focus too much on the benefit the relationship with a prospect or client can provide for themselves, versus focusing on the true benefit the relationship causes for the individual they are working with. For some, this mistake is a choice, but for most, it doesn’t happen intentionally. Either way, this mistake can cause you to lose business!
Here are four tips on how you can strengthen relationships with prospects and clients to ensure you are consistently providing them with value and a world-class experience.
Tip #1: Ask good questions
The most successful real estate professionals ask the best questions. You need to get to the root of what each person truly cares about. What’s most important to them? Perhaps it’s time, finances, or location. It’s your role to build rapport with each person, identify the goals they have, determine their unique needs, pinpoint any challenges they may have, and ultimately, identify when and how you can help them with their real estate needs. If the time isn’t now, keep asking questions about how you can best stay in touch with them
Tip #2: Practice active listening
It’s not enough to simply ask good questions. You must truly listen to the answers. In society, we are taught many forms of communication. We are taught to read, write, and speak, but one form of communication most people aren’t proactively taught to do is to listen. Harvard Business Review notes average person only listens at 25% efficiency. This means that they are missing out on 75% of the information others share with them. People want to feel heard, and by tuning into your listening skills, just think how much more impactful you could be by picking up on the additional 75% of information clients share. Small tweaks make a big difference!
Tip #3: Provide relevant value
Implementing the first two tips opens up the perfect opportunity for you to provide information that is 100% relevant to that individual based on what you learn! When communicating, there are often two approaches. The first is that many agents will be excited to have a conversation with a prospect or client and will immediately start sharing all of the value they have to provide. The problem with this is that all of that information isn’t important to the individual and the conversation isn’t focused on their needs. The second approach is to ask good questions, truly listen to the answers and then introduce relevant and valuable information that you KNOW will resonate with them. Having relationship-based conversations means you keep the focus on the needs of the other individual, not trying to sell yourself.
Tip #4: Communicate consistently
You want to make sure you are staying top of mind for prospects and clients so that when they are ready to embark on the next step of their real estate journey, they think of you. Implement a system to consistently reach out to your database, providing information that is uniquely valuable to them.
Implementing these four tips will help you create stronger relationships and ultimately, close more business! But tracking all of these conversations and managing each relationship can be tough. The good news is that Elm Street is here to help! Try Elm Street’s Elevate CRM® FREE for 60 days.
Elm Street’s Elevate CRM® is for real estate professionals who are ready to grow through strategic lead generation and appointment setting services while continuing to nurture and support past and present clients. The #1 Social Media Marketing CRM in Real Estate helps automate and consolidate your daily tasks so that have more time to do what you do best, build relationships and sell more real estate!
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About Elm Street
Elm Street offers a growing portfolio of real estate technology and marketing services with the goal of providing one vendor and one point of contact, fully fused into one singular platform – Elevate – to capture and nurture more leads into closed business. Elm Street’s portfolio of products and services allows busy real estate professionals the ability to streamline and automate their marketing and day-to-day business objectives by offering high-end IDX websites, lead generation tools, a powerful CRM, email, social, text, and blog marketing automation, recruiting and retention tools, and more. To learn more, please visit ElmStreet.com.