Live Answering Services for Real Estate Agencies and Realtors
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So, how can your business benefit from having live answering services to handle your calls messages and schedule appointments?
There is no denying that real estate professionals spend a lot of time working in the field. A lot of them are running around constantly, showing and looking at houses, managing properties, and overseeing repair work. It is quite a hectic job, so it does not really allow you to stay glued to your smartphone and keep in touch with your clients.
In such a case, the perfect panacea for you is a real estate live answering service.
Such an answering service for real estate professionals and real estate agencies can competently take complex messages from your clients, be available round the clock, transfer calls to you and your real estate team, and much more!
However, before we further explore the best real estate answering services, let us look at signs that indicate you require a Real Estate Live Answering Service, the benefits of such services, and their common features.
Signs That Indicate You Need An Answering Service For Your Business
If you are a real estate agency, agent, property management or any other professional in the real estate industry, how would you know that you require a live answering service?
The following are the most important signs that indicate you require a Real Estate Live Answering Service.
Are you missing Calls?
There is no doubt that missing calls leave a very lousy impression.
Realtor and client bonds are built on trust, and unfortunately, there is no second chance available to create the first impression. You might be extremely busy and not able to attend the call from your client, but the caller only sees that no one answered his or her call. This may infuriate them, and they might contact other realtors or real estate agencies until they come across someone who is immediately available to converse with them and answer their questions.
Hence, if you are missing calls from your clients, it is a strong sign that you need a real estate live answering service. Such as service usually operates round the clock, and by taking your calls 24/7, it will ensure that you never miss any of your calls again.
As a result, that will show your real estate client that you genuinely care about providing them with superior customer service, and they will thoroughly appreciate you for it.
Are Your Real Estate Customers Waiting for Too Long?
It is common knowledge that every client hates to be put on hold forever. If your clients begin to air their grievances about long waiting times, this a clear sign that your in house receptionists or customer service team are either overworked or just plain lazy. Neither is a positive thing for your real estate business.
The more clients sit on hold, the less likelihood there is that they would want you to call you back for inquiries or any other kind of assistance. Hence, if your clients are waiting for too long, it is about time that you engage the services of a real estate live answering service such as a virtual receptionist. Such services are quick and make sure your clients do not have to wait too long for someone to answer their queries.
Advantages of Real Estate Live Answering Services for Agencies and Realtors
An answering service can benefit you in more ways than one. Whether you are a realtor or a real estate agency, the following are the prime advantages of live answering services for you.
No Need to Miss Calls when You are Travelling
If you are a realtor, you are more than likely to constantly be on the move doing showings, marketing your properties, and meeting with your clients.
When you are traveling for work most of the time, there is a strong probability that you will miss some of your calls. One of the greatest advantages of a real estate live answering service is that you will never again have to feel anxious about missing a single call. Any real estate answering service worth its salt will efficiently be able to attend all of your calls, route the calls when the need arises, and manage entire conversations with the caller.
Round the Clock Live Answering Service
These days, clients expect constant availability all the time in the real estate world. Fulfilling this expectation can be considerably challenging, especially if you are a realtor running a solo practice. However, when you work with a real estate live answering service, you can efficiently maintain your availability round the clock. This puts you ahead of the curve and provides you with an edge over your competition (other real estate agencies and realtors) who can need to be present near the phone to take their calls.
Maintaining Excellent Customer Support
Today, clients have incredibly high expectations when it comes to customer support. This is particularly true in the real estate landscape. As a real estate agent, customer support should not end once you close a sale. It is important that you keep on maintaining lines of communication with your clients. You can achieve that by proactively checking in on your clients and responding to their queries at all times. A 24/7 live answering service can make that happen very efficiently.
Tracking Several Marketing Efforts
As a real estate agent or agency, you always want to be on top of things and track how efficient you are at converting your client and lead calls into paying customers. Keeping track of that information is not easy if you are as a solo realtor answering your client calls on the fly.
However, by engaging a live answering service, you can measure with great accuracy how well you are converting your prospects.
