How your Estate Agent should be utilising technology to sell your property.
Technology in our industry plays a massive part in broadening the exposure for each property. Gone are the days when, if you wanted to buy a property in a specific town, you would have to travel to that town and visit the agent's offices on the high street. Estate agent no longer advertise their newest instructions in local newspapers.
Okay, so today I want to talk to you about technology in Estate Agency.
So we have old Estate Agency and new Estate Agency, and there's merits to both.
Old Estate Agency is; negotiating with buyers, really speaking on the phone, getting to the nitty-gritty of what drives people and their home moves, really important.
Sometimes new technology takes away from that a little bit, so you focus too much on technology, both need to go hand in hand, but in this sense, what I want to talk to you about is how technology works from a marketing perspective, okay?
So, what we would consider old technology is; newspaper advertising, window displays and high streets, now those were the ways we marketed, that was absolutely right and absolutely correct at the time, the technology didn't exist.
We had people from Devon, or way out of the area coming up for the weekend, looking through the shop windows, looking at what property is there, if the Estate Agent had updated it, they may not have done, it could be an old property, depends how often they they were rotating their images.
Those people aren't necessarily your buyers, they're kind of, 'window shoppers', literally! They might be thinking about moving to Taunton or Bristol or wherever, in two years, three years, whatever, it's not going to help YOU as a seller.
Same thing with newspaper advertising, you see it at the moment if you look in the newspaper, find the local Gazette or what your local paper is, what you will see in that paper is Estate Agents who do market still are marketing their sold properties, okay. They're not marketing new instructions, the reason for that is, they want to tell you how they're selling properties, they're selling properties in whatever area, which is great, fantastic, wonderful, but they're not marketing new instructions, it's a dead form of advertising when we're trying to find active buyers.
Now, new technology, how do we market, okay? So it's really important, there's two things I want to discuss, there's a million things I want to discuss, but there's two video.
Firstly, is the CRM or our software, okay?
WE have a, it's not necessarily 'AI' but it's an intelligent algorithm, okay? So when we have a database of 6/7,000, I think it is now, of local buyers, it's impossible for us to ring 6/7,000 people for your property, what our intelligent algorithm CRM software does for us, is, it pinpoints the ones that are most likely to be looking at your property.
So, we take your property to market, new one comes, yeah so, new property comes to the market, we will get a list of 50, 100, whatever it might be people, who are relevant to your property. It'll pinpoint the ones that are likely to buy your house, those are the ones, bring back the old fashioned Estate Agency, those are the ones that we ring, speak to, actually on the phone.
We do the email shots, we do the text messages, we do the WhatsApp, but actually speaking to your buyers and knowing WHO to speak to, really, really, really, important.
So bringing the old Estate Agency in with the new, okay, with 'Tech'. There's lots of other ways, another one, really good one actually is, social media advertising, so, yes okay, we do some pretty pictures on Instagram, and this, that, and the other.
I'm not talking about that necessarily, what I'm talking about is the underlaying 'ad' side, 'targeted ads', within Facebook and Instagram. So your property comes to Market with us, we will pay for, you don't pay for, we pay for marketing that goes underneath Facebook so, what am I saying here, I'm saying something along the lines of, if you ever speak to, you're speaking to your friends, you've got your phone with you, or Alexa or, whatever it might be, and you will hear, you talk about a Hoover, you want, a new Dyson or whatever and then, later on you're getting advertising for a Dyson, or a whatever, okay?
Very similar for the way that we use targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, just another great example of how 'Tech' works. Our system then picks up who's looking at those sort of things, who we should call, okay?
So I don't want to bore you to death, I know I'm a bit Nerdy with this sort of stuff, I love, I love the tech side of it, I love old fashion Estate Agency, as well, the two should work really, really nicely together, but you need both, okay? I don't want to bore you to death in this video, but if you like what you hear, give me a call, I'd love to talk to you about what else we do when it comes to new tech in Estate Agency.