And why Estate Agents simply cannot keep up with he demands of the Smartphone user.
In the high-stakes world of home buying and selling, understanding the path to a purchase is both an art and a science.
Our analysis shows that the average home buyer requires 52 touchpoints, spanning from initial research to contact with an Estate Agent to actual purchase.
What were our top findings? There’s an average of 52 touchpoints from first inquiry (like a smart form submission, chat room query ) to completion.
The Metrics.
If one sales agent sells two homes per month, that’s 24 buyers per year x 52 touch points = 1,248 touch points a sales person has to manage in a year.
And that doesn’t include all of the other inquiries and contracts that cancel.
Average time from first inquiry to close was six months for primary residence and 15 months for secondary homes.
80% of Clients submit a smart form to start their enquiries, mostly off their Smartphone.
Drip email and newsletter campaigns can increase traffic by as much as 5%
But our research suggests a Progressive Web APP with no download required will increase enquiry traffic by as much as 20% using a combination of free notifications and SMS
Over 50 touchpoints in most completions.
How did you determine the amount of touchpoints in a single home buying transaction?
Progressive Web APP notification advocacy Online and QR based smart form submission Email, CHAT and TEXT QR based appointment booking Bespoke Smart Brochure interaction EXAMPLE Video interaction via Smart brochure and window QR
How can Estate Agents make the most of each touch point? Speed is critical.
The probability of reaching an online lead goes down the longer you wait with a follow-up email, call or chat reply.
The Millennials insist on absolute immediacy on their Smartphone and the killer is that whatever platform they touched, they expect you to have a record!
Your Smart Brochure, Smart form pages, Company email, telephone calls and texts, QR links, Chat room, and Progressive Web APP have to be joined into teams within a CRM
The rule for the Smartphone user now is a maximum of 10 minutes on any medium, or they drop you like a stone.
Get it right and Smartphone advocacy on social media goes through the roof.
Within the first 10 minutes of inquiry — 98% chance of reaching them
Contact 4 hours later — 95% chance of reaching them
Contact 8 hours later — 92% chance of reaching them
Contact 12 hours later –80% chance of reaching them
Contact 24 hours later — 60% chance of reaching them
Contact 48 hours later — 5% chance of reaching them
This is why it’s critical that sales people get immediate notifications about hot leads and that follow up is relevant and automated.
Depending on the stage of where the buyer is in the purchase cycle, personalisation is important.
I decided to start writing a lot more about my life, my job and my office.
I’m a 32 year old medical secretary from Long beach New York, originally from London England, married to a baker and our household is awake at 4 am every morning!
I finish at 5 pm, so quite a long day, but my husband is home by 2 pm.
Our time apart is a good time for me to write, so here goes
Becoming a medical administrative assistant was a challenging position with significant responsibilities, but my degree leant itself to this kind of job and the salary is excellent.
Although my job isn’t medical or overly patient-facing it doesn’t mean it isn’t one that requires a significant amount of dedication!
The responsibilities of being a medical administrator are rewarded with above average pay, and there is a reason for that!
I have identified some touchpoints I would like to share and I wonder how many other people have similar problems in their office environment ?
Dealing With Difficult Personalities
Communicating with patients very often means dealing with scared, confused, and angry people and the Consultants and doctors themselves can be very demanding in their own right!
A Heavy Workload because of a lack of joined up thinking !
Running a healthcare facility comes with a lot of paperwork and there is my gripe, thats the nub, that’s the rub, this is my complaint.
In a world of wireless internet and smartphones, I fail to understand why its all so complex and why the Printer still seems to be the shrine.
It’s like the kitchen space in a house where everybody congregates next to the coffee machine.
I have inherited a mish mash of paper written doctors notes, a central management system that was commissioned in 2004, files galore and paper doesn’t talk to computers !
It’s not joined up and feels cobbled together rather than strategically compiled.
Why is this a problem when ostensibly, we allegedly have a paperless office.
