Economy fluctuations, changing trends, advancing technology, demands of millennials, digitization all have added to the challenges of the real estate industry. The whole scenario has hit the agents and real estate market in a big way. It is a struggle for an agent to tackle the challenges in the competitive market.
Challenges are multiple. Right from inadequate listings to inability to use technology or referrals, managing lead generation costs to competing with non-traditional listing sites or markets. But these are not all. To add to it, there are issues of keeping up with home staging trends, implementing effective marketing strategies, and much more. And all this while keeping aligned and updated with the core areas of operation like legal issues, appraisals, valuation, market trends, etc.
A real estate agent today can’t just confine himself to his core area; they need to know a lot more about social media, sales, business development, and technology. All this while continuing to find new clients to help the business grow.
This is a struggle, and real estate agents need to find a solution to these challenges. The story walks you through the challenges a real estate agent faces and proposed solutions to those challenges.
5 Issues Every Real Estate Agent Must Tackle
The challenges are endless, but with some agility and creativity, those can be resolved. Following are 5 issues every real estate agent faces in their day-to-day dealing with clients across the market.
1. Low Inventory
Challenges: Low property inventory is a challenge for real estate agents, whether they are new entrants or seasoned players in the market. Since the entire business depends on inventory, a low volume of real estate listing leads to poor business and low income. It also hits the image of the company you represent when buyers come to your website looking for listings and don’t find enough options. It is important to ensure that you have sufficient listings with you.
Solution: The simple solution to this problem is that, if people don’t list with you, you need to look for listings. However, it is not as simple as it sounds. Concerted efforts are required for this.
- Get personal: Nurture relationships with old clients
- Network: Connecting with local businesses and people helps get more listings to your website
- Use referrals: Sellers often trust a referral from a stranger
- Look out for expired listing: look for homes that were listed but never got sold. Connect with the seller and find out the reasons for the house not being sold.
- Explore rental listing: Often properties that are listed for rent are meant for sale and because of some reasons, the seller did not list for sale. Find out the reasons.
- Leverage your listings: make an attractive ad, spread the word, etc.
2. Competition from Listing Portals
Challenges: With listing portals growing at a fast pace, buying and selling happening through apps and businesses turning online agents’ roles is getting limited. Even millennials prefer to do a home search online and may engage an agent at a much later stage. Services like Zillow, Homesnap, and Zoocasa have further added to the challenge. Competing with larger brands has its challenges.
Solutions: The solution lies in looking for ways and means to attract prospective buyers and sellers. An IDX site without listings will lack the potential to attract traffic.
- Invest in a website for your community: This will help you compete with larger brands and will prove more beneficial than an IDX site.
- Market yourself: Make your website attractive, put-up ads, list news, and events so that both buyers and sellers get inclined to visit you.
- Keep content updated: Keep site updated and relevant with listings collected from other directories and news sites.
- Demonstrate expertise: Even though people get information on a property from branded listing sites, they still look for the extra information that you can provide as a property expert.
- Build credibility: As more and more people identify you as a trustworthy source for information, your website popularity will grow, and search engines will index your pages.
- Build database: Start converting your visitors into subscribers building a solid database.
3. Adapting Technology
Challenges: Keeping up with the technology trend is a must stay in the real estate market, especially with the industry shifting towards online. Technological advancements have resulted in noteworthy changes in the functioning of buying and selling platforms. Things like algorithm update, data security, marketing automation, SEO, smart home technology, home staging, virtual tours, drones, CRM issues all require agents to be tech-savvy. The trick to staying in the business is to flow with the changing technology, but with technology advancing at a fast pace, it gets challenging. But the future belongs to realtors who adapt.
Solutions: As a realtor, your strengths are different, and you need to focus on your core business. Spending time and energy on technology-related aspects can be detrimental to your business, as this requires specialized skills.
- Understand what technology is workable in what context.
- Don’t move with the assumption that old will not work.
- Keep up with the times and stay informed about the latest technology trends within the industry.
- Understand the benefits the new technology will bring to your business before introducing it into your system.
- Like using the RESO Web API could be an efficient way to transport data in the real estate industry
- Partner with technology experts who can offer cost-effective solutions to your tech issues.
- Seek someone you can trust for tech advice and support.
4. Costly Lead Generation
Challenges: Lead generation, an important component for business growth in real estate, could hit the pockets hard. Lead generation itself is a challenge in the competitive real estate industry. There are multiple ways to generate leads, but the challenge remains the cost. Lead generation through CPC can be expensive. Google AdWords is also expensive, where major brands compete aggressively for desirable keywords. Social media has also reached global saturation. Digital advertising is getting expensive.
Solutions: You don’t always need expensive marketing strategies to get you leads that convert. Many cost-effective marketing strategies, if used effectively, give significant results.
- Increase your visibility through organic traffic. By using the keywords and implementing metadata, you can improve your website’s appeal with search engines.
- Utilizing the right keywords, metadata, and other SEO elements in your property listing site’s blog posts, videos, and other digital assets helps you to drastically boost your organic traffic.
- Invest in video marketing strategies.
- Leverage positive customer reviews. Have a customer feedback section on your website and post testimonials and videos with positive reviews on platforms like Zillow, Trulia, etc.
- Invest in cost-effective platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – Being more professional, LinkedIn attracts relevant traffic.
- Targeting existing leads in your database with custom audience features through Facebook ads turns out a cost-effective lead generation method.
- Establish a local presence and engage your customers through events, community service, newsletters, blogs, etc.
5. Cultivating a Database
Challenges: Cultivating a database for leads and referrals is a challenge. Following up with clients after a transaction is difficult for many agents and, not realizing the worth, they miss on referral business. Nurturing contacts is often ignored by agents. 82% of all real estate transactions are referrals and 88% of buyers claim they would use the same agent or refer them. It tells a lot about referrals and why to cultivate them. But many agents overlook this aspect and even if some want to do it, connecting with thousands of contacts gets time-consuming and requires automation.
Solutions: Marketing automation can assist with these challenges:
- Invest in automated tools to keep in touch with your clients.
- Schedule emails to promote your listings
- Set reminders and alerts to targeted members
- Automate social media posts for optimum reach
- Bots can post relevant ads to relevant targets.
Conclusion
Keeping up with the trends is the biggest challenge most of the agents face in the current scenario. Technology advances, digitization, competition from non-traditional markets, cultivating databases, making a presence on social media, etc. have been keeping the agents on their toes. An agent needs to figure out people, sales, psychology. An agent can’t be all in one. You can’t be an expert in technology, business development, social media, sales and also be an authority in your core business. Outsourcing some parts of your business that deal with non-core issues yet are crucial for your business is best outsourced to experts while you focus on your business.