Well, there has been a long-running debate on the future of our sector for a long time between online estate agent operators and high street estate agents.

Generally, traditional estate agents held their value on customer service and having a local presence, while on the other side online estate agents are proud about being available out of usual working hours and saving customers’ money due to not having high street overheads.

Now, to find the answer we will do a quick survey on the answers the investment consultancy Jefferies gave on these issues:

Customer is the core

 

Your customer does not care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Damon Richards

 

According to Jefferies, the residential property sector would continue to be led by the consumer. They assert that customers should have an open line of communication with agents out of normal working hours.

Therefore, it is obvious that people’s lifestyles have become less formulaic and more reliant on technology, there seems to be a desire for more round-the-clock services like live chats, etc.

Local staffs are still essential

Jefferies believed that agents who only offer a listing service are unlikely to be successful.

The fact that the local presence has been the key part of the estate agency business is not deniable. However, the growing Hybrid estate agent proved that having staff on the ground to cover a specific market is not a necessity. Because in the selling or letting process the customers’ needs is to be heard and advised by an expert local agent who is working on that area through a call, even though they are on the ground or online.

Customers will pay for the high quality

Therefore, the low price is not necessary for the estate agent environment anymore because experience in hybrid estate agents increasing their fees and on the other side customers paying the higher price for better services proved that lowering the prices would not be the solution anymore.

The clients will be pay higher fees when they are fully aware of what they are paying for.

There will always be a niche sector of the market looking for rock bottom prices, but it seems the majority will happily pay if the service is good enough. Therefore, Agents who can successfully sell their services to prospective clients without dropping their fees are most likely to be the industry’s leading firms

Embracing the technology has a long way to go

The sale process has some way to digest and digitalised. One feature that can help agents dramatically is the matching process in the sale process.

In the Homes Around property management software, we happily provided the applicant and property match as simple as one click.

The correct use of technology really can improve an agent’s business. From having a beautiful website, which is, user friendly to utilising the cloud and the latest property management software, agents who embrace PropTech and understand how it can enhance their offering increase their chances of success in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Here at Homes Around we provided cloud-based property management software allowing you to acquire tenants and manage Arrears, inspections, payments, maintenance, and staff.

You can also count on us to design your property websites.

For more information about what we can do for you, get in touch on:

Tina

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