Real Estate Contact & Prospect Management

James Kimmons*

It's always interesting to see a successful real estate agent or broker working hard and long to keep their information systems updated, their listing information accurate and closing transactions on track.

Then, when you hear that same REALTOR® discussing their next training or continuing education, it's a course or seminar on building more business. So they learn some new business building strategies, which if they work, will have them working longer and harder, with the probability of quality degradation and dropped balls increasing. Since repeat business and referrals are so important in this business, a seamless transaction without major upset should be everyone's goal.

Most of us would do just as well building business if we devote the time and energy to implement strategies we already know. By using sensible technology to manage your contacts, listings and transactions for efficiency, you can free up valuable time to do the behaviors and activities necessary to grow your business.

Many of those in that growth phase of the business curve make the decision to put on one or more assistants. Then they have to take the time to train and manage, not even talking about the overhead expense. Not that I'm against assistants, as we'll talk about how to make your team more efficient with intranets in a section devoted to intranets. However, what if you could do more in less time and with more accuracy. You could delay that first assistant and save that overhead expense in time and money. Let's bullet some of the important things we need in Real Estate Contact and Project Management integration:

• We need to keep track of contacts and buyer/listing prospects with their contact information.
  Once we have the contacts in our database, we need to be able to market to them via email, snail mail and/or telephone.
• Once a listing prospect becomes an active listing, we need the ability manage the listing process. This includes tasks with reminders for the many to-do's required to set up and maintain a listing.
• We need to regularly communicate what we've done for that listing, including marketing and other progress.
• Once we put a listing under contract, or write a contract for a buyer, we need to manage the closing transaction requirements and progress. This includes a large number of deadlines and tasks that need to happen in a timely and accurate manner.
• We need to report to our client the progress of the transaction, including its related inspections, appraisals, etc.
• After closing, we want the ability to regularly communicate with our client to keep our name in their mind for future referrals.

Those are the basic requirements for a good solid real estate contact and project management plan. Some are doing all of these things. Some are doing some of them. All too many are doing few of these things. Contact management is probably the most-used of the two, but there are a lot of us who do not have a good project management solution in place. Thus we don't have all those tasks pre-built so that we can just apply them to a new listing or closing and have the task list create itself.

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