Determine Customers’ Interest Level with Real Estate Plugins
There is now a real estate plugin to help agents determine which customers appear to be more active than others and perhaps more likely to close. This can be a tremendous time management and sales tool for agents to focus on their best prospects. For anybody in a sales-related position, nothing is more exciting than seeing buying signals from a prospect. You know, the times when a buyer keeps calling or a seller continues to send you questions via email. This especially applies to real estate sales.
Understanding the Real Estate Sales Funnel
As you may know, a sales funnel has four basic parts – moving from the wider awareness part to interest, decision and the narrow action portion. (The common AIDA formula). After you spend considerable time and money making a lead aware of your services, then you certainly want to build up their interest level and move them on to a decision and finally taking action.
You know the traditional interest signals agents receive from prospects – questions about market conditions, price points, mortgage rates or staging a home. What if we were able to tell you there is a way to monitor interest levels online as well? These are a different form of buying signals.
But when you consider this is the age of the Internet and most people spend their time on the web, finding these digital signals are more critical than ever to an agent’s success. There is incredible insight you can generate from activity on your website. That information can help you discover those prospects who are more eager than others to make a move.
These are the prospects who are lower in the sales funnel, closer to taking action. They can be both buyers and sellers. You certainly want to focus on them. And you certainly want to provide all the information and assistance they might need before they either cool off on making a decision, or go somewhere else. The data is there. A broker or agent just needs the tool to find it. This is where data technology companies such as Home Junction can be a valuable asset.
The Benefits of Real Estate Plugins
At Home Junction we have decades of experience in building real estate websites for brokers and agents. With that experience, we have also developed a suite of services to help enhance those websites. We have taken our knowledge of market data, recent sales information, school data, boundaries, and more to create real estate WordPress plugins. Rather than build a photo gallery for home listings, a contact lead form or a easy to revise roster page for agents, a broker can actually purchase code-ready software packages already designed to perform these functions.
Apps are one of the features that made iPhones and smartphones so desirable. The same can be said for plugins. In fact, for the most popular content management system in the world, WordPress, there are reportedly 30,000 plugins available. This is because WordPress is an open-source platform where outside developers are encouraged to create these handy plugins that people can add to their website.
Real Estate Plugin for Website Users
Our team has developed real estate plugins for displaying market data such as recent home sales, school information, maps, pocket listings, new construction, and several others. The user plugin addresses the ability to monitor activity on an agent’s website. This valuable tool points out which users might be most likely to make a decision in the immediate future. With this plugin, brokers and agents can analyze visitor data on their website and identify their “hottest” prospects.
Perhaps there is a potential buyer who keeps returning to look at several beachfront properties. Maybe there is a contact who was inactive for several months, but all of a sudden now continually visits the site and spends a significant amount of time reviewing homes for sale. This is incredibly insightful information that can be integrated with an agent’s customer relationship management system. The user real estate plugin basically identifies these prospects and displays their activity on an agent’s website, such as the pages they visit.
While tools such as Google Analytics shows you the total number of visitors on a particular page and how long they stay there, this tool helps separate those visitors into individual prospects. Not only do you have all your prospects organized correctly, but now your CRM can tell you which ones are most active. Those active prospects are displaying buying signals online. An agent certainly doesn’t want to ignore the signals. A savvy agent wants to know the level of interest with their prospects… and which ones they should be focusing on the most.
Perhaps a buyer needs more information. Maybe they were finally able to clear up their credit score and now they are ready to purchase a property and apply for a loan. Maybe another buyer who dropped off the agent’s radar several months ago because they couldn’t find any homes in their price range, is now able to put down a larger down payment and is ready to look at other properties. Maybe a homeowner has visited your home estimator tool several times this past month and could be very interested in putting their property up for sale. You certainly want them listing with you rather than someone else.
This is the digital age, and experts say 93% of home buyers now start their search online. Instead of calling agents all the time for information and answers like they used to do in the old days, your prospects are spending much of their time online. Use a real estate plugin to find the prospects online who are ready to make buying and selling decisions. The opportunity to see data on buying signals is there. A broker or agent now has a real estate plugin to spot them and give these prospects the extra attention and assistance they might need.
