Editor’s Note: The Playbook is an RISMedia weekly segment centering on what brokers and agents are doing to ensure they not only survive but thrive in these challenging times. Industry professionals explain the strategies they’re employing and unique ideas they’ve formulated. Tune in every Thursday for another addition to the series.
You can’t do it all yourself. While real estate, more than most industries, demands that practitioners take on a huge number (and a wide variety) of tasks, some level of delegation or automation will always be necessary. Especially for those who hope to grow or specialize, removing the more menial, tedious or time-consuming responsibilities can make a huge difference for success and balance in a business.
But as always, the devil is in the details. Are there tasks that are more easily, cheaply or effectively automated? What are the potential drawbacks of taking a hands-off approach to any particular task?
Amelia Chavez is a top producer for John L. Scott Real Estate in Washington State. She says that real estate is a particularly tricky business to automate.
“The whole point of being a trusted REALTOR® is you have to build that trust somehow, and that comes with personal interaction,” she says.
In Tennessee, Lila McCann heads up agent development for MW Real Estate in the Nashville area. She says automation is something that is different for every agent and broker, but cannot replace skills and experience.
“You’re a self-employed entrepreneur, if you don’t learn how to run your business—if computers are doing it for you, and they stop ‘computering,’ so to speak—who is there to pick up what’s left over?” she asks.
It all comes down to your business and your goals, Chavez says. But keeping in mind that a lot of the value you provide comes from you, and not the software you use or the services you pay for, must be a guiding principle when choosing what to entrust to an automated system or assistants.
“I’m not sure how we would quantify a service that didn’t offer us the human element to be able to problem solve and be able to take care of certain items,” she explains.
Out of sight, out of mind
Rarely does the question of “do I have to do this myself” have a simple answer. More often, there are parts of any given task that need human attention, and parts that don’t.
Chavez uses social media as an example. Automated postings of basic local content (news, holidays, etc.) can be very helpful, but something like promoting a listing needs to be something you do yourself.
“In our business, it’s so in flux. There really isn’t a way to say, ‘Every week, we’re going to talk about this.’ Because sometimes we’ll get a listing, we’ll be live next week and then three days later, the listing will be pending and we’ll be sold,” she says. “All of that stuff needs to be pretty manual because of the timing.”
McCann, while emphasizing that she strongly prefers to do things herself with a personal touch, agrees that there are elements of social media that can be automated. Her company coordinates various posts and updates across platforms, with both educational and promotional content scheduled out.
But agents are also careful to keep an eye on certain things—market data being one of the most important—in order to provide more relevant and personal value to their audience.
“We want to give our followers and clients the most up-to-date information,” she says. “Certain things we will automate, like broad homebuyer tips…I would say probably about half of what we put on our posts are automated, and the other ones are like, ‘Hey, this came up today, and we feel like it is valuable information.’”
But even choosing to automate requires that you keep an eye on your content. Chavez says she used a service that posted local news to her social media, but later discovered that included more than just positive business and market news—things like police alerts or shootings.
“I don’t want that on our Facebook page,” she says.
Additionally, some people want to see things like interesting houses or architecture, while others are interested in that market data or harder news, Chavez points out, so even an auto-post might need to be monitored or supplemented.
Intra-brokerage communication is another place with lots of room to automate. Chavez says she has a small team, and doesn’t need anything massive or complicated. But she says she would be very interested in a shared platform where team members can quickly update the whole group on status, processes or inquiries without having to deal with triangulating phone calls and texts.
“It’s a lot of communication to get items taken care of. If we had a list or a database that was just one place where we could all go to, and everyone could look at…not everybody has the same system that they’re operating under,” Chavez describes.
Basic business
A human transaction coordinator is something McCann says she is seeing more of in the industry—delegating all those deadlines from offer to closing. In the lending industry, it is easier to use technology for this purpose, but McCann doesn’t foresee that translating easily to a home sale due to how unique each transaction is.
“It would take a lot of time (to automate), more time than it would take to just stay on top of the file and what needs to be done,” she says.
Instead, her team “self-automates” by working together and always having someone available to clients. Chavez, on the other hand, says a program that independently tracks checkpoints in the listing or sales process could save a lot of time—reminding the whole team when an inspection or contingency is due, for instance, without the need to get on a phone call or write an email.
AI, centered around several recent public-facing chat programs, has dominated headlines, with some claiming it could take over many real estate tasks—from writing listing descriptions to analyzing contracts. McCann says she will “cross that bridge when she gets to it,” and doesn’t currently utilize any kind of chatbot on her website or for other functions.
In terms of writing—whether that is a listing description, an Instagram post or an email—voice is something that remains very important to a real estate brand, McCann says, and (so far) is difficult for a machine to replicate.
“I want what I do…to be in my own language,” she says. “If we’re not using our voice, that’s not going to relay to our clients that’s something genuine.”
Ancillary to the practice of real estate but very important to the business, tracking expenses, mileage and taxes is something Chavez says she wishes could be automated.
“Come tax season, which is what we’re in right now, I basically just want to die,” she laughs. “This is not an easy business to manage over the course of a year.”
Some apps will automatically track and categorize mileage, while others generate expense reports. Some of these features are available in big real estate CRM platforms, but again, Chavez says for her small team, it isn’t necessarily worth the expense.
The bottom line is, many of the most important parts of real estate are personal, and automating them is going to remove some part of that human element. Chavez imagines a scenario where a potential seller reaches out to an agent, but in setting up a listing appointment only ever interacts with a chatbot or some sort of automated system.
“They aren’t going to invite you into their home,” she says.
McCann agrees, but emphasizes that anyone who wants to make it in real estate should always be honing their skills, and you generally shouldn’t be automating something that you aren’t very capable of doing yourself.
“If you’re trying to learn about the business of real estate, building a client base and learning how contracts work and how transactions run—the best way to do all of those things is to be out in the field, doing them yourself,” she says. “You’re not going to learn those things if you’ve automated them.”
