The real estate business is tough. Even the most well-established agencies are feeling the downward pressures of increased expenses. Let’s face it – nothing is getting cheaper, wages are going up, marketing costs are exploding. Pay per click advertising seems to be rising exponentially. It’s all eating into your bottom line and making it harder for your business to grow.
There’s a ceiling which is holding you back, and that ceiling is rising costs.
The thing is, growth is not just about your business expanding – it’s about growing your turnover. You don’t have to sell more to make more money – you can also spend less.
Think about your profit margin. Are you happy with that number? Wouldn’t it be nice to increase your profitability percentage and keep more money in your pocket?
The good news is there’s a way to reduce your costs, make your business run more efficiently, and find more opportunities – and that way is real estate outsourcing.
There are dozens of time-consuming tasks that need to be done BY your office every day – that doesn’t mean they need to be done IN your office. Why spend valuable time and resources doing things internally when you can outsource it?
When you start to think this way, you’ll bust open the ceiling that’s stopping your business from growing. With the extra time and money that you’ll save, you can properly focus not just on growing your business, but on exploding it.
So if you’re really interested in growing your real estate business, here are X ways that outsourcing can help.
1. Save on bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is a really important part of your business. Without properly balanced books, nobody gets paid. But here’s the kicker – bookkeeping doesn’t need to be done in house. A properly trained person can do all of your bookkeeping admin offshore, including expenses, timesheets, payroll, wages, and allowances.
Your offshore bookkeeper takes care of all the fiddly stuff on a day to day basis and then submits everything to your internal accountant.
2. Make your awesome domestic staff better
When you have good people, you want to hang on to them. One way to make them happy is to take away unnecessary and annoying tasks. Your best salespeople want to be out on the road, on the phone, talking and making sales. They don’t want to be bogged down with emails, following up simple inquiries, organizing their calendars, or doing basic data entry.
All of that stuff is necessary to keep your business running, but why are you experienced (and expensive!) sales staff doing it?
Imagine if each of your top sales staff had their own real estate virtual assistant. It’s that person’s job to sort out important emails from junk, qualify leads, schedule appointments, set reminders, follow up client inquiries, and so much more. Stop hounding your staff to complete all the complicated paperwork and let their assistant get it done.
When your sales team can focus on what they love – making sales – then your whole business thrives.
3. Boost your SEO
In today’s digital world,
That can be everything from identifying keywords and creating content, through to updating listings, posting reviews, optimizing meta titles and descriptions, and ensuring your site is fully mobile-friendly.
Do you have someone in charge of your social? Or is it one of those tasks that get handed around to whoever has the time or inclination? Are the people managing your social media experts in their field?
Whatever your feelings about social media, it’s an essential part of your real estate growth strategy. Social media is now the number one place where people learn about your brand.
Social isn’t just about posting your listings to Facebook. Potential customers want to know about your company and your people. They want to hear real stories from real clients that they can identify with.
It’s the good old word of mouth combined with digital marketing, and that’s why you need a dedicated professional to take care of it.
5. Explode your marketing
Take your marketing to the next level by hiring professionals. An outsourced graphic designer, for example, can create gorgeous assets that are in line with your style guide, at a fraction of the cost of using an agency.
If you understand your customer journey and your marketing funnel, you can identify touchpoints that are ready for exploitation. It could be as simple as sending an email on a client’s sale anniversary or as specialized as optimizing your email marketing campaigns.
With an outsourced marketing professional, you can even try out new tactics, like reaching out to influencers, creating mini-sites for individual communities, or organizing workshops and events.
6. Get more out of your pay per click
It’s so easy to throw a bunch of money at an AdWords campaign and has nothing to show for it. You need to carefully track every campaign and calculate your ROI which is, let’s face it, time-consuming and thankless task.
The way to get the best value out of your pay per click (PPC) advertising is to be constantly testing and reiterating. I’m guessing your marketing manager doesn’t have time to do that – if you’re even lucky enough to have a marketing manager. With an outsourced professional, you can finally start to see real value in your AdWords budget.
7. Delight your customers
I mentioned earlier about giving each of your top salespeople their own real estate virtual assistant. This is not just for their benefit, but it is a brilliant way to delight your customers – and that’s what we’re trying to do every day, right?
Imagine if every time a customer sent an email, it was replied to within a few minutes rather than hours or even days? Imagine if you had time to personally reply to every piece of feedback left on your Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, or Google Reviews?
Outsourcing means responding to your customers much faster giving them the information they need when they want it. They will very quickly come to associate your brand with thoughtfulness, efficiency, and satisfaction. And they will love you for it.
And all any of us want at the end of the day is a happy customer.
Oh, and also a business that kicks butt.
