How to Manage a Busy Real Estate Season

As a real estate agent, it is important to understand seasonal trends in the housing market. Research from CNBC shows that homes are usually less expensive in the fall and winter months, but spring and summer typically show a larger inventory that tends to sell faster and for more money. Understanding when is the best time to buy a house is key to managing your clients.

It’s important to understand how changes in the housing market can affect you and your business. In real estate school, you can learn about important policies and procedures to help your clients, but it’s important to anticipate your career’s day-to-day demands. Although you can’t predict the future, you can arm yourself with strategies for managing your real estate business and your clients in every season.

Our four tips on how to manage a busy real estate season will allow you to get ahead of seasonal demands, generate new leads, and close more deals.

Leverage Technology and Automation

Investing in a good customer relationship manager (CRM), can help you automate your outreach and nurture leads during a busy season. A good CRM can help you reach the right lead, with the right message, at the right time.

According to Forbes, a CRM software tool gives you a simple, easy-to-use interface where you can store customer data and manage relationships.

It’s almost impossible to remember every lead or client’s contact information, birthday, closing anniversaries, moving dates and communication preferences. Chances are, without a CRM to help automate processes, realtors lose hours of work a week and the opportunity to nurture leads, deals, and potential future customers.

Choosing a powerful CRM will help you nurture leads long enough to become clients and close future deals during the busiest of seasons.

Utilize a Task Management System

Similar to a CRM, a task management system helps keep you on top of your daily and weekly to-dos to push you toward larger goals. Using a real estate task management system like Slack, Asana or a free tool like Trello will allow you to prioritize different tasks and increase your productivity level.

If you’re looking for a tool that is industry-specific, Nekst and Amitree provide task management software for real estate agents.

If you’re managing a team, task management systems help you delegate and stay accountable.

Stay on Top of Your Inbox

As a realtor, your inbox can become overwhelming if you’re not actively managing it. Consider adding labels to your email like “Follow Up”, “No Action” or “To-Do”. By adding labels, you will be able to prioritize and address emails appropriately.

Limiting your email time can help too – rather than responding to every email that comes your way, designate 5 minutes every hour to check-in and follow up on high-priority clients. Reserving 30 minutes at the beginning or end of the day to label, delete, and archive your emails can save you hours in the long-run.

Not only will organizing your email help you stay on top of leads, new deals, and meetings, but your clients will also appreciate the responsiveness and easy communication flow.

Use Your Time Strategically

In order to be successful and remain productive, it’s crucial you learn how to use time management skills like time blocking.

Time blocking is a common practice that involves setting aside a large chunk of time and tackling one time-consuming task. Maybe you spend a sporadic few hours completing, submitting and filing real estate documents, agreements, and leases. Using a time block to tackle all of the administrative to-do’s will help free up time for lead generation, meetings, and tours.

Let’s face it, realtors are busy no matter the time or season. However, investing time to choose the right CRM and time blocking will only help increase your productivity and boost your real estate career.

Looking for other productivity hacks? Check out how smart home technology can improve your home business workflow.