The real estate customer journey of today VS tomorrow: How to survive in a disrupted market?

Inflation, rising interest rates and other factors have significantly impacted the real estate market, consequently affecting real estate agents’ activities around their real estate customer journey. Today, these challenges have created an environment where real estate agents must differentiate themselves from the competition to ensure business continuity. To address this pressing need, many realtors have turned to real estate marketing and intensified their efforts in building an effective digital real estate customer journey.

Recognising the limitations of previous unidirectional funnels, real estate agents have realised the need for adaptation to digital transformation. Additionally, they have acknowledged the importance of addressing changing consumer habits and expectations. Therefore, they have embraced a new approach to meet these challenges head-on.

By focusing on acquiring, converting, and retaining customers through online methods, you can increase the likelihood that your prospects turn into mandates. Discover the transformation of the real estate customer journey and learn how to navigate its new challenges to achieve greater sales success.

What does the traditional real estate customer journey look like?

Let’s first look at the more traditional real estate customer journey to establish a shared understanding of the status quo and possible improvements.

The real estate customer journey along the funnel can be broken down into four phases:

• Awareness and visibility: this phase can be enhanced by advertising, building an optimised website and publishing relevant online content.
• Lead generation: solutions like free online valuations and other lead generation techniques are beneficial during this phase.
• Lead conversion: during this phase, real estate valuation solutions can help agents convert more potential clients into mandates by providing in-depth market insights and accurate valuations.
• Transaction: innovative solutions for real estate digital marketing can help real estate agents sell the customer’s property more efficiently.
  

Nurturing leads makes your real estate customer journey more powerful

Real estate customer journeys that stick to traditional approaches tend to overlook two crucial elements: staying top-of-mind and leveraging opportunities to re-engage contacts. In the current situation, this is critical, with challenges such as inflation, rising interest rates, and other market factors. Real estate agents must maximise the potential of their existing contacts. Doing so can unlock new, untapped opportunities.

It is worth noting that statistically, over 95% of leads don’t ultimately sign sales mandates. So focusing on nurturing relationships, building trust, and effectively re-engaging their network increases the chances of converting prospects into satisfied customers.

Your existing customer base and dropout leads have untapped (often underestimated) potential and are an essential source for new sales mandates. Perhaps the timing was off when you first got in touch, but that may not be the case forever – those people may be ready to have a serious conversation with you in a few months or weeks.

That’s where the concept of nurturing comes in; imagine if you could automatically revive:

• A few of those leads requested a free property valuation via your website and then never got back to you and
• Existing customers who have already bought or sold a property with your help would be open to doing so again in future.

How can you re-engage your contacts? Keeping the conversation going can be done by regularly providing them with relevant content and information. By pertinent information, we mean up-to-date data on the value of their property and in-depth market insights. Newly re-engaged contacts would fill your sales pipeline alongside the freshly acquired leads and ultimately boost your overall conversion rate.

Lead nurturing is a crucial element in tomorrow's real estate customer journey. Many real estate professionals have already incorporated nurturing into their strategy to boost business.

How to optimise your real estate customer journey?

After looking at how lead nurturing can upgrade the traditional real estate customer journey, let’s learn about new and innovative approaches to building a real estate customer journey and apply the theory to practice in two steps:

Step 1: Design your dream end-to-end customer journey with your target group in mind

Knowing your potential customers is critical! Asking yourself the following questions will help you define personas relevant for your business:

• What are your target customers’ habits and expectations?
• How can you best grab their attention?
• What are their pain points, objections, and needs?
• Is your target customer more active on Instagram or Facebook?
• What type of information would they find interesting
• Is it critical for your target customers to be able to reach you telephonically if needed?

Step 2: Pay attention to the right key performance indicators (KPIs)

Once you’ve mapped your target audience to the most relevant touchpoints within the real estate customer journey you are building, you need to track its performance and iterate where necessary.

Here are a few key performance indicators at different stages of the real estate customer journey:

• Traffic Volume: The amount of traffic you’re getting to your website.
• Web-to-lead: The rate at which website visitors convert into leads – specifically, seller leads requesting a free property valuation.
• Lead-to-mandate: The percentage of leads that sign sales mandates – after receiving a free valuation, they get back to you and give you the mandate to sell their property.
• Mandate-to-sale: The ratio of mandates signed that ended in properties sold.
• Reviving ratio: The percentage of customers and cold leads (people who dropped off) that turn into seller leads.

A step-by-step guide to help you optimise each phase within your real estate customer journey

We’ve compiled a quick guide detailing key initiatives you can implement to help you increase the traffic volume to your website and improve your conversion rates and the ratio at which you revive cold leads at every stage of your journey. To learn more about how to improve your critical KPIs around your real estate customer journey and profit from practical advice from more than ten successful real estate professionals around Europe, have a look at our ebook:

Who is the real estate agent of tomorrow?

We took a closer look at digital real estate customer journeys and their characteristics and delved into how they can be optimised. However, one question remains: in this ever-evolving market, what does the real estate agent of tomorrow look like?

The evolving landscape demands that you find unique ways to stand out from the competition. That's where PriceHubble comes in. We offer a range of solutions designed to empower real estate agents like you throughout every stage of the real estate customer journey.

With our products such as Lead Generator, Property Advisor, and Property Tracker, you gain access to advanced tools and resources that enable you to leverage the power of big data and analytics. These solutions provide accurate real estate market insights, including valuations, which are invaluable for attracting, converting, retaining, and engaging homeowners. By harnessing the capabilities offered by PriceHubble, you can effectively differentiate yourself and stay ahead in a highly competitive market, leveraging cutting-edge technology and data-driven strategies to achieve success.

Would you like to learn more about using digital solutions and real estate data to optimise real estate customer journeys? Get in touch with us!