There seems to be a trust problem, as if “if its not written down it might be lost” culture
The paperwork is an important part of my job to keep the gears turning behind the scenes, enabling everyone else to do their job professionally.
But my day is impeded by file chasing and haulage !
Dealing With a Lack of Physical Activity
As with most clerical roles, working medical administrative assistant is mostly a desk job.
While there is nothing wrong with working at a desk, most of us do it, being entirely desk-bound can have a negative effect on your health.
If you’re proactive enough to fit in the right kind of exercise to stave off the problems associated with office work, thats ok, I run almost every day, the park is beautiful, that bit I have overcome.
I am the Go-To Problem Solver
A constant never ending stream of requests and telephone calls with zero automation !
Clients cannot book into a central diary and the booking system still relies heavily on incoming telephone, very often into a disorganised Consultants diary shared with a private diary, its a constant problem with return calls and new arrangements .
With all this Covid kerfuffle I noticed such reliance on QR codes.
Quite clever I thought, so if its good enough for Government Departments its good enough for my office.
And here we are.
I identified about 10 areas I could implement QR codes, independently of the office metrics, and it has worked !
It has worked because my workload is much more manageable.
Here is what I achieved:
On my desk and around the clinic
A Brochure with QR linking to a dedicated booking email.
QR on the wall head height and large for:
Parking ticket redemption
Clinic map
Covid rules
Toilets
WiFi
Emergency ( on brochure as well )
Map geo code
Opening times
Staff
Payment ( links to website)
Clerical ( 10 codes )
Advisory ( 20 codes linked to you tube mainly )
Thank you for listening, maybe we will eventually go paperless, but for now using paper to connect to the Smartphone has been an outstanding success for managing my time !
£421 billion ( Yep, you got it , thats £421,000,000,000 ) plan to tax rising house prices to pay for the Coronavirus crisis
The first of October an Estate Agents problem ?
Seriously though, apart from the customer paying a hefty tax on an asset that may well go down in price over the next few years.
Do you see this as a problem with Government taxation?
Or is mortgage amortisation going to flatten things out and remove the issue?
Talking to Agents in more than one country helps a lot.
Continents rather than just Countries !
Lots of different problems and worries, but one common denominator
Distributing snippets of quality information on a regular basis is going to be very important for building trust and future sales.
And the ability to communicate on all sorts of platforms but retain the touch points of the eventual sale is becoming critical in this disparate world.
I guess you are sending newsletters and publishing on the website etc
But is that going to be enough in the new digital high street ?
The preferred communication channels for the smartphone generation are changing at lighting speed.
And your website probably doesn’t get a look in
It’s a much broader brushstroke than that to future proof communications in the world of property sales.
We get the problem, we understand and the statistics compound that.
68% increase of mobile traffic.
15-fold improvement of load and installation.
25-times reduced use of device storage.
52% average conversion increase.
78% average session increase.
137% engagement increase.
But taking the right action from a Property market Directors or owners perspective requires a bit of joined up thinking.
And its not particularly expensive, its more organisational but with the right tools.
And thats a huge problem for management that’s generally too young to make good judgment on future proofing their business.
Consumers aged 20 to 45 The Millennials.
New rules:
“They trust advocacy on social media, explore their wants on a website, but buy and engage on an APP”
And thats the problem, most Estate Agents think that using the website and the telephone is satisfying their customers needs ……………….it cannot !
Executives must shift their approach to ” identifying high-value cross-touchpoint tasks – and then design those touchpoints to support those tasks…”
“Brands must focus on optimising the journey, not each individual touchpoints”
Think A to Z business, think APP in APP solutions.
All the touchpoints related to the detail, e. g, financial documents, bank statements, mortgage quotes and their decision should be chronologically incremental.
And evenly spaced in the time frame.
Say 10 weeks to sale, then 10 bitesize increments is good.
Perfect for the logic of Progressive Web APP.
