Engage your past clients to grow your listing business
Traditionally, real agents and brokers have helped with both sellers and buyers to help them with their home ownership dreams. One of the fundamental changes as a result of the NAR settlement agreement is that sellers need not fund the buyer agent’s commission or fees. In addition, the buyer can negotiate with their agent regarding the fees they are ready to pay for the services provided.
There is an apprehension in the agent community that increasingly home buyers may directly work with listing agents, in states that permit it, to negotiate and purchase a home to keep their expenses low. But in reality there are a good number of cases where that will not be true. First time home buyers will certainly be an exception to this and will most probably continue to avail the expertise of a buy side agent. Even repeat buyers would want to get help from agents to understand the local market, lean on negotiation expertise, and connect with the home buying ecosystem of lenders, inspectors, contractors, etc.
If you have been helping more buyers, you can easily pivot now
Still, having considered the above, real estate agents currently focused on more buy side transactions must pivot to increasing sell side services to be in better control of their business and revenue. One of the most important first steps in this process is reaching out to your past clients.
Anyone who bought a home from you are all great candidates to be listing their home in the near future. Here are the most important things to consider from your past client list:
- If someone bought a home with you more than 10 years ago, they may be ready for their move to a different location due to life stage changes.
- Those who bought a home more than 5 years back, may be interested in cashing out on the value appreciation which has been more than 20-25% in most markets.
- Anyone who bought a home recently could consider a refinance. While this is not a revenue booster for you it is a great trust building opportunity; you could present ways for your customers to save money.
So, how do you re-engage those past customers?
Prepare your list of past customers – names, email addresses, phone numbers, and most importantly the address of the property they purchased with you. Using the property address you can now figure all the following insights:
- Current Value of the property
- How much did the property appreciate in value?
- Current mortgage information on the property – loan balance, interest rate, monthly payments
- How much equity does the homeowner have in the property?
- What can the homeowner do with the equity – cash out, get home equity loan, cash out refinance, etc.
- Is there a refinance opportunity?
These insights are valuable for you to have a meaningful and engaging conversation with the homeowner that builds trust for the long-term.
But to build these insights and communicate them to your customer base, you need tools to help you.
And here’s the best part
Prospektr’s “Claim My Home” package can automate the whole process for you.
All you need to do is prepare your past customer list and upload it into your Prospektr account.
The automation in Prospektr will do the rest:
- Verify the Property Addresses
- Generate the insights for each property
- Invite your customers to join your fully branded Prospektr platform
- Set up a marketing campaign to periodically send value, equity, and financial updates to all signed up customers
You can focus on following up with the leads that start flowing in from your own past customers.
