Realtors may be concerned that the real estate industry is moving towards automation that will make tasks performed by agents obsolete and possibly even replace agents altogether.

Such fear is largely unfounded and any real threat of agent replacement is far in the future. In fact, there’s been a surge in the number of automated products or services in real estate. These tools actually work in a complementary fashion to the role of the agent.

Agents who use these tools can gain an edge on the competition. By delegating some of their responsibilities to these automated processes, agents can use their extra time to increase business.

Here are the top tools and services that help real estate agents automate their real estate business:

 

GET LEADS AUTOMATICALLY

Unless you’re a well-established agent driving your business solely on referral fuel, you’ll need new leads to be successful. There are countless techniques for generating new leads, but only a few which have been automated in an effective manner.

 

Open House Management

Collecting numbers from open houses is a crucial contact generator to pour into your marketing funnel and eventually qualify leads.

Collecting the information and interpreting illegible  handwriting can be a tedious and sluggish process.

Providing open house management software apps on your tablet not only eliminates the hassle of transferring the data into electronic form, but most can even integrate with your CRM and auto-populate the contact information into an actionable format.

Companies: Spacio, Open House Wizard, Open Home Pro

 

Auto Cold Call Services

Following up on expired listings, FSBOs, and open house numbers can be very time consuming. Dealing with the high frequency of inevitable rejection from this tactic can also be demoralizing.

Automatic cold call services follow up on leads for you by leaving a professional, human-voice message and filter the mass of numbers to the few good leads that call back with no effort on your part.

Companies: Slydial, RedX

 

Social Media Ad Management Platforms

Advertising on social media has quickly become a necessity for real estate agents to remain relevant in the industry.

Finding content to post and boost individually on each platform can be a very gradual process and is hardly the best use of time.

Additionally, determining your target audience through A/B testing, trial and error, or simply guessing is an inefficient use of time and resources.

Social media ad management platforms exist that can automatically find relevant content for your target audience, post the content across all your social media platforms, and cull your target audience appropriately in real time to maximize the effectiveness of the ads posted.

Companies: CityBlast, Adext

 

NURTURE LEADS AUTOMATICALLY

Now that you’ve employed automatic lead generators, you’ll need to filter these potential clients through marketing processes to strain the qualified leads out and allow you to determine which to focus your time and energy on for optimal business efficiency. Fortunately, this process has been largely automated as well.

 

Email Drip Campaigns

Email drip campaigns are effective tools for maintaining contact and providing your lead with relevant information and value.

This is also a very time-consuming process to undertake manually, and there’s no good way of knowing what content to provide each client without the proper IDX data at hand.

Automated lead generation and email drip services can be built into your website to automatically determine what content would be relevant to each browser based on their search history.

Email campaigns are then automatically assigned to the browsers accordingly to maximize results.

Companies: Zurple, Zapier

 

Chat Bots to Qualify Leads

This tool can instantly generate leads in the same moment it nurtures them.

Once a website visitor has engaged a chat bot, it can automatically pull or request user information and social profiles, collect data as to what line of questioning yields the best results, and even adjust its language to mirror inflection of the user.

These now qualified leads can be seamlessly transferred along with the data collected on them to your CRM automatically as well.

Companies: Bold360, FreshChat

 

Lead and CRM Integration

Once a lead has been deemed good and worthy of a follow up, you’ll want to incorporate all pertinent information for that lead in a CRM to effectively organize and track these leads and help dictate your contact points.

These lead management platforms can also collect data of each lead including demographic, contact points, type of contact, and step by step activity leading to conversion then automatically use this data to begin qualifying new leads as they come in.

Companies: FreshSales, HubSpot

 

CONVERT LEADS AUTOMATICALLY

Once you’ve acquired your lead, nurtured them, and eventually reached a contract agreement, the transaction process begins wherein the completion from escrow to close is dependent on highly functional transaction coordination.

 

Outsourced Transaction Coordination Services

This is a tedious and daunting process for agents to undertake on their own, with or without transaction coordination software at hand.

Transaction coordination platforms can take time to learn and you are liable for any errors made throughout the timely process.

Alternatively, send your transaction coordination paperwork and organizational mandates attached to an outsourced transaction coordination company to complete the conversion of your lead for you.

Companies: REBO

 

MAINTAIN POST SALE RELATIONSHIP AUTOMATICALLY

You’ll want to set up a system for retaining these successfully converted leads as clients after the sale is completed. When they enter the market again, you can remain at the forefront of their mind by instituting the use of automatic reminders periodically of the service you provided them.

 

Recurring Gifts or Postcards

Client gifts or postcards are a great way to remind them you are their realtor.

Since it can be difficult to organize and execute the delivery of these yourself, it is useful to set up an automated, “set it and forget it” recurring gift or postcard service.

Several companies allow you do this by charging you a recurring fee after you’ve selected which client to give the gift or postcard to, what the gift is, and how frequently they receive it.

Companies: CauseView

 

Whether the product featured is AI or a coordinated team handling your tasks for you, the cost of automation can be well worth it, particularly if it’s in a facet of the business in which you tend to struggle.

The best automation services in real estate don’t remove agents from the equation, they free up the agent to do more of what they love while growing their business.