Common Services that Real Estate Answering Services Provide:
Here are the common services that all real estate live answering services can provide you:
- Answering incoming customer calls
- Client Appointment Scheduling
- Round the clock coverage, including nights, after-hours, holidays and weekends
- Transferring and screening of calls based on your particular instructions
- Engaging on the telephone or website with your current clients and prospects
- Efficient and swift routing of messages, paying extra attention to any pressing situations
- Answering general queries about appointments for showings and real estate
Live Operator | Virtual Receptionist
Virtual Receptionist is by far the best answering service for real estate agencies and realtors.
Any successful real estate agent is aware that efficient communication is key in ensuring client satisfaction. Every client wants to know that they can contact you at your office at any time of the day. You might be punctually returning your voicemail messages, but clients soon start to doubt about your commitment to them if they consistently arrive at your voicemail whenever they try to reach out to you.
However, if you do answer your phones all the time, this practice will keep you from other crucial tasks in your office that you cannot afford to delay. By engaging the services of a real estate virtual receptionist, you can always remain connected with all of your clients. At the same time, you do not delay any of the other important tasks at your office that needs your attention.
What is a virtual receptionist
In case you are not very clear about the definition, real estate virtual receptionists are experts in providing customer service to your clients. If you are a realtor or a real estate agency, a virtual receptionist is most likely to be the best solution if you are looking for someone reliable to take care of your client callers.
Here some of the many services that a virtual receptionist answering service can provide you include:
- Taking Messages
Virtual receptionists can take messages on your behalf when you are not present in your office, and your client callers want to leave a message for you. Reaching a live individual instead of your voicemail would assure your callers, whereas you will be able to get these messages on the basis of their priority and at the time that you prefer.
- Forwarding of Calls
Effective coordination between your office staff members becomes a vital requirement for a real estate agency when your work demands you to be on the move. During this time, it’s likely that you will be viewing new real estate properties and meeting and engaging with potential clients. Real estate virtual receptionists provide call-forwarding service that allows you to conduct your day to day business as usual while the receptionist ensures that none of your callers are neglected by effectively transferring their call.
In certain situations, when a customer wants to converse with you or any other staff member of your team in the agency, the virtual receptionist will efficiently forward the client’s call in real-time to the individual. What this ensures is a content caller and maximum support efficiency.
- Scheduling Client Appointments
It is very important to appropriately schedule your day when you have to meet subcontractors and clients every day, aside from viewing real estate properties as well. Apart from round the clock availability, virtual receptionists offer live appointment scheduling services to your client callers as well.
Your clients (along with anyone else in your real estate agency) can cancel, change, or book their appointment at any time, and the virtual receptionists will keep you in the loop regarding these changes. In this manner, you will have the flexibility to plan your day in advance.
- Identification of Leads
You can tell a virtual receptionist what is needed to convert a particular prospect/lead successfully. Equipped with this knowledge, any competent virtual receptionist can ask qualifying queries to identify which of the leads are top-quality ones and then proceed to collect reliable information that will assist in converting these leads in a proficient manner.
Moreover, a real estate virtual receptionist answering service can help you in getting the maximum amount of output from your marketing campaigns by giving priority to those leads that are easier to covert. This results in the generation of more conversions and greater revenue.
Why should Real Estate Agencies and Realtors get a Virtual Receptionist?
Hiring the services of a virtual receptionist for your real estate office has benefits galore. Some of these are as follows:
- Extension of your Real Estate Office
Real estate virtual receptionists are usually several operators who effectively handle all your callers at the same time. These receptionists answer your incoming calls as if they are at their desks in your office lobby, and you only pay them while they directly work for you. In other words, they are a great extension of your real estate office.
If you are running a real estate agency with several professionals, virtual receptionists can connect the calls to the appropriate individual and can also take messages and promptly deliver them to you through fax, text message, or email.
- Virtual Receptionists Present a Professional Image
First impressions matter considerably in the real estate domain. If you are a realtor running a solo practice or a real estate agency and do not have a live individual answering your telephone, what message do you expect to send to your clients? Efficient real estate virtual receptionists are available to answer your phone calls both during the office day and after hours, enabling you to keep a professional appearance without the extra expenses of hiring dedicated in-house staff.