Perfect for the two way communication methodology of a Progressive Web APP.
The Millennial is heavily into the one stop smartphone shop.
In both vehicle lending and mortgage lending, the moments of opportunity occur much earlier in the process than they used to.
By the time the savvy Millennial are in contact with an Estate Agent they are much closer to fulfilment than most Agents realise.
It can be said, that the Estate Agents role is completely changing and the variable costs of the traditional model are changing obsequiously and inexplicably.
Changing enough to affect Fixed cost models as well!
“Every loan purchase is a journey for the borrower”
It’s critical to map that journey and understand when the moments of opportunity occur.
Then your financial institution can open timely dialogue about product choices.
Understand you percentages:
Over 80% of the completion journey focuses on the geographical area to purchase and physically looking at the property.
The Millennials put huge trust on quality videos, they have a brilliant skill set of spatial awareness, absent in the pre Smartphone generation.
A property without a top quality video is tantamount to neglect as far as the Smartphone generation are concerned.
Meeting with an estate agent is easily abandoned when they have access to video.
And the preferred method is looking up that pro-video via QR code
The clues of A to Z needs of the Millennial are already obvious, they already and painfully have a disjointed 65% internet journey with plenty of reasons to abandon the process.
Ask your team to conduct all their business on a Smartphone for a month, ban big screens and PC’s
Then you will begin to see the problems you are presiding over inside your business.
But it’s the Digital diet Obesity obsession that doesn’thave a word to describe it, thats the most illuminating.
This Digital Diet eats up your time and engulfs your waistline for a truly “Well upholstered ” small business nightmare.
The Diet to avoid here is the Business Website.
A thankless never ending task of updates and inclusions and a thousand ways to waist ( pun) countless hours of your life without any real sign of a return on time investment.
And thats just half of the pain.
Arguably the bigger waist ( sorry ) of time and effort with zero reward is marketing the website.
A futile pointless demeaning and fantastically complicated Digital Diet to avoid.
So how can a small business lose the weight FAST !
My digital diet is making me fat
An over weight business can carry many words.
Not a Diet FAD
Change your mindset in 24 hours.
Adopt the Smartphone professionally and leave the PC behind !
The Millennials have !
Get off the Digital Diet, leave time for more pleasurable exercise.
Deborah Grant Communication advisor and business development coach in conversation with Will Nicholls.
Modern business is all consuming, and the journey is just like walking, we tend to navigate our business looking down at our feet.
A natural human response in any situation is avoiding obstacles and not tripping up !
Deborah asks some really important questions, especially on her one on one coaching workshops.
She asked me for my vision for my business and I looked up to see the story ahead.
STOP she says, hold that, what else do you see ?
Then silence, that went on for ages.
Deborah asked me to look up even higher so it cranked my neck.
Now do you see she enquired ?
Yes I said, I’m in the clouds looking down, surveying my business.
Do you see things differently now she enquired ?
Business people forget to look up.
It could be costing your future.
The majority of small business people are too busy working in their business to work on their business.
This is especially true in times of pain and stressful workload, and I guess most small business has been through hell and back in the last 2 years.
And in the industry of business tech, past investments are so redundant it’s time to drop them.
Drop them like the burden of carrying heavy water.
Lighting change for small business.
Look up you guys, do this today!
Deborah says take a short high energy walk.
Stand outside and crank your head as far back as comfortable, as your eyes join the clouds in the sky, then look down at your feet and then straight ahead.
The tunnel vision of business ownership will open up like night and day, its like opening the huge doors of a barn to let the sunlight illuminate your future.
The journey you have been on for a very long time is akin to carrying water through the desert.
It’s very heavy its extremely hot, its debilitating.
But looking up you will see an aquafer or a viaduct and your river of change that allows you to stop carrying that heavy water and begin looking straight ahead with clarity and purpose.
Deborah whispers to me.
The water is already on your journey, put trust in that.
