The real estate industry is highly competitive, and agents rely on constant contact to sell more properties. SMS messaging is an excellent tool for real estate agents looking to harness more efficient and effective communication with people looking to purchase and sell homes.
SMS solutions allow you to use automation to simplify your job as a real estate professional. From rerouting calls to auto-replying to messages, SMS can take your operations to the next level.
Explore the ways real estate professionals can use SMS to improve their business and establish better connections with buyers and sellers.
6 Ways Real Estate Agents Can Use SMS
SMS solutions allow you to use automation to simplify your job as a real estate professional. From rerouting calls to auto-replying to messages, you can take your operations to the next level. Explore how professionals in the industry use SMS marketing for real estate to improve their business and establish better connections with buyers and sellers.
6 Real Estate SMS Marketing Ideas
Let’s look at how any real estate professional can use SMS messaging.
1. Send Reminders
Missed appointments can be frustrating. However, one of the main reasons clients don’t make it to their commitments is that they forget. To overcome this challenge, you can send SMS messages to remind sellers and potential buyers about upcoming appointments and opportunities like:
- Showings
- Open houses
- Closings
- Inspections
A simple text can minimize no-shows to scheduled showings, helping you get more probable buyers to open houses. With an SMS platform like Red Oxygen, you can schedule reminder messages in advance to ensure they’re delivered to clients’ phones just in time.
2. Set up Meetings
Texts are a great tool for planning meetings like showings, as they allow you to streamline your scheduling and phone calls with buyers, sellers and other agents. Instead of spending hours emailing and calling people, you can send them quick SMS messages to:
- Confirm times and dates.
- Share a calendar link for showings and property tour bookings.
- Reschedule appointments.
Sending real estate messages to clients via text can increase efficiency. Beyond making it easy to coordinate with everyone, you’re more likely to get a quick response than with other methods of communication. Most people believe it’s acceptable to take one business day to respond to an email, and they may not always be available to take a call—but 95% of recipients read texts within just three minutes of delivery.
3. Share and Promote Opportunities
When working with potential home buyers, keeping them up to date on new listings is essential. This way, they can act fast on the properties they fall in love with. With SMS, you can set up automated messages to share new listings as soon as they come on the market. Because people read texts so promptly, they’re a much quicker and more attention-grabbing way to alert buyers than email.
You can also use SMS solutions to promote existing listings to people within their network. Texting makes it easy to share links to web pages with photos of the property and detailed information about the home. With SMS platform features like two-way messaging, you can also ask recipients to reply if they are interested in the listing.
Promoting open houses is another way to leverage real estate text message marketing. This can attract more prospective buyers and lead to a bigger turnout, which could increase your chances of closing a deal.
4. Send Follow-Ups
The real estate business is competitive. Sending follow-up texts after meeting with buyers and sellers can keep your clients from turning to your competitors or losing interest in the properties you are working with.
For example, you could send an SMS message to thank people for attending your open house or showing and encourage them to continue the conversation by asking what questions they may have. You could also send texts to follow up with clients who haven’t responded to you in a while.
Sending such messages via text can save you a lot of time and energy, as the hours spent calling each of your clients after every meeting or viewing add up quickly. With SMS, you can cut down on redundant tasks and keep the ball rolling to sell more homes.
5. Share Price Updates
As you know, things move quickly in the real estate market. You can stay ahead of the ever-changing landscape with automated SMS messaging that shares timely updates about price changes. Let’s say you have a hesitant buyer interested in a particular property, and the seller reduces the price—a text is a fast way to share this update, reengaging your client.
Using SMS to send potential buyers such information can help you stay competitive, keeping everyone in the loop without creating extra work for yourself. As a result, your clients will be able to make moves on attractive listings sooner and be more abreast and aware of the current market.
6. Send Offer Updates
You can also use SMS messages to inform sellers when an interested buyer puts in an offer on their property. Similarly, you can text buyers to let them know the seller has accepted their offer. Texting is a great way to send clients this good news and share the next steps.
Benefits of Using SMS for Real Estate
Here are some of the top benefits of using SMS solutions for your real estate business:
- Save time: In every industry, time is money—and as a real estate agent, your time is valuable. When you implement SMS messaging, you can save a lot of valuable time coordinating with and updating your clients. Automated messages eliminate repetitive tasks and streamline your operations, freeing you to focus on other essential aspects of selling homes. Texts can also speed up the sales process by encouraging potential buyers to act fast on competitive listings.
- Establish better connections: SMS messaging is an extremely engaging tool, as clients must opt-in to receive your texts. As a result, you’ll only be communicating with people interested in receiving your content, making it easier to establish a connection and grow it over time. Your clients are also likely to read your texts, as SMS messages have an open rate of 98%. They can also conveniently respond to your texts, allowing you to answer questions and keep the conversation going.
- Share real-time updates: Clients want to be updated regularly and expect instant replies to their inquiries, but meeting these expectations while balancing a full schedule can be challenging. Luckily, SMS solutions make sharing real-time updates easy, allowing you to keep your potential buyers involved and engaged. Your business can be more agile and efficient when everyone is up to date on the latest changes. You can also set up an automated response when you’re out or busy, helping to maintain a good response time
How to Implement Real Estate SMS Marketing
Follow these steps to get started with SMS marketing for real estate:
- Develop a strategy: Determine your texting use case, what you want to achieve and who your audience is.
- Choose a platform: To send marketing messages to your clients, you’ll need an application-to-person platform. These platforms will allow you to automate texts after open houses or send reminders before appointments and make it easy to send texts to many different people when promoting listings.
- Create a subscriber list: According to laws in the United States and Australia, clients must opt-in to receive your communications before you text them. In other words, they must give you their consent.
- Write your messages: Ensure your texts are concise and reader-friendly. You can even use templates to save more time.
Tips for SMS Marketing for Real Estate
When implementing SMS marketing into your real estate business, use the following tips to optimize your campaigns:
- Share who the message is from: Always sign off with your name or the name of your realty business. The people receiving your messages need to know they are not dealing with spam and whom to contact with their questions or concerns.
- Avoid overwhelming your recipients: Sending messages too frequently can easily annoy your recipients. Always allow people to opt in or out of receiving updates that may increase the number of texts they’ll receive, such as notifications about price changes or new listings.
- Use personalization: Including each person’s name in automated texts can make them feel more special and connected to your message. Leveraging personalization is ideal for boosting engagement rates and catching your readers’ attention.
- Stay compliant: Along with gaining your clients’ consent, you must comply with additional regulations in your country. Failing to do so could result in your messages being marked as spam, meaning they won’t be delivered. Businesses in the United States must abide by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, while those in Australia must comply with the Spam Act of 2003.
Request a Demo of SMS Messaging Solutions From Red Oxygen
If you are a real estate agent looking to harness and leverage SMS to benefit your business, turn to Red Oxygen. Our messaging solutions are compatible with Office, Gmail, web browsers and application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing you to select what works for you.
Our SMS solutions make it easier to keep in touch with your clients and other professionals, send personalized texts and set up automated messages. Plus, we can help you stay compliant.
Are you interested in learning more about how Red Oxygen can simplify your real estate business‘s communications? Contact us or request a demo today.
