9 Real Estate Tools Every Agent & Broker Needs for Success

To run a successful real estate practice, real estate agents and brokers need the proper tools to set them apart from the rest of the crowd. Real estate marketing has come a long way over the years. To keep up with the trends, many professionals in the field have realized the importance of adopting new digital strategies to put them ahead of the competition. If you are looking to add to your real estate toolkit, read below for the top real estate tools that will bring you a larger audience, more leads, and greater success.

Best Tools for Real Estate Agents & Brokers

 

Custom Real Estate Website

One of the most useful tools for real estate agents and brokers is a custom website. Websites are wonderful platforms for lead generation, listing exposure, and buying and selling information for clients. Having a custom real estate website also helps differentiate yourself from competitors by giving your brand a look and voice. You are more likely to have a successful lead when clients feel connected, educated, and trusting in their buying or selling journey.

Successful websites should be responsive to any device, innovative, interactive, user-friendly, and optimized for search engines to increase your visibility. Building your site on WordPress allows you to customize your website with real estate WordPress plugins that provide additional resources to help educate and engage visitors. Some helpful plugin features you can implement on your site include:

Customer Relationship Management Software

In the real estate business, it is no secret that building customer relationships is key. From building relationships with new clients to maintaining relationships with previous clients, the connections you make are the backbone of your business. Using CRM software aids in generating more leads, scheduling and managing tasks, keeping contact records, monitoring sales pipelines, automating marketing efforts, and more. Incorporating a customer relationship management system into your real estate practice will keep you connected and ensure your business runs efficiently and effectively.

Email Marketing Platform

Staying in touch with your contacts via email is one of the easiest and most effective communication tools for real estate. Email allows you to send out updates about your business on a regular basis to keep contacts involved in your brand. Using an email marketing platform such as MailChimp helps with contact list building, newsletter formatting, and email automation. Whether you send an email newsletter bi-weekly or annually, it’s a great way to stay in touch.

Include information such as new listings, open house schedules, recent blog posts, and other general business updates. You can also build out email lists based on factors such as price and location preference to determine which content is most relevant to send out to your clients. Hyper-relevant content increases a lead’s chance of engagement and conversion.

Electronic Signature Service

Today, most people rely on their technology to complete everyday tasks, including signing important documents. Electronic signature services like DocuSign help facilitate the extensive document signing process in real estate transactions. For you and clients, signing electronically cuts down on in-person meetings, helps with document organization and storage in the cloud, reduces the amount of physical paperwork, and improves the efficiency of the buying and selling processes.

Home Valuation Tool

Providing a home valuation tool, also known as an automated valuation model or AVM, is one of the best real estate tools to provide clients. Use the Slipstream real estate data API to embed a home valuation tool on your site to engage with prospective clients. This tool will keep clients on your sites instead of on your competitor’s site, and can also aid in lead generation for potential clients early in the process of looking to sell their property. Giving your real estate website visitors the chance to interact with this tool gives them the confidence in being involved in the process.

If using a real estate data API on your site, you can also integrate a number of other features to further improve the user experience, such as:

Local SEO Strategies

Having a real estate website with search engine optimization (SEO) mind is extremely important for your online presence, and taking it a step further with local SEO can be the final push to put you ahead of your competitors. Your local visibility can be improved by ensuring your site and online directories have all the necessary contact information, also known as NAP(+W), or name, address, phone, and website. Other important local SEO factors include gathering positive customer reviews and performing local link building.

A large factor in local SEO success is having a Google My Business profile. Be sure to create and maintain a Google My Business listing with accurate NAP(+W) to be shown in search results and be easily found by users. You can even upload photos and share posts to engage with users and encourage leads.

Marketing Collateral Design

Making a great first impression is crucial in this industry. Making sure your marketing collateral is well designed to easily deliver your message can set you apart from competitors with bland designs. Luckily, you don’t need a creative team to make your real estate marketing pop! Use a design tool such as Canva to design simple-but-eye-catching marketing materials like social posts, open house flyers, business cards, posters, presentations, and more from their templates. Create designs that will draw attention to your message, but avoid making designs that are too busy and distracting.

Social Media Management

Being active on social media is a great way to promote your business organically while connecting with your audience. Use social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to create a voice for your real estate practice and grow a following. Social media allows you to share helpful materials like educational articles, company updates, and recent listings. Find a regular cadence that works for you and keeps people engaged. If you need help managing social channels, you can plan out your social strategy in advance and schedule future posts with tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

Real Estate Marketing Platform

One of the best real estate marketing tools? A comprehensive real estate marketing platform! As you can see, a lot of tools work together to create a successful real estate strategy. Investing in a full marketing platform helps integrate many different tools and processes into one, convenient space to save you valuable time. The ListingLeader real estate marketing platform offers marketing automation for realtors and offers services such as monthly email reports, social media integration, customer lead management, customized micro-websites, and printable reports to share with clients. Save time and stress by using a tool that can help you automate and streamline your real estate marketing efforts.

As a realtor, you know just how important it is to make a name for yourself in your local community. Using these tools for real estate, you are sure to boost your business in many ways. From increasing efficiency internally to generating more leads and forming closer bonds with clients, you’ll be impressed by just how much these simple solutions can create such a big impact. Get ahead of your competition and start using these real estate tools today!