ShoreAgents Blog

One aspect we’re particularly interested in is real estate marketing. Gone are the days where you could just stick a sign up in the front yard and hope for the best. Real estate business owners need to be marketing pros. And that means more than just following the latest trend. Depending on your target demographic, you should be using Facebook or Instagram. Maybe there are real estate influencers you can leverage. Or you can expand your reach in tangential ways, like through real estate podcasts or diversified real estate websites.

We often think of lead generation as the first step in the real estate marketing funnel. But there’s important work to be done in warming up those leads first through community engagement, providing great content, and giving away valuable information. Everybody loves a freebie, and there are clever ways you can get potential customers to know about you before they’re even thinking about buying or selling. That way, when it’s the right time for them, they come straight to you.

There are so many amazing tips and tricks that our experts want to share with you, from technology like the Facebook pixel to a variation on the good old open home.

One area that can cause anxiety for real estate business owners is the plethora of technology options out there. Rest assured, we’ll have you covered here too. Real estate tech has grown in leaps and bounds over the past decade and it’s not always easy to figure out which is the best solution for you.

It’s important to know that not all tech is the same. Different products are solving for different problems. Some are focused on managing the financial side, others help you keep track of your rent roll, and some specialise in finding and nurturing new clients. And then there’s the tech that tries to do everything in one package - sometimes more successfully than other times.

While there are a lot of similarities between different real estate agencies, the fact is your business is not the same as the one down the road. Our technology posts will help you to understand the differences between the various offerings and how each one applies to your particular business. Knowledge is power, right? Prepare to get to know A LOT about how technology can revolutionise your business.

When we talk about real estate technology, we’re talking about more than just the essential property management and sales trust accounting software you need for day to day management. As mentioned, we’re also talking about software like customer relationship management (CRM) tech which can help you keep track of and manage your potential customers. The right CRM will help you to identify who your leads are, target them, and warm them up. There are amazing tools out there which are designed to generate leads. Then, once you have customers in your lead funnel, you can use automated drip campaigns to move them along the sales process.

Then there’s cloud-based software which is 100% essential these days. Some people shy away from cloud computing because of security concerns, but the reality is that it’s usually much more secure than anything you could house in your office. Have a read about how our Director, Stephen Atcheler, moved to the cloud and made the switch to Property Me.

If all this technology sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t stress. That’s where smart staffing comes into play.

Clever business owners work smarter not harder. You don’t want to implement technology that is going to confuse your staff and weigh your business down. By utilising real estate offshore staffing, you can make sure all the fiddly bits and pieces get done so that your technology works for you.

If you’ve never used a CRM before, it can seem a bit overwhelming. But you can help your staff along the learning curve by hiring a real estate virtual assistant. When you combine your perfect tech solution with this new staff member, you can make sure your sales team starts each day with a list of warm leads to contact without having to trawl through their overstuffed inbox.

There are so many ways that a real estate VA can supercharge your business. We cover some of that in our post specifically about what a real estate virtual assistant can do.

As well as providing the best information about what offshore staff can do for your real estate business, we also share essential insider info about the offshore industry itself. There are many avenues into offshoring and it’s easy to get burnt. You’re dealing with business operators in another country and the whole process can be a bit opaque.

One of the many things we pride ourselves on here at ShoreAgents is our transparency. Whether you choose us or another provider, we want you to know everything about how the offshore biz works. How much does it cost to hire a real estate virtual assistant? What exactly does a service provider provide? What pensions and other employer contributions need to be factored in? How do you choose an offshore service provider when they’re not all the same?

With our expert knowledge, you’ll be able to find out everything you need to know about offshoring for your real estate biz.

And of course, your amazing team (whether domestic or offshore) deserves the best training. Well-trained staff work have a solid understanding of the overall business and why certain things need to be done, they know which tools can make their life easier, and they work better as a team. That’s why proper professional development is more than just sending your new recruit off to a three-day training course.

Naturally, we offer comprehensive advice about training your offshore staff. We even offer our own VAs who are fully trained in property management systems.

But we also understand that local staff need great training solutions too. In order to really benefit from offshoring parts of your real estate business, you need to get buy-in from your current staff. For your new cross-border team to work seamlessly, your domestic staff will need to embrace new ways of doing things, like using Dropbox, online forms, project management software and CRMs.

Part of that is understanding how different cultures understand the world. We have some great posts lined up about how Filipino culture is different to Australian, American and British culture, and how to work with it rather than against it.

Basically we'll be giving unique real estate training techniques that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. No one on the web knows as much as we do about how to get the most out of real estate staff and how to integrate offshore assistants into your domestic team.

The future of real estate and beyond

One thing we know for sure, the real estate business is changing ever faster and faster. If your business hasn’t already embraced some of these new technologies, soon it’s literally going to be too late.

This isn’t scare-mongering. The next wave of technology is already approaching, so if you haven’t gotten on the bandwagon yet, you’ll struggle to keep up.

Savvy real estate business owners are using artificial intelligence and bots to pursue leads and handle sales enquiries. They’re building their brand through podcasts, social media and content. They’re leveraging the latest marketing tools like Facebook ads to dominate their field.

We love this stuff. We actually love it. When we hear about a newer and smarter (and cheaper) way of making more money in the real estate business, we learn everything we can about it and apply it in our own business. And we are not shy about sharing what we learn.

Guest Posting

We’re building an amazing online resource for real estate professionals who are ready to take their business to the next level. If you have the knowledge and know-how on any aspect of real estate and you want to share it with our readers, we are currently welcoming guest posts.

If accepted, your post will be edited and laid out by our professional team to make sure it’s of the highest quality. We’re happy to include backlinks to your own site to boost your own profile because we believe strongly in the power of teamwork and collaboration. If you have a great idea for a blog post for the ShoreAgents blog, get in touch. Ideally, send us a 200 word overview of your content idea, a few paragraphs about your experience, and links to your website and LinkedIn.