When an SGR (Italian asset management company), and in particular an asset manager, starts a real estate divestment process, the estate agencies are often left to handle the marketing on their own: publishing the listings on the portals and, as a result, managing the enquiries received by the brokers themselves.
I always advise SGRs and asset managers to publish all the sale listings for their units with a single telephone number and point of contact, especially when working with multiple brokers and estate agents. In large buildings with units to sell or lease, publishing the listings can be optimised by rotating subsets of listings across different portals (there are software solutions on the market, known as PropTech, that make this method easier to use).
A single number for all real estate marketing activities
A single telephone number means taking on the cost of a switchboard operator or a call centre, which will route the calls to the various agencies, with the aim of not losing a single telephone enquiry. The benefits will be considerable, for the following reasons:
- First, using a call centre makes it possible to understand the real response rate of an advertising campaign and the actual interest in each unit, building, area and so on. Specifically, all the enquiries that arrive through a form, a landing page or a website created for an advertising campaign already carry their ‘source’. For every telephone call received, however, you need to ask, and record, where the advert or the listing was seen.
- In addition, telephone calls generate enquiries that succeed at a rate 30% higher than enquiries received through web forms or email. (*)
- Second, on average an agency or a broker manages to answer 56% of the telephone calls it receives, so almost half of these valuable calls are lost. (*)
An efficient call centre answers every telephone call, routes it to the broker in charge and, if the agent is unavailable, forwards a memo and sends a reminder to call back. This simple measure considerably speeds up the sale or leasing process, and it also shows at once the cost per enquiry of an advertising campaign.
Naturally, to keep control over data and processes, it helps greatly to use a management platform (PropTech) in the hands of the SGR or the asset manager, so as to obtain the real figures for enquiries received, calls handled, successful deals and so on.
(*) The percentages given come from the average figures of our clients’ operations managed with the EASYRE® PropTech.