Real Estate Marketing: Three Pillars of Success - Customer Retention

by Harper Thorpe | 3 comments | Posted Wed, 2011-08-31 11:09

This is the second article in a three part series that explores the three legs of successful service companies.

Real Estate is part of the largest segment of our economy, the service industry. The service industry views three distinct pillars of success: Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, and Customer Margin. The most successful Real Estate brokers and office managers also focus on these three components.

In the first article in this series, we focused on Customer Acquisition. Here we will discuss Customer Retention.

Customer Retention

Improving customer retention has obvious near-term impact on your business, and as importantly, it increases the book value of your company. Since customers have so much value and the benefits of retaining a customer is so obvious, how can a brokerage make improvements in customer retention.

The answer is simple but not necessarily easily executed. Create a database of customer information (Real Estate CMS) across your enterprise. Too often brokerages take a passive role on collecting and curating information on prospects and clients. Your agents have a role in the collection process, but to not provide guidance (even standards) can be a mistake. To the degree there’s both broker and agent participation in the process of information gathering, the basis for broker and agent ownership of the information is tacitly established.

You may have seen research performed by NAR that indicates that 85% of consumers indicate that they would use the same brokerage in a transaction but only 35% do. The number one reason why the brokerage fails to get the repeat business is failure to stay in touch. And the more valuable the “touches” are to the client, the more the value of maintaining the professional relationship is reinforced for the client.

The notion of maintaining customers for life is heavy lifting for agents and brokers. Without a well-conceived real estate contact management solution that automatically prompts regular touches with the client, the conversation typically ends after the sale. Understanding the challenge this represented to our broker customers was our motivation to automate the process of meaningful customer touches in AgentAchieve. Consistent with our philosophy, this function is architected to deliver valuable information to the consumer before, during, and after the sale.

Among the “touches” consumers appreciate receiving are notifications of relating to real estate activity on their street, immediate neighborhood, or a few block radius from their home or investment property (Of course, home and investment property have never been more synonymous.) The activity of interest includes when properties get listed, short sales, foreclosures, and auctions.

This type of information can be delivered at regular intervals or triggered by the activity itself, i.e. real-time changes in the market. Combine the surrounding activity with the value of the customer’s home – consumers understand one influences the other – and you’ve turned valuable touches into a service.

Think of it like a portfolio report that you get on your savings. It is nice to know your home value, especially in times of price volatility up or down.

Indeed, this service has already been created and your customers can begin receiving these alerts branded for your company and delivered as your own service. By definition, the service is customized for each client because the real estate activity presented pivots on the home address of the customer. Valuable touches (no spam here) that resonate with each customer – that’s what we do. Great software combined with great data makes these customer retention routines, well.....routine.

To read the first article in this series which covers Customer Acquisition, please follow this link. In the next edition of this three part series, we will discuss Customer Margins and how they may be improved. Click here to read this article.

Contact Agent Achieve for more information about our customer retention tool, ePropertyWatch.

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