What would you do with an extra 4 hours a week? You could make 200 more cold calls. Or hold 8 more open homes. Or you could do what I’d do: take 4 power-naps. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day - even a real estate agent’s day. You can blame the Egyptians for that one. So, if you can’t make more time, what can you do? You can save it. Enter the Rex real estate CRM....A CRM can automate tasks, manage relationships and make your agency more efficient - saving you time (and ergo, money). In fact, using just four features from Rex’s extensive feature set can save you 4 hours a week. 4 hours and 38 minutes, in fact.While it may not seem like much in isolation - for the average 9 to 5 worker, four hours a week adds up to a total of 30 work days saved a year (for perspective, Australia’s annual leave entitlement is only 20 days).Whatever you’d choose to do with 30 extra days, the Rex real estate CRM gives you the time to do it. Let me show you how.
1. Cut down on meetings
The average person spends 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings - so cutting that number down seems like a logical place to start.For argument’s sake, let’s say one effective business unit’s daily meeting runs for about 10 minutes - a very modest estimate. Every day, they stick to the same agenda. The buyer’s agent relays any buyer feedback from yesterday and briefly lists the people they intend contacting today. The lister tells their team when they’ll be out of the office, and the PA (or vendor manager) gives a quick status update on each of their tasks.That 10 minute meeting, run from Monday to Friday, eats into 50 minutes of each person’s working week. And that’s not even counting time spent scheduling the meeting, rescheduling when someone inevitably double-books themselves or exchanging pleasantries when the meeting finally kicks off. You know what I’m talking about - the fluff. And all that fluff adds up.Instead of holding a daily meeting, simply log in to Rex whenever it’s convenient and scan the Dashboard. There’s a reason that we call it ‘a user’s blueprint for the perfect day’ - the Dashboard shows everything that needs to be done in the day ahead at a glance:
- A live activity stream provides immediate updates on sales, leases, new listings and other goings-on in the office. The same stream also surfaces important contacts for your daily follow-up.
- The reminders stream shows a list of daily, upcoming and overdue follow-up tasks.
- An agenda shows details about upcoming appointments and gives you clear information about what follow-ups are due.
- Other dashboard streams surface follow-up reminders, expiring listings, contract dates, vendor feedback and a powerful industry RSS news feed.
- Managers can check in on progress of staff by using Rex’s Assume Identity functionality
You’ve just been saved from the mind-numbing, patience-testing, exasperating waste of time that is the daily meeting. You can thank us later.Time saved: 50 minutes, plus all of the fluff
2. Run less reports
Next up, reports.Real estate agents are an ambitious bunch - every day striving to be better than the day before. So it makes sense for agents to track their progress and make sure they’re well on the way to achieving their goals.If you are consistently checking in with your KPIs - well, Rex is going to save you a chunk of time.Rex can pull over 40 types of reports from the data in your system. The reporting functionality was designed based on consultation about what agencies, admin staff and sales managers require - so you can be sure they cover every part of Rex, and every part of your agency’s business. One report was so obviously needed: a KPI report.Without Rex, a real estate agent wanting to track their performance would need to run at least three reports a week:
- appraisals (conducted, won and lost)
- listings (new, current and expiring)
- the activity taken in relation to their listings
Each of those reports would easily take about 10 minutes to run and analyse - think about how long it takes to navigate your system, input date ranges and generate the report.Sure, they may ask a member of their Admin team to stop whatever they’re doing and pull up a heap of stats - but who knows how long that could take. The average employee suffers through 56 interruptions every day. It’s pretty easy to lose track of a task.Instead, Rex’s KPI report seamlessly pulls all of that information into one, easy-to-read, visual report. You’ll be able to see your progress at a glance.Time saved: at least 20 minutes
3. No more manual listing alerts
The time saving potential of Rex’s Auto-buyer matching functionality is two-fold:
- No more time wasted sending out listing alerts.
- One less phone call to each potential buyer.
Allow me to elaborate.Many real estate agents are still in the practice of manually sending listing alerts every time they win a new listing. How much time would you estimate that takes? Even if you have a templated listing alert, you’d still need to populate the fields, test the link and merge the letter with your contact list. That’s got to take at least 10 minutes.No longer, friends. Rex’s Auto-buyer matching feature means you’ll never need to manually send a new listing alert again. Never. Again.How can a real estate CRM be so smart, you ask? Why - with a little bit of automation magic… and populated match profiles. This is where agents need to do a little prep work. Don’t worry, it’ll only take a moment.Every time you create a new contact record for a buyer, create a match profile. Simply pop in the property type they’re after, a price range, preferred suburbs and number of bedrooms, bathrooms and garages required. You can even get super-specific and specify whether they need air con, a deck, an alarm system… the list goes on.When you list a new property, Rex filters through your contacts to see if any match profiles fit the bill - and then, Bingo! Rex will automatically alert those contacts that you’ve just listed a property they may be interested in.And because those alerts are sent as campaigns, buyers have all the details they need to work out whether they want to know more. This is effectively saving you one phone call per matched buyer - that initial five minute chat where you tell them you’ve just listed a new property, and provide all the basic information.To see which contacts have been matched to a particular listing, simply open the listing record, click Automatic Updates and then the number of agency contacts.From there, you can follow up with a phone call, text or email, or set a reminder to follow up later, see who’s opened the listing alert, how many times, and if they’ve clicked on the links. Pretty nifty, right?Let’s say you list one new property a week, and there are about 20 people in your database whose requirements match each new listing. Rex saves you from making 20 cold calls introducing the property.Instead, when you dial your way through your database, they’ll already know what you’re talking about - and will probably have questions for you.Time saved: 10 minutes sending the listing alert and 1 hour 40 minutes on the phone
4. Create bulk reminders
This is feature that’s going to bring us up to 4 hours. Well - 4 hours and 38 minutes, to be exact.Let’s say it takes the average, well-caffeinated real estate agent about 30 seconds to create a reminder to follow up a new contact. If that contact is a warm lead, the agent will probably want to create 20 reminders to touch base over the next 2 months. That’s 10 minutes of time, per contact.If you add ten new contacts a week, 1 hour and 40 minutes of your week is spent creating reminders. That’s 80 hours a year (assuming agents take 4 weeks of leave).But what’s the alternative - not having reminders?Nope, that’s not it. Instead of manually adding each reminder, Rex lets you attach a track of best practice follow-up activities to that new contact record. It takes about 10 seconds - saving you 9 minutes and 50 seconds per contact.Add 10 new contacts a week, and you’ve just saved over 1 hour and 38 minutes. And we’ve not even started on bulk actioning reminders!So, there you have it, friends. Four Rex features that save you a total of four hours (and 38 minutes) every week.
