Making Your Clients Happy Will Future Proof Your Real Estate Business

I had the pleasure last week of attending Inman's Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. I have a soft spot for the Connect conference as it was in many ways a showcase for ActiveRain in our early years (We even won an Inman Innovator Award for Most Innovative Media Site in 2007). The ability, as a fledgling company, to connect with some of the movers and shakers in the real estate industry was a rare experience that we are glad to have been able to have.

But having come back to Inman after a few years of not attending, I decided to attend this show from the perspective of a real estate agent, not someone in a small real estate start up looking to get connected.

The tagline for the show was 'Be Future Proof, Own Tomorrow'. So I set out to see what I could learn about future proofing a real estate business. The first thing that began to strike me is that the technology I expected to see wasn't all that transformative. Sure, there were some cool products that I came across (I wrote about a few of them here), but there wasn't the Trulia and Zillow type companies that promise to change the face of real estate.

(Which I should add is hardly unexpected........)
What I ended up learning throughout the three days was that the real estate industry seems to be in a place that's more about what the consumer actually wants and less about the technology we can provide to make it happen for them. Does that make sense? Let me try to explain

Hear It Direct

It was appropriate that one of the first panels of the show was the Hear It Direct panel. If you're not familar with Hear it Direct, it's basically a panel of consumers being asked questions about what they expect in the real estate process. What a shocking concept, right? Sue Adler (and a few others, but we had Sue at a RainCamp talking a little about this, so I'll use her) is one of the co-founders of this concept. She wanted to get more in tune with the experience of being a real estate consumer in today's market, so she created the idea of bringing consumers on stage and asking them real questions about the process.
As real estate practioners how much time do you spend getting more acquainted with what your clients actually expect. Here's the thing about a panel like this..........the consumers fielding the questions might not be YOUR type of client. So for me, the big 'Aha' was......Do this with your clients. ABSOLUTELY DO THIS WITH YOUR CLIENTS.
What would this look like? Find five recent clients. Maybe one is yours and the other 4 are clients of four other agents in your office. Invite them into the office, invite all the agents in your market who care to learn more about what clients actually want.......then ask the client. Seriously, what a novel concept. Sure, some of you probably do surveys with your clients (if you don't, RealSatisfied is a great survey tool you can use to survey your clients), but how many of you sit down with them after closing and take serious inventory of how your performance matched their expectations. The reality is, not many agents are doing this. It's less a matter of what was said by the people on that stage at Real Estate Connect than it is a matter of getting inside the head of YOUR clients.....because like I said, the folks that were onstage for Hear It Direct in San Francisco were not your clients.

Getting Your Customers to Rave About You

Morgan Remmers, Manager of Local Business Outreach for Yelp did a presentation during the Agent Success Track that discussed getting managing your online reputation. Of course, every client you do business with comes to you because you were highly recommended by their best friend, mother, or cousin, right? Well, not exactly. Which means that people are out there checking up on you from time to time to see if you are the right agent for them.
(As a total side note, the Inman Innovator Award for Real Estate Agent App, Tool or Vendor went to AgentAce. What does AgentAce do? They attempt to match consumers with an agent based on performance metrics. In my mind, it makes sense that if they want to be really successful in the long term, one of those metrics would be client satisfaction and they'll have to get that data from somewhere......so hopefully your clients are willing to rave about your service online)
She had some very concrete advice that I thought was solid (get it? Concrete, solid). She framed that advice around the idea that "word of mouth happens about your business whether you like it or not". So how do you manage it online? The first thing to do would be to focus on five places. Which places would those be? Do a google search for 'seattle real estate agent reviews' and see which sites come up. Those are the ones you would want to get reviews on.
For some of those places, it would be alright to ask for a review. For others, it might not be appropriate. Her advice was to make it easy for people to be able to review your service but don't outright ask them to do it. From my perspective this was advice geared toward reviews on Yelp, because they have a sophisticated system that could filter out a review from someone that has never used Yelp before and was only going there to review you. But for other places, like Zillow, it would seem to me to make sense to ask for your past clients to leave you a review.......or at the very least make it really easy to do it. Like a link at the bottom of your email congratulating them on getting everything moved into the new house.

Going Above and Beyond What Your Clients Expect

To me, it seemed like there was a common thread that was sewn through many of the panels and discussions. Hear It Direct was a great way to have it brought to light by the real end consumer in our business, that person who just bought or sold their home. That thread is that you can have a great business by figuring out what clients expect, and then outperforming those expectations. In one of the panels on the Agent Success Track, there were a bunch of top producers sharing what they are doing to close deals. I can't remember which of the panelists said it, but she (pretty sure it was a woman as most men don't have this much insight, haha) talked about setting expectations. You can't exceed someone's expectations unless you set the expectations from the beginning. As I recall, the comment was made as she talked about managing her clients and not letting her clients manage her. No amount of technology is going to be able to manage your relationship with the client.
At the end of the day, if you want to have satisfied clients that rave about you online, that share their experience with their friends and family and that really become a champion for your business, you have to manage that relationship. And the first part of managing a relationship is setting the expectations. How many of you have a checklist of what a client can expect from you and share it with the client at the outset of your relationship? And then how many of you communicate to the client when each of those expectations is met during the process?
(Another not so subtle plug for my friend Ben's listing management tool, Brivity. It can't help you set the expectations, but it can sure help you communicate the performance on those expectations to your seller. And I only share this with you because when we had our brokerage I absolutely would have used this tool in our business)

The Rest Will Trickle Down

Now don't get me wrong, there was all kinds of other talk at Connect about the future of real estate. There was a great panel with some of the heavy hitters in the online listing space (Trulia, Zillow, REALTOR.com) where the discussion of an API that allows vendors to connect products was suggested. There was a session about some of the new marketing avenues available. There was a session about getting better conversion on your website. There was a session about how 'Big Data' is changing the industry. There was even a session about robots and how they might change real estate (would you ever let a robot show houses for you? And if you did, would you program your robot to say 'This is the kitchen'? Ummm, don't you think we know that already Robot! We can clearly see the fridge, sink and dishwasher).
Here's the thing with all that stuff.........I'm just not sure how applicable it is to an agent out in the field practicing real estate on a day to day basis.
I mean, I get why agents attend. They want to keep their brain primed to be ready for these changes. They want to have an open mind when things start actually having an impact on sales. But as one of the smartest people I know in this space once told me about how he built his business......"I just find what other people are already doing and adapt it to make it work for me".
Believe me, by the time robots are actually having a real impact on real estate sales, there will be 5000 robot gurus in the industry to teach you how to make it work in your business. Until then, focus on making the clients you have super satisfied and you'll carve out a nice little spot yourself in this industry.
All that being said, if you ever want to get a good sense for what is on the horizon, or you have an idea that you would like vetted by some of the smartest people in our industry, there is no better place than Real Estate Connect. Maybe we'll see you in January in New York City.

Friends, followers, and connections are the way of the future.