- Never Losing Contact with Your Customers
Losing contact with your real estate clients can prove to be very costly for you. Loss of telephone service, unwell employees, or a power outage can cause your real estate agency business to suffer a lot. However, with real estate virtual receptionists, you can make sure that there will always be professional individuals readily available to take your client calls. In this manner, you never lose contact with your real estate customers.
- Round the Clock Office Support
One of the biggest advantages of engaging the services of virtual receptionists in your real estate office is that you are not confined to the conventional office hours (9-5). Virtual receptionists operate in a 24/7 (round the clock) call center environment; hence, they are available to answer your client calls 24 hours a day and seven days a week!
Furthermore, as you are only paying for their time on your account, you can offer this 24/7 office service and still not spend as much money as it would take to hire full-time and in-house receptionists
Real Estate Live Chat Service
When looking at a real estate property listing on your official site, not every interested client is keen on calling your agency. Some of these individuals will prefer to stay anonymous and look for an online live chat option on your real estate site. That is where a real estate lives chat answering service comes in!
Live chat answering service is a great customer support channel for real estate agencies and realtors who want to stay ahead of the curve in an industry that is extremely competitive. Real estate entails a lot of careful planning, and several clients want as much important information as they can get in advance. You can make use of a live chat answering service to efficiently manage these requests and convert potential customers into real estate property owners.
Common features of real estate live chat include but are not limited to:
- Taking Messages
- Scheduling of client appointments
- Round the clock answering
- Bilingual customer support
Regardless of whether you are running a solo realtor practice or a real estate agency, you can leverage live chat answering service to increase your sales.
Live Chat Answering Service Features
As it is quite common for real estate agencies and realtors to earn a healthy commission on a rental or a real estate property sale, it is very helpful to let the prospective client know about the fees and conditions early on in the process.
In this way, the customer has the opportunity to inquire about details such as the terms, down payment, how long the house has been on the real estate market, warranty, and so forth.
Real estate professionals can leverage live chat to establish this important knowledge early on and determine if the interested client is a qualifying prospect or not.
Answering Common and Uncommon Questions Immediately
These days, most house buyers are conducting their research online, though photos and home listings that are merely a couple of clicks away. A prospective customer might contact your web page’s customer support for more specific information. When you have hired a live chat answering service, your real estate agent can immediately answer queries that your official website does not address. For instance:
- Condition of Property: “When was the real estate property constructed? Has someone renovated it lately? How are the water pressure and energy performance?
- Hidden Expenses: “How much will I have to pay up in taxes and utility bills?”
- Comparisons in Price: What is the price of the house based on, and what do the other real estate properties in the neighborhood area cost? What does the sale include?
Materials that are visual in nature also assist in boosting interest in a real estate property and builds relationships with prospective clients and buyers. With live chat answering service, a real estate agent can send files that are incredibly helpful if a customer requests you for a floor plan, downloadable version of the real estate property listing, or extra photos of the said listing, for instance.
Scheduling Visits for Real Estate Properties your Clients are Interested In
Prior to making a sale, real estate agencies are heavily dependent on estate property visits. Live chat real estate answering service makes it very easy and simple to invite a prospective client to a scheduled visit or an open house.
Most of the live chat answering services usually feature a registration form that prospective customers can fill out with their credentials, email address and inquiry or a question. The form is often filled out prior to the start of the chat, so all the live agent has to do is simply schedule a date for the client.
The more effortless the process is for customers, the more likely they are to rate the business highly and walk away satisfied.
Conclusion
To summarize, real estate live answering services, such as those mentioned above, are an indispensable asset if you are a real estate agency or a realtor running a solo practice. Their services run the gamut from forwarding calls and taking messages to scheduling appointments and resolving your client’s queries. Sure, you can do all of these things on your own, but do you really have the time? If you have a crammed schedule and need assistance with your real estate business, then a real estate live answering service is the way to go!