Key Highlights
- Virtual hand-holding with your prospective buyers via early morning texts and emails help and encourage your to persist in the home buying process
- Virtual handholding via a daily summary via email/text at the end of the day let your clients know you are working on their behalf consistently and relentlessly.
With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to require ongoing social distancing restrictions, agents must adapt their “quality time” with their prospects and clients to virtual quality time or hand holding with their clients and prospects to help ensure continued engagement in any home buying/selling transaction.
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Gerard Splendore, a licensed associate broker with Warburg Realty in New York, offered these tips to help agents develop and sustain quality relationships and transactions during this challenging time:
- To be efficient with everyone’s’ time (agent and client), send emails with the word “update” in the subject line accompanied by the address of the listing being considered. That specific subject line will get the immediate attention of the client/prospect right off the bat. That specific subject line will immediately identify the specific property and client to the agent so she/he doesn’t have to waste time sorting through all client names and listings to which he/she is responsible.
- As in any transaction, communication is key. Find out how clients want you to communicate with them…by text, email and/or phone. Make sure to obtain the contact information of everyone involved in the transaction…parents, in-laws, children, financial advisors, estate trustees…and copy them on all emails/texts. When using phone calls, take notes on the call and file them so there are both written and oral records of what has been communicated.
- Agent’s role is one of a teacher, particularly with first-time buyers. Agents have the information clients need…current, reliable, data driven market information, pricing information, etc. Being able to communicate that information with clarity is essential. Being able to communicate needed information repeatedly so that clients understand and grasp that information is essential. Almost without exception, Spendore has found that clients are grateful to receive necessary information over and over again.
- Agents must anticipate client questions and explain why details such as the client’s credit score are crucial to the process. For example, a client’s credit score is fundamentally important in obtaining a mortgage as well as the type and specifics of that mortgage. Agents must be able to communicate without being condescending.
- Agents need to be able to manage “setbacks” as “compromises.” First-time buyers, some 40% of the current buyers pool, may be “disappointed” that the house they can afford in the location where they can afford is not consistent with their ideal home. Features and amenities such as kitchen tile can be changed. Locations cannot but can be perceived as sacrifices or a means to homeownership. How agents frame setbacks and disappointments matter. When framed as compromises, Splendore has found that his clients adjust.
- Lastly, Splendore believes in agents having positive, optimistic attitudes even when the transaction process becomes tiresome and challenging. Home buying and selling transactions for any client are anxiety-producing transactions during the best of times. Communicating your virtual cool, calm, collected and professional attitude via email, text, Zoom, Face-Time, phone call, whatever will go a very long in maintaining and enhancing your connections with your clients. The more you develop your virtual skills, the more you as an agent will maintain, develop and enhance your business success.
Thanks to Gerald Splendore writing for INMAN News.
Also read: 4 Things for Homebuyers to Consider in 2020, More Than 70% of Couples Argue When Buying or Selling a Home, What’s Hot and What’s Not in September’s Housing Trends
