10 Time Saving Hacks for Real Estate Agents

The real estate market has been on fire for the past several years. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be complicated. Sure, you’re probably busy and don’t have a lot of spare time on your hands. But there are always a few tricks that can help you carve some additional minutes out of an hour.

Here are ten time-saving hacks for real estate agents that can help you maintain and grow your business:

1. Invest in an Appointment Service

Working in real estate involves coordinating a lot of appointments. When you have to exchange emails or play phone tag to get something on your calendar, this isn’t the most efficient approach. Instead, you might want to invest in an appointment service like Showingtime that can do the work behind the scenes while you take care of business.

2. Try Hands-Free Calling

At some point, you’ll need to make a few phone calls while you’re on the road. But did you know that distracted driving is one of the leading causes of motor vehicle crashes? If you need to look at your phone while driving, you aren’t being safe and are probably breaking the law. For convenience and safety, use hands-free calling solutions to connect with your clients and business partners.

3. Use a Multi-Stop Route Planner

Showing homes is an integral part of your function as a Realtor®. On some days, you might have multiple homes on your list and need to plan out an efficient route. An excellent solution is an app called Road Warrior that allows you to enter multiple destinations in any order. You can also integrate your planned route with Waze, Google Maps, and other GPS applications.

4. Create Facebook Lists

It’s all too easy to log onto Facebook for business purposes and then spend hours looking at cat videos, catching up with friends and family, and planning your next vacation. Facebook can be the ultimate time-waster, but there are some ways to make it less distracting.

Rather than going straight to your Facebook feed, you can create Facebook lists that include people you’d like to stay in close contact with. This can include current, potential, and past clients that you want to keep in touch with on social media.

5. Send Audio Messages

You might have a lot of information you need to convey to a client. Maybe it’s too much to send through a text message, or the client just doesn’t “do texting.” Sure, you could call and leave a voicemail, but voicemail boxes are notoriously full. One solution that is becoming more popular is to send an audio file. You can quickly record your friendly message to the client and attach it to a text. This is simple to do with Android or iOS.

6. Install the Discoverly Extension

Real estate agents spend a significant amount of time doing online research. Whether this is your strong suit and something you love or your nemesis, a good tool to add to your arsenal is the Discoverly extension for Google Chrome.

This extension, which is commonly used by salespeople and recruiters, allows you to uncover the social media profiles and contact information of people you’d like to learn more about or get in contact with. You can find out if you have any mutual social media friends with some, see their recent Tweets, and learn about their LinkedIn connections. If you’re trying to generate leads, this can be invaluable.

7. Create Some Useful Content

Of course, homebuyers and sellers are going to have questions and concerns. But do you spend a portion of your time answering the same questions from new clients? You can save a lot of time by adding valuable and informative content to your website. Set up a blog and begin posting articles and videos that answer some of those common questions.

8. Automate Social Media

Even though social media can drain your time, it’s still an excellent digital marketing channel for just about any business. You definitely want to have a professional presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That said, you can automate some of your social media content using services like SproutSocial or HootSuite.

9. Set Up Google Alerts

You probably do a lot of reading to keep us with the real estate industry and what is happening in your local market. Sure, you could pick up the local paper or log onto social media. But, again, those can be distractions and time-wasters.

Instead, set up some Google Alerts with targeted keywords, like “mortgage interest rates,” and choose whether you’d like those alerts instantly, daily, or weekly. You can then read the relevant news articles and blog posts to stay in the loop.

10. Use a Time-Saving App

The internet can be a black hole. And some of us can just spend too much time chatting on the phone about stuff that isn’t going to produce results. But relationships are still important, right? So, everything in moderation.

When you can measure what you’re doing, you can optimize it. Maybe you waste too much time on Twitter or reading marketing emails. A time-saving app like Rescue Time can help you track the time you spend on various websites. It runs in the background and reports the details to you.

When you read your activity report, you can decide what is working for you and what you’d like to change.

Partner With an Experienced Title Company

While not one of the items on our list, you sure can save some time and frustration by choosing the right title company. Sure Title Company has been a trusted partner of Realtors®, lenders, buyers, sellers, and other parties to coordinate the flow of funds and documents and bring closings to a successful conclusion.

We understand the importance of honesty, integrity, and communication in the closing process. To learn more about our residential and commercial title services, call us today at (901) 881-0606