Proptech a ‘must have’ for estate agents.

by Ayman Alashkar – Founder & CEO

Estate Agents need to be on the ball. Your customers are faced with a wealth of choice when it comes to selecting their new home. It’s hypercompetitive out there. Your brand, your experience, even your charm, can only get you so far.

There’s no doubt that the property market underwent a tumultuous 2020. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, forward-thinking tech has become a ‘must have’ for agencies to keep up with the changing pace of the market. Efficiency is more essential than ever.

Changes to working hours and processes has meant that tasks can fall through the cracks, and standards can easily slip. The transition to working remotely has been challenging in some respects and rewarding in others, but we all agree, customer experience shouldn’t take the hit.

Using PropTech to improve the employee and customer experience

Agents are competing to stand out from the crowd to get leads and exclusive instructions. Managers must therefore embrace technology while ensuring performance standards are exceeded, such that clients buy or rent their properties in the most efficient and satisfactory way. 

To optimise this goal, companies leverage technology to give better insights into processes.  

Take the business of writing your property marketing descriptions. Traditionally, managers either leave the task to each individual agent, or to administrative support staff. In either case it’s done manually. It takes time. It’s boring. Repetitive. Even worse, it’s prone to human error. Miscommunications. Poor copy writing. Under- or mis-representation of a property. All of these are common mistakes that reflect poorly on you and your brand.

From the Landlord’s mouth

This past week I asked an agent to correct the content of a listing they’d published for a property of mine, because their description utterly failed to mention some of the property’s key attributes, like its uniquely wraparound garden view! As a customer, I found that concerning. The agency in question failed to quality control my property’s description before it was published online. The whole process is totally inefficient. 

And that’s just one of many cumbersome processes that agencies grapple with everyday, at a time when efficiency is crucial. Agencies really need to be on the ball, even more so than before. The slightest underperformance may result in clients taking their business elsewhere.

Adopting a sophisticated service

Automation and process insight technology can help companies make decisions which improve efficiency, such as allocating a member of staff to a particular task or rolling out company wide procedures that prove successful in testing. 

Imagine automating and centralising your property description writing process. Instead of wasted time, you instantly create property descriptions that’ll get people reacting; wanting to know more about your property. Calling you to action. Instead of human error, you get quality assurance, key performance management, and lead generation, in a simple dashboard.

By the time a competitor has performed the task manually, you could have already completed it and moved on to the next.

The dinosaur in the room

There is a misconception that automating a task will dull your ability to perform it. Such views are held by the industry’s dinosaurs. The very people who complained when mobile phones eliminated the need to memorise phone numbers.

What we are seeing now is that smart and sophisticated artificial intelligence platforms are able to augment human capability; taking the best of what humans do, and helping them do it even better.

Estate agencies now have the flexibility to decide on which specific parts of their processes they would like to automate. Managers have the tools to augment their human resources.

Agencies with the right infrastructure in place to work quickly and efficiently will absolutely see their business change for the better, in 2021 and beyond.

OVERWRITE.ai is a world first, user-friendly marketing solution that allows estate agents to instantly autowrite unique, search-optimised property listing descriptions, taking the boring out of the daily grind.