Real estate

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Real estate
  • Overview
  • Groups of services: your prospect's situation
  • Services: different types of appointments
    • First contact in the context of a search for a property to buy or rent
    • Visit of a property to be put up for sale or lease
    • Individual or collective visit of a property offered by the real estate agency
    • One service per property offered for rental or sale
  • Staff members: real estate agents
  • Process: validation of appointments & automatic choice of agent
    • Thank you message
  • Notifications & reminders
    • SMS Reminders
    • ICS Event attached to an email notification
    • Email sent in the event of cancellation of an appointment
    • Customer feedback after an appointment
    • Email notifications to the real estate agent
  • Widget: Settings
  • Data collected when booking an appointment
  • Integration with the agency's website and social networks

Overview

Several configurations are possible, depending on your processes:

• The agency systematically meets the buyers to qualify their needs before showing them a property or offering it to them;
• The first appointment with a potential seller/buyer is directly at the address of the property to buy/lease/sell;
• A real estate agent agrees to make an appointment to visit a property without automatically communicating the address;
• A real estate agent agrees to book individual or collective appointment appointments at the address of a property.

Groups of services: your prospect's situation

The types of service can be grouped by context in which the prospect contacts the agency. For instance:

• Homes
• Lofts and condos
• Commercial properties
• Acreage, lots and land

This approach can be used to sort appointments and assign them to agents according to their specialty. Another approach may be to configure distinct geographic sectors if a distribution among the agents on this basis is more desirable.

Services: different types of appointments

Several types of services can be offered:

• I am looking for a property
• I am looking for a rental
• I wish to have my property estimated
• I wish to rent a property
• I wish to know more about a property
• I wish to visit a property

First contact in the context of a search for a property to buy or rent

The first appointment can be of two forms:

• At the agency : the client comes at the agency to meet with the realtor;
• By phone : the appointment allows the agent to call back the prospect at the requested time. 

Visit of a property to be put up for sale or lease

The appointment is a visit: the prospect indicates the address of the property and chooses a time slot among those on which the agent indicated to be mobile and available for this type of appointment.

Individual or collective visit of a property offered by the real estate agency

Several use cases can arise:

• The visit is confirmed after a phone call from the agent who only confirms the appointment for the visit itself, in order to ensure upstream that the property fits the prospect's criteria;
• The appointment takes place at the agency and the agent then drives the prospect to the address of the property;
• Information about a property over the phone: the appointment allows the agent associated with the property to call the prospect back at the requested time.
• Visit at a property: the meeting place is sent to the prospect in the appointment reminder, and the visit can be individual or collective.

In these different cases, the link between a property and the agent who manages it within the agency is established in the appointment booking link to add to the description of the property on the website of the agency.

An alternative is to create and configure one service per property.

One service per property offered for rental or sale

In order to automate the management of visits, a service can be created for each property. Its name can be its designation, and its description can be used to indicate its address so that it can be transmitted easily, for example on the occasion of a reminder 1 day before the visit.

A photo can illustrate the property, in order to be displayed in confirmation and reminder emails. The team member associated with this service is the agent who ensures the sale or rental.

A resource can be associated with this service to materialize the times when the property is available for a visit. For example: from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, and Saturday only in the afternoon.

The service must only be accessible from your console to be visible only when you explicitly refer to it via the appointment booking URL (see section Integration).

Note: It is possible to define the service with a capacity of 3 or 5 participants, if you wish to allow group visits.

Staff members: real estate agents

Each agent can optimize their availability ranges, for example to limit agency appointments to specific periods of their schedule at the end of the day, or even only on certain days of the week.

In addition, each agent can also synchronize their Google Calendar or Outlook calendar to facilitate the management of their personal unavailability outside of the online appointment scheduling platform.

Process: validation of appointments & automatic choice of agent

Depending on the agency's operating mode and the willingness to accept visits without a prior qualification meeting, it may be useful to submit each appointment request you to agent validation. Thus, each prospect can be called back by telephone before confirming the appointment:

• Either by the manager or the secretary of the agency;
• Or by the real estate agent associated with the appointment.

The choice of the agent can be automatic, according to the workload of each, while still allowing to associate a specific property to an agent.

Thank you message

The email sent to the prospect or client acknowledging receipt of an appointment request as well as the thank you message of the widget can then take the following form : "A real estate agent will quickly contact you to confirm the appointment".

Notifications & reminders

Several elements can be configured to automate communications.

First of all, each email sent to the prospect must be sent including:

• The telephone number of the signing agent
• The agent's email address for response

SMS Reminders

In the event that each property to be visited has its own service, the description of each service can be the address of the property, which makes it possible to send it to the prospect when reminding him of the appointment 

Appointment reminder for tomorrow, here is the address: {if:service=I wish to visit a property}{service description}{endif}

This element is important if you want to communicate the address of a property to visit when sending a notification or reminder.

Email sent in the event of cancellation of an appointment

To simplify the agency's communication when an item is no longer available, it is entirely possible to personalize the message template sent in the event of cancellation by the agency:

{if:service=I wish to visit a property}We put on hold all visits for this property.{endif}

If the booking widget is installed on each page of the agency's website, it can be very useful for the agent to know the page on which the prospect was when requesting an appointment. For example:

https://agendize-immobilier.weebly.com/properties/house-67-m-city-center

For this, it is possible to integrate the following element in the email sent to the real estate agent when making an appointment:

Property page: {URL source}

Several parameters are to be considered for the appointment booking module to be adapted to your real estate agency:

• The appointment scheduling module should indicate the last name and first name of each agent.
• It is not necessary to display the duration of the services.
• The interval in each appointment slot can be reduced to 30 or 15 minutes so that customers or prospects have a finer choice to define the time of their appointment: the criterion is not necessarily to maximize the number of appointments per day for each agent, but to make themselves readily available.

Data collected when booking an appointment

Several elements can be collected at the time of making an appointment to autofill the customer or prospect contact card:

• Postal code of residence and address (which can give an indicator on the property sought or for sale)
• Context of the contact request (for example: deadline for research or sale)

Many questions could be asked at this stage, but the challenge is to limit the number so as not to discourage contact when completing the appointment booking form.

Integration with the agency's website and social networks

The online appointment scheduling widget can be integrated in several ways:

• A global appointment scheduling button on your website, allowing you to offer different types of services;
• An appointment booking link in each agent’s email signature;
• An appointment scheduling button for each agent displayed on the "Meet our agents" page of the agency's website;
• Integration on the Google My Business and on the agency's Facebook page ;
• An appointment scheduling button for each property listed on your agency's website (the associated agent can then be predefined).