REPOST: Three Customer Service Tips for Real Estate Agents

 This article from Muncievoice.com talks about  different ways to improve customer service for real estate agents.

Image Source: muncievoice.com

MUNCIE, Indiana – For you real estate agents, you know the housing market is recovering, but are you getting the amount of clients you want. What can you do to get noticed? What brings in clients? It may be that your customer service needs some extra attention. Try these three tips to bring people into your office.

Change Your Fees

Even though it seems that home sales may be on the rise, as has been the trend for the past few years, the fees that real estate agents charge can be ludicrous. We all know that every working individual needs to make money, but let’s get serious—$20,000 looks like a heart attack on paper… unless it’s justified.

If you sell big homes, then you obviously will lean toward bigger fees. And that’s fine. Make sure there’s a reason that your buyers are paying you what some folks make in a year. Itemize your fees on paper and in person, suggests Bacal & Associates. If the buyer has amazing credit or is willing to drop more of a down payment than is expected, go ahead and give them a break on one part of your fee. You also may want to lower your fees overall. By giving everyone a break, your buyers will share this information with other potential buyers.

Establish a Social Media Presence

Make your social media presence large. Use all the available platforms to their fullest extent. Post blog entries including useful facts about the real estate market. Don’t just regurgitate facts. Tailor them to the current season, recent condo trends, whatever. Check out photo-based sites like Pinterest for Real Estate to share pictures of your properties. Whatever networks you use, get your name out there and get people talking about you. And if you’ve only dabbled in social media, get comprehensive get-started guidance at Mashable.

Use a Cloud Contact Center

According to the Census Bureau, almost 36 million Americans moved between 2012 and 2013. The in-state movers are likely to make all contact in person at your agency’s brick and mortar location. However, out-of-state movers will likely make initial contact via phone or email. Depending on how much energy you put into your social media campaign, you may have a large batch of new buyers heading your way and managing these new contacts can be rather tricky and time-consuming.

Fortunately, there are solutions. The folks over at Zipwire and other cloud centers have created a management system for your client pool that allows you to stay in constant contact with your buyers. Have someone interested in your listing in Scottsdale, Arizona, and they live in Michigan? It might be a good idea to share a picture or some live camera footage with them via the cloud system. With all of your clients in this contact cloud, you can provide the ultimate customer service.

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REPOST: The Mystery Of Real Estate Agent Compensation

Richard Green shares the ins and outs of the real estate agent compensation in this Forbes.com article.

Real Estate agents are valuable–if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have them. The three times in my life I have sold a house, I thought the agent earned his/her commission.

But the commission structure –the agent gets a fixed percentage of the sale price of the house–makes no sense. (Steven Levitt pointed this out some time ago). There is a price at which anyone could sell a house without an agent–let’s call it 80 percent of market value (it may be more or less). So for the first 80 percent of the sales price of a house, the agent is adding no value.

But now let’s say it takes real effort to sell a house for more than 80 percent of market value. This means for every dollar the seller receives above 80 percent, the agent is producing more value than the typical commission percentage they currently receive.

This produces a perverse set of incentives. Agents have reason to sell the house quickly, but not at the highest possible price, because they don’t get rewarded for their effort. A compensation structure that would align everyone’s interest would be more like a consignment structure–one where the agent would get no compensation for any sale of less than an agreed to amount, but would get a large fraction of any proceeds above the agreed to amount. This would likely produce higher prices for the seller and higher compensation for the agent.

I understand that agents face upfront costs to marketing a house–it would be reasonable for them to charge a fee to recover those costs, regardless of outcomes. But we don’t observe that either.

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