When a real estate client trusts their estate agent, you can expect two wonderful things to happen. First of all, buying or selling a house will run much smoother, allowing both sides to feel at ease to give their inputs. This often results in a satisfied client and agent, a win-win situation.
Secondly, once the deal is closed, the client may give other people referrals to your work, speaking about how safe and supported they felt during the whole process. Word-of-mouth, as you know, improves your professional reputation and attracts even more clients.
This is why you find in this article a 6-step guide to building trust with clients. Enjoy!
1. Answer your client’s messages or attempts of contact fast
When you get a new real estate lead, the last thing you want to do is leave them hanging. While they wait, they can find another estate agent to trust their property to. So, the best practice here is to answer them even if only to say you will get back to them shortly.
You can do it in the digital environment by automating some replies to make sure the person knows they’re not going to wait for long.
With the canned replies in our real estate CRM, CASAFARI allows you to have answers automatically sent when you get a new information request, when a new visit is scheduled or when you receive information about which kind of properties are of your client’s interest.
These replies do not substitute a tailored message, but they will buy you time and show professionalism in serving your client.
2. Be transparent about your work process
You don’t have to walk your real estate client step by step about everything you’re going to do for them, don’t worry. But, for sure there are some pieces of information that must be explained, to ensure a clearer understanding of your work. That helps build trust with clients as an estate. Let’s see some examples.
When you get a Comparative Market Analysis report from our property valuation tool, a good idea is to explain to the client how CASAFARI calculates the fair market value and the selling price of their property. By understanding that their property was appraised according to comparables existing in the same area and with the same characteristics, the real estate client will see that, if they want to beat their competitor properties and sell fast, the price must stay within a safe range.
Also, you want to make sure that you stay in touch so your client is updated about what you are working on, even if it’s taking longer to find a buyer.
If you are selling their property, for example, you could use our real estate CRM Ownerlink for this purpose! This feature from CASAFARI CRM generates a customized online page in which the owner gets to see everything that’s happening to their property, like visits, feedback from visitors, where it’s advertised, buying proposals, and how many people saw the property and more.
3. Offer your real estate client properties that are tailored to their needs
No one knows what’s best for them than your client. As an estate agent, you can always offer your knowledgeable piece of advice, but, at the end of the day, they are the ones investing and deciding whether a transaction or a property is good enough for them.
So, the first step to building a strong relationship with your real estate client is listening to what they say. What are their habits? What do they value in a home? What do they absolutely need? Only after understanding the profile of your client can you move forward with property sourcing.
Now you know what this person or family expects of you, one option you have to provide an appropriate selection of properties for them is CASAFARI CRM’s Smartlink. This feature allows the estate agent to provide their client a personalized landing page with a number of properties that agree with the client’s interests. It can also be shared with your client through a messaging app or email.
4. Show you’re knowledgeable about the property market
The real estate client turns to an estate agent searching for someone that deeply understands how the property market works and that will give them useful information. They want to pay for a service that they couldn’t do that well by themselves and that they couldn’t find elsewhere.
And this means you’re going to have to study a bit because, once you show your client that you work with updated data about the market, they are going to feel less anxious and more at ease, knowing that their property is safe in your professional hands. This definitely speeds up the process of building trust with clients!
Here is where CASAFARI enters to aid you. With Property Sourcing, you can go to the property page and get informed about the house they want to sell, with data about all that happened to your client’s property through time. This way, when you go to a meeting with them, you’re as ready as you can be.
Also, if you use CASAFARI, you have at your side the only real estate software that has a clear view of the property market across Europe. Unlike any property marketplace, we can see all that’s available, searching more than 30,000 real estate portals and 200M listings everyday. We monitor all market movements in real-time to make sure you’re updated with everything you need to show your real estate client what a premium service looks like.
These numbers and our data intelligence can not only help you prepare for your business meetings, but also be used as an argument to show your client you have all you need on your side to perform great work.
5. Give reasons for the client to trust your advice
Still talking about showing knowledgeability, you should know that, at some point in your estate agent career, you will be faced with those kinds of people that only trust what they can see. These are the most difficult ones to establish a truly trustful relationship with, so you better be prepared: have solid information up your sleeve to promptly answer hard questions.
A question such as “why should I look for properties in this neighbourhood and not in the next?” can be easily answered with the help of CASAFARI Market Analytics. With our tool, you can see how property prices are behaving (increases, decreases, stabilized) in a certain area or in a specific period of time. You can also show at what pace the market stock is being sold.
Combine this with newspaper information about new transportation systems or other changes to the city and you get a complete answer to an interesting question.
For a question such as “why should I agree to sell my property for less than what I want to or for less than my neighbour did?”, all you need to do is combine our property valuation tool with Market Analytics once again.
First, show your real estate client the list of comparable properties they’re competing with. Talk about where they’re located, which are their characteristics, what is their square footage, under what conditions are they being sold and for how much.
Then, the second step is opening CASAFARI Market Analytics to, once again, check all market trends and stock, an action that’s going to help you paint a picture of what selling a property nowadays in that area looks like.
6. Build an online reputation with real estate marketing
Another good way to be seen as a good professional by your real estate client is by building an online presence and reputation. This will not only help you attract more people to your services but allows the building of trust with clients as well.
Create a profile on a social network in which your clients are active, post frequent and relevant content about the property market and avoid drifting to other unrelated topics to build an interested and focused following. If they come to you by what they saw on your social media marketing for real estate, then they supposedly already liked the way you work!
This is not a fast route, for sure. But the good news is, if you automate some of your daily tasks, you can leave enough room in your routine to work on your real estate marketing skills, like real estate photography, for an instance.
But how to automate, you might ask. Make the most out of CASAFARI Alerts, a feature that can give you a shortcut to gathering FSBO property leads, controlling changes on your property portfolio and in your competitors.
Now that you know all these ways to start building trust with clients as an estate agent, waste no time and apply all these tips on your work!
