If you’re working in real estate, no one needs to tell you the hustle that’s required to keep your business thriving. Real estate can be cutthroat, it can be emotional, and it can be full of surprises. The following will explore some of the things a real estate agent can do to help keep their business growing and thriving.
Know Your Town Like The Back Of Your Hand
You need to know about the area you’re selling in, and this is going to involve understanding a whole bunch of different topics as they pertain to your neighborhood. You need to have a sense of the architecture in your area, the history of the settlement, the styles of construction and when they were built, the common construction issues that the homes in your area like flooding, the wildlife that people often have to deal with, the soil in your area, the weather, the schools, the parks, the government bodies and how easy it is to work with them if someone needs a building or alteration permit. You need to know which neighbors are difficult to deal with and always leave their dogs off-leash unattended. You need to know what life is like in the area, how the restaurants are, what stores and activities are available, and that’s just the beginning.
Know The Real Estate In Your Town
You’re also going to need to be constantly refreshing yourself on the homes that are bought and sold in your area. A change of ownership should not happen without you taking notice of it and looking at the asking price, the time spent on the market, and the selling price. This will help you give both buyers and sellers realistic expectations (which you probably already know can drastically alter the speed at which a home is bought or sold). If you can tell people what the houses on their street went for and how long the process took, you’re giving them valuable data they can use to get a better estimate of how their own experience is going to turn out.
Pay Attention To The Trends
Trends in home design and decor are always changing. This means you need to be always learning what the new ones are and adapting your advice to your clients. Certain features become stylish for a time and draw in buyers, and then, almost overnight, they become dated and actually serve to turn potential buyers away. As a real estate agent, people might ask your advice on repairs, renovations, or alterations they should make to gain a little more money in a sale. Yes, almost always sticking with neutrals with as little personality present as possible is the way to go, but what is considered “neutral” changes. Beyond this, often things people consider tacky are what was stylish five to ten years ago. It takes maybe thirty years for something to become cool again or indicative of an era.
Get On The Platforms
People aren’t only searching for houses in the newspaper anymore or driving around looking for sale signs; they’re searching all over the place. Dip your toes into all platforms, but especially pay attention to ones like Real Estate Bees that streamline the process. If it’s easier for people to shop and buy homes on a platform, you can bet that people are going to gravitate towards those platforms.
Amp Up Your Photos And Videos
Standards for photo and video quality are booming, and it’s no longer okay to have a few amateur photos with bad lighting. If you aren’t fantastic with a camera, hire a professional. More and more people are touring homes using online videos, and detailed photos, and the rates of buying sight unseen are radically increasing. If you don’t capture the home’s charm in your images, you might miss out on the perfect potential buyer who didn’t have the time to drive past the house before making their decision to book a viewing or not.
Go The Extra Step
Sometimes it’s the little things that make or break a deal. Working with clients to get a home decluttered, encouraging people to take half their stuff out of the closets to make them appear bigger, cooking something that smells good, and getting the pets out of the house for viewing can all help make the sale. Over the course of your career, take note of any tiny detail like this that people positively comment on and see if you can recreate the effect in the next home.
The above tips should help you keep your real estate business thriving. Of course, none of these are to be applied once and then forgotten. You need to be regularly revisiting these tips and reapplying them to keep seeing results.
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