How to nurture your real estate database

Your database is only as powerful as the way it can be utilised. Having 10,000 contacts in your database is fantastic, but if you don’t know what to do with them after you have them in your system, then it may as well be the local phone book.

Having your CRM setup so that you can put your contacts into groups and/or segments means we can begin to categorise WHO these contacts are, WHAT should I be doing for them and WHEN should I be doing it?  This will then help you nurture your real estate database, which will help you get better engagement rates and generate more real estate leads.

CRM = Contact Relationship Manager

Your real estate CRM is where you manage your relationships with your contacts, but for you to manage them effectively you will want to categorise those relationships.

Think of it like this. If I have a prospective vendor in my database in a group called ‘Prospects’, this is certainly more helpful than them just sitting in my database with no reference BUT it doesn’t tell me anything more than this.

What would be far more powerful is ‘Prospect – Vendor – Hot’. The reason for this is, I now have three labels in this one group that I can work from.

We know the following:

1. Prospect – This is someone I should be following up with.
2. Vendor – This is someone who might be selling a property.
3. Hot – This tells me this is someone I need to keep tabs on in the short term.

I might also use other groups such as e.g:

Prospect – Landlord – Cold 

• Prospect – This is someone I should be following up with.
• Landlord – This is someone who might be leasing a property.
• Cold – This tells me this is someone who didn’t get back to me OR asked me to put it on hold.

Purchaser – First Home

• Purchaser – This is a client looking to buy a property.
• First Home  – This client is a first home buyer, so would benefit from information as a first home buyer.

You can begin to see how such group labels give us a lot more ways to search for our contacts based on WHO they are.

The next thing we want to look at is WHAT and WHEN we should be doing for them and that’s when our automations come into play, as we can create communication plans for these contacts based on who they are.

Coming back to my first example ‘Prospect – Vendor – Hot’ I would want to create 3 automated communication plans for my prospective vendors, being Hot, Warm and Cold.

• Hot = Selling in 6 months
• Warm = Selling in 6 – 12 months
• Cold = Selling in 12+ months

Automations

Your CRM should enable you to create your own customised automated communication plans.

Via automations, you can set up your communication plans for each of the different groups your contacts can be added to for the purpose of keeping in touch.

Using our original example Prospect – Vendor – Hot, I would set up a plan like the following (as this client is looking to sell in the next 6 months):

• First Week: Automatically send a ‘Preparing your home for sale’ email
• Second Week: Create a task for a Follow Up Call
• Every Second Week: Automatically send an email about selling
• Every Second Week: Create a task for a Follow Up Call

On the 24th Week: Move the contact to Prospect – Vendor – Warm group so this automation plan can now run on the contact who didn’t end up selling in the 6 month time frame.

Every week they are now receiving a contact touch point from you, one week it is a helpful piece of advice emailed through and the second week a friendly follow up call, which can relate to the email sent through the week before.

You want to become the source of advice because people often don’t make a commitment because they don’t understand. So you want to be known as an educator and communicator, and using your CRM effectively to nurture your database is the first step in sales communication success.

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