5 Tips for Optimizing Your Real Estate Business

The real estate industry is comprised of 2 million real estate professionals—and 1.4 million of those with real estate licenses are also members of the National Association of Realtors. With that many options for current and potential homeowners to choose from, you must be efficient and stand out to be successful.

As a real estate agent, your responsibilities include finding all of your buyers and sellers, setting up showings and listings, organizing home photo shoots, attending all meetings, and managing any rental contracts you hold. Optimization is the key to having a successful real estate career. Here are five time-saving efficiency-boosting tips to help you succeed.

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• 5 Tips to Improve Your Real Estate Business’ Efficiency and Profitability
• OptimoRoute: Use Automated Route Planning to Boost Profits and Efficiency

5 Tips to Improve Your Real Estate Business’ Efficiency and Profitability

As a real estate agent, you are in a way a small business of one, and your time is quite literally your money. These five tips will help you save time on finding and managing buyers and sellers so you can increase your revenue, improve your average lead conversion rate, and nail your customer satisfaction for a more successful real estate business.

1. Focus on digital advertising and social media

Maintain your web presence so that internet users can find you when looking for someone to help them buy or sell a home. If you don’t, you may risk losing customers to your easier-to-find competition. In addition, those without profiles on popular social media platforms and real estate websites like Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor will lose on the easy ways to obtain customers that come from those apps.

If you are a broker, create a Facebook and LinkedIn page for your real estate business. If you are a real estate agent, check with your broker first, then create pages for yourself. Post each home you list or close, along with tips about the buying and selling process to offer value to potential customers looking at you and your page.

Finally, if your broker allows, creating a real estate website should be part of your business plan and marketing strategy. This website is where you can showcase your listings and availability as a real estate agent. But, don’t forget to follow all applicable laws; for example, showcase your brokerage and fair housing status with each listing.

2. Get involved in the community

Attend festivals, eat at local shops, and volunteer to get to know business owners (and potential clients). As a real estate agent, you represent people moving to and from the community. By law, this means understanding everything that a local would about the area, from new road construction to zoning changes.

However, it also means understanding the ins and outs of the community, from events to the best places to eat. Use the information you gather to inform potential home buyers of what they have to look forward to or what options they have during the home buying process—like home inspection services. Alternatively, take this as an opportunity to work on lead generation and find new buyers or sellers within the community you serve.

3. Frequently ask for referrals

Referrals are the most common way that home buyers and sellers find their real estate agents. Ask for reviews on Google, Facebook, and home selling apps (like Zillow) from past clients to increase your online presence, and so that future buyers and sellers can see that you’ve made customers happy. In addition, ask for those same clients to tell their friends and family about your offerings. However, it’s important to avoid offering a referral reward as that’s usually against the law. Instead, encourage your clients to refer you to others by letting them know it’s the main way you stay in business.

4. Use a CRM to organize prospects & clients

Take complete advantage of your local multiple listing service’s (MLS) customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities to track notes and keep track of potential and current buyers and sellers. Using the CRM feature already offered by your MLS and brokerage will keep you organized and able to run marketing campaigns, like email marketing, to reengage old customers.

The alternative is to pay for an extra service and hope they work together, write a list down by hand, or hope you remember—all of which add additional work to your already tight schedule. Since your broker and local real estate board likely require all documents to go through the portal, you’ll already have your contracts, contacts, and appointments in the system anyway. Use the other features to keep notes, send automated emails, follow up with old leads, and track potential leads to save time for new clients rather than note-taking.

5. Automate route planning & scheduling

Use a real estate route planner to plan your route effectively each day to minimize downtime between buyer showings, listing appointments, and meetings. One all-too-common issue many real estate agents face is downtime between showings and appointments. Not enough time to go to the office and do paperwork, but too much time to go to the next place right away. That’s because manual route planning (using options like Google Maps) often results in inefficiencies throughout the day.

You can obtain the ideal route by adding the times and locations of home showings, listing appointments, and other meetings to an automated router and scheduler. This lets you use the time between or after showings more efficiently—meet with tenants, create marketing campaigns, or find other homes for your seller.

OptimoRoute: Use Automated Route Planning to Boost Profits and Efficiency

As a successful real estate agent, you spend significant time each day driving between house showings and listings. In addition, if you are a real estate agent that manages rentals, you likely spend even more time on the road dealing with service calls and maintenance workers. Save time on driving and planning repair work with route optimization by OptimoRoute. Take advantage of these features to focus on growing your sphere of influence and getting new business.

Prioritize routes based on multiple factors

Each day, you have to plan your rental repairs, check-ins, showings, and listing photos based on any number of factors, including importance, tenant or owner availability, and your schedule. Just think, how many times have you forgotten about a personal appointment or skipped lunch to make a showing? Accounting for all these factors by hand is an arduous process that takes time and often results in mistakes.

When you use OptimoRoute, you can factor in lunch breaks and multiple schedules to make sure that all your commitments and personal needs are being accounted for in your daily schedule and driving route. For example, if you need to stop for lunch, you can set a timeframe for lunch and a location where you plan to stop (whether that’s home or your favorite eatery).

Service time windows and date range constraints

Make your driving schedule simpler and create clarity by setting service windows like attending listing photoshoots or meeting repair workers. Helping buyers and sellers leads to a complex plan that involves meeting people all over town. Add in rental management as you grow, and you could be driving across town multiple times per day.

OptimoRoute helps you spend less time on the road by inserting flexible appointments where they fit best based on the available service window and location. So, you end up driving fewer miles and spending more time working on closing deals or gaining new clients.

Integrate with your MLS system

Integrate OptimoRoute with your MLS system to maximize efficiency and automatically import open houses, showings, and appointments each day. Integrating OptimoRoute with your MLS CRM takes the manual labor out of planning your day—resulting in less time spent planning and less time wasted driving or waiting.

OptimoRoute features end-to-end integration with many CRM systems and can sync in seconds no matter how many stops, appointments, or contacts you have for the day or month. Our API (how the two systems connect) is programmable to have complete control over what comes through, collect real-time data, and even join other systems. For example, OptimoRoute can connect with your CRM, point-of-sale system, and property management software if you are a rental manager.

Maximize billable hours and jobs performed

Schedule more showings and get more done with the power of OptimoRoute. Our automated route planning and scheduling software will automatically move a new listing photoshoot from later in the day to between showings to open up the second half of your day for new sellers/buyers. This means you can take on more clients, earn more revenue, and grow as a real estate agent. Try OptimoRoute today for free for 30 days.