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Like any venture, the practice of real estate has business challenges. But like any challenge, they can be overcome.
Business challenges can rather be universal. How can the business get more clients? How can the business stand out from the competition?
While the answers can come across as generic, specifically addressing challenges unique to a certain industry or market makes the answers a little less obvious. This is the case with real estate, and as a highly competitive industry, several challenges are unique to the professionals who work within the sector.
1. Market the Properties, or Market the Professional?
Clearly, it is important to market yourself as a real estate professional with whom clients want to work. But then, property is what rules the day. It is, after all, the reason why clients work with you.
The truth is, both are equally important. While buyers are mainly purchasing a home or commercial space, they are also buying into the real estate experience you provide them. One of the better ways to meet the challenge of both is to establish your presence online. You can set up professional pages aimed at letting people know more about you and your real estate expertise. If you have the resources to establish your own website, this would be an effective way to market both yourself and the properties you handle. Ultimately, it all depends on which avenue you are using, and of course, striking a balance between marketing yourself and marketing your properties.
2. How Do I Stand out in Such a Competitive Market?
Many real estate agents essentially work like independent contractors and are typically responsible for attracting and servicing their own clients. While some brokerage firms provide some basic training, brand advertising, and administrative support for their agents, most brokers use their own resources for developing their business. With such a high level of investment, coupled with the sheer number of practicing professionals, the market can indeed get quite competitive.
Tweaking your approach can make you stand out from such stiff competition. While it is still important to continue expanding your clientele, focus on repeat business. This means establishing relationships, supported by the intent of working with buyers, lenders, and real estate professionals for the long term. Even big firms know this strategy: relationships lead to results, and personalized service before, during, and after real estate transactions lead to referrals and repeat business.
3. ‘I Have Never Sold Anything Remotely as Expensive as Land Before’
This challenge is very particular to newer real estate professionals, mainly for the reason that they either have had no prior sales experience or that they had not dabbled in the sale of expensive commodities like real estate. Negotiating is a significant aspect of large transactions, and not much else gets any bigger than land and property.
If you are new to the real estate profession, there is really no other way around this lack of experience than to actually gain some. This does not necessarily mean just learning along the way, as one of the better aspects of the industry is how there are plenty of seminars and other sources that you can use to further skills in real estate sales.
4. How Do I Manage Prospects More Effectively?
Whether new to the industry or not, this is a challenge commonly experienced by real estate professionals. Because of the previously mentioned lack of sales experience, those new to the industry have a tendency to focus on prospect management that is more short term, with most of their attention on leads that have a chance for a transaction sooner than later.
Due to this eagerness to work a hot lead into an immediate sale, warm leads that require a little nurturing fall by the wayside. Filipino real estate professionals, even the experienced ones, simply fall into the trap of focusing more on client acquisition but not as much with retention.
While it would indeed be hard to manage prospects, especially if they range within the hundreds, the key is to simply take advantage of the technologies at hand. You would likely establish social media and online messenger accounts dedicated to your real estate profession, so make the most of it by keeping in contact and building relationships with all the prospects you meet.
Lamudi is awarding the top real estate professionals who have shown excellence in their practice in the past year through The Lamudi Broker Awards Night, happening on February 21, 2019, at Makati Shangri-La Makati. To know more about the event, visit the official page.
Sources: Lamudi, Zillow
