How many real estate agents does it take to change a light bulb? Six. But we’ll accept four!
Alright, so that’s a bad joke! Changing a light bulb is simple enough to do with just one person, but a real estate transaction is much, much more complex. That’s why companies with any sense of scale (think Opendoor and Better.com, for example) are using a team-based approach to scale higher levels of service to thousands and thousands of clients.
Leverage the power of teamwork
The more your team can specialize, the greater the “sum of its parts” it can be. In fact, for over 100 years, businesses have relied on the one-two punch of specialization and technology to drive scale. In the real estate business, your limiting factor is usually time. A team-based approach allows you to add more time to your total supply. But it also multiplies it by playing to each team or teammate’s strengths.
When you have one team to focus on each stage of a transaction and each aspect of a client relationship, you’re starting to achieve an economy of scale. But with each added layer of complexity, you risk sacrificing the client experience and your hard-fought efficiency gains due to sloppy or inconsistent hand-offs.
The biggest myth in real estate: Scale means sacrifice
For most people, buying or selling a piece of property is the biggest, most important transaction they’ll ever make. We expect a level of service and experience commensurate with that level of risk. In other words, most people expect “white-glove” service, so to speak.
And from the agency’s perspective, introducing a distributed approach with a bunch of hand-offs throughout the process has the potential to not just destroy the client’s experience, but reduce efficiency as well. Information gets lost in translation. Errors pile up and compound. Time is wasted explaining details over and over again. But that’s just the price of scale!
It doesn’t have to be that way. Those highly scalable businesses like Opendoor and Better.com are using the other half of the scale equation we talked about earlier: technology. Technology improvements are transforming real estate day by day. CRM (customer relationship management) and customer communications platforms are nearly universally used to:
- Track each client’s progress through each transaction
- Coordinate internal teams and their workflows
- Maintain constant communication with clients
Bonus tip: Talk to your clients in every channel
One thing most clients value about working with individual agents is the level of personal attention they get on their own terms. Most people will text and email and call their agent (often day and night and weekend). But when you work with a team, those lines of communication become muddier, and they’re often happening over email, with tons of forwards and CCs happening behind the scenes.
Companies like Better.com are able to talk to clients using text messages, emails, phone calls, and web chat. And to the client, it all looks and sounds like it’s coming from one person. There’s no confusion on their part about who or how to reach out (or when — Better.com is accessible 24/7!) and for their team, there’s no missed messages or context, because every single message, whether email, SMS, or chat, is visible to every single team member in one simple app — Front.
And Front isn’t just for giant companies. teams of any size can use Front to communicate better with clients and with each other. Click here to learn more and try it out for yourself.