PropTech Today – working smarter with PropTech can ...

Technology continues to enhance the way estate agents work, from improving efficiencies, reducing admin time, and ensuring your team remains highly productive.

From virtual reality and the internet of things (IoT) to artificial intelligence (AI), PropTech trends are reforming the agency model and making their way into daily routines up and down the country.

While the property industry has been sometimes been accused of being too slow to embrace technology advancements as a whole collective, more agents are opening virtual doors and providing valuable information to buyers, landlords and sellers through PropTech.

But integrating products, services and software can sometimes be difficult and cause frustrations and hold-ups for all parties.

That’s why it’s vitally important to partner with the right tech providers, use their products to the fullest potential, and ensure every member of staff knows how to utilise them.

A new member of staff

It’s one thing to implement PropTech into your business, but it’s another thing entirely to introduce every member of your team to it – almost like a new employee – so there is familiarity across the board.

Everyone from the director to the most junior member of staff should be onboarded with the product, but equally, there needs to be a hierarchy when it comes to the implementation of the tech.

This means appointing someone to take charge, delegating and making informed decisions. With the primary employee taking sole responsibility, all the leads are funnelled through them, helping to prevent disruption to the business.

There should also be a second employee who fully understands the system, so they can easily step in if the primary employee is otherwise engaged.

Having other people who are equally up to speed and aware is important, as they can ensure things don’t falter when the first and second employees are unavailable.

Meeting resistance with clarity

Even the simplest PropTech products can be met with resistance from members of staff when rolling out a new product. This is because the industry operates on a legacy system – if something isn’t broken, why fix it?

Some employees are impervious to ‘something new’, no matter how useful it could be. Employees may also want to avoid new products being passed down to them as it’s another system they must log into.

As a result, staff might not maximise the product to the fullest extent and could claim they are too busy with other tasks. However, having a centralised way of working – whereby one person manages the leads and filters them down to their staff – solves this issue and negates it altogether.

Achieving quicker and better results

With only one person managing the product, decisions on who to delegate leads to can be made quicker, meaning prospective clients can be contacted much sooner and with more efficiency.

Slow processes can turn a very hot lead into a much cooler one in a matter of days. Being decisive and jumping on the lead as soon as possible through sharp decision-making can allay this problem, this is proven to be vital to have systems and processes in place to ensure your leads are being responded to instantly both during office hours and also out of office hours, which can be achieved via MovePal.

But speed doesn’t matter if the results are mediocre. Avoiding logjams in the system means less disorder and hold-ups, which can lead to better results.

Of course, there is no rainbow without rain. A centralised system has its downsides in certain situations, but simple trial and error can allow your business to determine the best way to make the most out of the product. After that, the results speak for themselves.

Don’t just take my word for it. We’ve heard from numerous agents who have employed such a system, especially since the height of the pandemic, and they haven’t looked back since.

*Craig Vile is director at The ValPal Network, which is owned by Angels Media, publishers of the Today sites