3 Real Estate tasks you should outsource in 2019
I know this business owner who has a brick-and-mortar yoga and athletic wear boutique. She also has an amazing e-commerce website on which she spent a whole lot of time and money. While the website still takes a good chunk of her time, it does practically no business.
Because she’s too busy to market her website and too frugal to hire someone to help her.
Unfortunately, she is one of many small business owners who feels she has to wear all of the hats. Sort of like real estate agents, right?
She is, however, sitting on a goldmine in that website. She knows it but feels helpless to do anything about it.
The best way to get rid of the stress of having too much to do and little time to do it, of feeling helpless to keep up with everything, is to outsource.
“There are times when you should think about shifting the workload to others, so you can devote more time and energy to the areas that will best grow your business,” according to Amy Vetter at Inc.com.
She goes on to say that small business owners should consider outsourcing anything that requires “specialized skills,” such as accounting, graphics or website design and copywriting. Tasks that are “routine, procedural or recur in cycles,” such as posting to social media and answering emails.
While there are numerous tasks suited to outsourcing, three stand out as especially valuable to the busy real estate agent.
Blogging
The best way for an agent to compete with the big Google first-page leaders is by publishing lots of hyper-local content to their blogs. By “lots,” the experts recommend posting at least once a week, but more often is better.
Experts also say that for Google to consider your content valuable enough for first-page placement, it needs to be long—at least 1,000 words, but, according to Sam Hollingsworth at Search Engine Journal, the “average content length for Page 1 results is around 1,900 words.”
Do you have time to pound out 2,000 or even 1,000 words per week to post to your blog? And, if you do, it means you’re neglecting other parts of your business.
Outsource the project to a professional writer (from the U.S.) that has experience in the real estate industry.
Yes, it costs money, but the fees are tax deductible and, if you hire the right person, you’ll see a definite return on your investment.
Social media tasks
It’s not enough to write and post to your blog; you also need to promote the posts. Social media platforms (especially Facebook and LinkedIn) are the best places to do this.
Again, social media marketing is one of those time-consuming tasks that are better handed off to someone else.
If you make the big bucks, hiring a social media manager is a brilliant idea. This person can not only promote the blog posts but come up with a social media campaign that includes ads, contests and other real estate lead generating tactics.
If you lack the funds of a top producer, consider hiring a virtual assistant. You can find them at online freelance platforms such as Upwork.com or by Googling “real estate virtual assistant.”
The beauty of hiring a virtual assistant is that he or she can handle other repetitive tasks, such as CRM maintenance, responding to emails and transaction coordination.
CRM management
To most agents, the CRM is the lifeblood of their real estate business—it’s the tool that helps agents consistently build and maintain relationships.
And, relationships are the name of the game in real estate, right?
It takes a big chunk of time to maintain your database, according to Hubspot Research’s State of Inbound 2018. More than 27 percent of salespeople who took part in the research said they spend more than “an hour a day on data entry work instead of selling.”
One hour or more. That is time that’s better spent having coffee with a past client, calling warm leads or working your sphere.
Then there are the agents who just can’t seem to find a spare minute in their day. How much business do you suppose is lost each year because agents don’t have the time to keep up with CRM maintenance or the will to hire someone to help?
Real estate’s top producers have an exercise that will, spending significantly more on their CRM than other agents.
Determine exactly what you need to have done and how often, when outsourcing the management of one of your most valuable tools. Here’s a list to get you started:
- Implement segmentation
- Add new contacts and leads
- Add notes and updates on contacts
- Update leads according to their location in the pipeline
- Schedule follow-ups
- Manage transactions
Then, go about finding and hiring someone. A virtual assistant, knowledgeable about CRMs, would be the ideal hire.
By outsourcing tasks that don’t require you to be hands-on, you’ll free up more time to spend on those that do, like building and maintaining relationships.
Another time saver is to automate your Just Listed Just Sold postcards in 2019.
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