Fail to plan, plan to fail

“There was an excuse for not being prepared for Covid-19 a few months ago, but there is no excuse for not being prepared now.” – Peter Knight, Property Academy

This comment from Peter Knight during Prospect Engine’s webinar on partnerships really resonated with us.

The threat of a second spike in the Covid-19 pandemic is real. It could happen next week, next month, in three months or more – no one knows, not even the government or scientists. It could even happen more than once.

Consumer habits are changing. High streets are changing. Lifestyles are changing. Other businesses are changing. Are you changing?

What's your plan

You need to be planning to make your business as agile as possible right now. Researching technology and outsourced solutions should be high on your agenda. Your supply chain should not be the same as it was four months ago.

We are now seeing a trend of agents making multiple supplier enquiries at once because rapid change is needed.

If you’d like to discuss your changing supplier requirements book a free consultation with one of our experts.

Changes in your supply chain that you should be considering now:

Virtual viewing solutions

In lockdown it allows the show to go on, post Covid it’s a great time saver that you should help buyers and tenants identify the properties they are genuinely interested in before arranging in-person viewings.

Kerfuffle recommends – Gavl, Matterport, Homelive

Telephone systems

Just before lockdown was imposed Moneypenny brought out their new digital dashboard that uses voice and number recognition technology to divert incoming calls to the relevant phone numbers. You must be feeling smug if you got hold of this pre-lockdown! Other solutions hook up your phone systems to your CRM platforms so that contact records are instantly pulled up. It’s worthwhile considering your options, particularly if work from home is going to feature more frequently.

Kerfuffle recommends - Global4Communicatons, Moneypenny

Digital presentation tools

There is no excuse to have a ‘lockdown look’ when it comes to presenting your services and your properties these days. If you are still attaching letters, pdfs and comparable reports then you need to be upping your game. Acaboom is leading the way here with it’s digital presentations that provide you with clever stats like when a viewer is reading your presentation so that you can coincidently call them and create that ‘it must be fate’ moment. There are loads of other great reporting features too such as comparable property reports. You need to see it to believe its brilliance.

Kerfuffle recommends - Acaboom

Website

The high streets have changed forever. We have all known about the ecommerce revolution for years but the last four months have moved things along at pace. Your website needs to be looking great and most importantly you need to be capturing data and engaging with the people using it. Yomdel and Moneypenny have great live chat solutions for estate agents which are great for that. When did you last update your blog section? Fresh content helps with its performance too. A great place to start is with a Homeflow benchmark report that will quickly give you insight into how your website is performing against others in the industry.

Kerfuffle recommends: Homeflow, Starberry, Yomdel, Content for, EstateApps, Property Jungle

Training & development

Something none of us make enough time for. Hindsight tells us how important it is to have something like this in place – imagine if you could have flipped all of your furloughed staff into a training and development model? It would have helped their mindset, kept them engaged with the industry and they would have returned to work even more brilliant than before! If you’re planning for the future and want to be the best estate agency in your area, this is a must have.

Kerfuffle recommends: Property Academy, AbleAgent, TM Training, Agency Mentors

Outsourced options

There are some great businesses specialising in the likes of sales progression, prospecting and auctions. They all offer a professional service under the guise of your brand. It’s worth exploring your options here to see how their performance compares with your own and then compare that with the cost of employing people to do the work in-house against their solutions. We’ve spent a lot of time understanding these businesses and we have been very impressed by their offerings.

Kerfuffle recommends: ASAP, OneDome, IAmSold, SDL Auctions, Prospect Engine, GOTO Group, Moneypenny