Select top listings
If you really want to get buyers interested, the best thing to do is to ensure that the properties you’re listing genuinely are top quality. This includes keeping your listings up to date, deleting old ones or those that have sold, uploading new ones or changing details to current listings where applicable.
But that’s not all. You may feel that as an estate agent your job is to sell the properties that are brought to you. But who says you can’t go proactively looking for the right properties?
We publish regular data reports about what’s selling and to which nationalities. If you know that apartments are hot with Brits right now, or that there’s growing interest in Spain from German buyers who happen to like coastal properties, then make sure to market yourself to these vendors so you can fill your books with properties that you know will appeal to international buyers.
Choose awesome photos
You can describe a property in award-winning language but no words will ever come close to a picture when it comes to capturing your potential buyer’s heart. Imagery is everything when it comes to selling houses, so either ask your vendor for suitable photographs or take some yourself.
We’ve got plenty of tips on the kind of photography that will help attract and convert buyers. It might take a small amount of effort to get these taken and uploaded with your property profile. But we’ve seen for ourselves that the properties with a decent number of high quality, professional standard photographs are the ones that generate the most enquiries.
Face to face appointments
Buying a property abroad – whether as a holiday home or a permanent residence – is a pretty big step for any individual or family. The fact that this is such an important purchase means that people will usually be a little nervous about making the wrong decision.
Anything you can do to help them feel more secure will take you one step closer to a sale. But reassuring someone is very hard to do via email or even telephone. By ensuring that you have at least one (if not more) meetings face to face with your prospective buyer, you’ll greatly increase the opportunity to build a relationship and therefore the trust that may well lead to a sale.
Great customer service
Of course, face to face meetings are only part of it. If you want to increase the likelihood of your Kyero listings translating into enquiries, and then sales, you’ll need to focus on customer service as a whole. People don’t make property purchases purely on logic – there’s a great deal of emotion that goes into decisions like this, and the way they’re treated during the buying process can make or break a deal.
Your main goal should be to create trust. Visitors are much more likely to buy or rent from agents they have built a good relationship with. Go the extra mile to ensure you’re building that trust and you’ll certainly see the results. You can use all sorts of small yet effective techniques, such as taking advantage of our free auto translator, which is shown to help agents who use it to generate far more leads.
Remember that basic politeness – returning phone calls and emails, showing up when you say you will, etc – is only the starting point. To make your prospective buyers feel really looked after you’ll need to go one step further. Remember that international buyers may well have very different customs to you. Something that a Spanish buyer might find acceptable might be considered rude in another country, so be sure to do your research.
Be ready to listen
Great customer service can only be delivered on the basis of good listening. Unless you listen to your potential buyers, how do you know what they want? We’ve already alluded to the difference between people of different nationalities. But every individual – no matter where they’re from – is unique and therefore needs treating in a personal way.
By starting from a position of listening, you have a far better chance of really understanding your buyer’s needs. That way, you can help them find the exact right solution for their needs, as quickly as possible. This is far likelier to get you to the point of a sale than just trying to shove a property at them in order to get it off your books.
Likewise, it’s important to be proactive in showing that you’re available and ready to listen. We’ve seen plenty of agents ignore enquiry emails because a property isn’t available anymore or because they’ve had lots of interest.
They’re missing out. Yes, this new enquiry might not end in the sale of the property the buyers are looking at now. But catch them at this stage and there’s a good chance you can help them to find an even better option from the selection of properties you’re currently selling.
Say congratulations with a closing gift
You may feel that when you’ve made the sale, your job is done. But sales operate on a three step process – people need to feel emotionally drawn to a proposition, then they need to be convinced by the logic of their buying decision, and finally we come back to the emotional response to having made the purchase.
By giving your buyer a gift to say congratulations on their new property, you’re helping them to feel that little bit more certain about the decision they’ve made. You’re taking a step to counteract what is known as “buyers regret”.
Plus, you’re ensuring that if your new buyer should have friends or family looking to buy in the future, they’re much more likely to recommend you.
Invest in marketing tools
No, we’re not just talking about listing your properties on Kyero – although we have proven results when it comes to generating leads, enquiries and sales for our agents.
But there are other marketing channels that you can spend time or money using to your advantage. For example, customer reviews and ratings – on Google, Facebook and so on – can really help provide the social proof that might make the difference between an international buyer trusting you with their property purchase or not.
Likewise you might want to think about putting things like automated emails in place or getting a newsletter set up in order to nurture the leads you get and ensure more of them convert into property viewings and ultimately sales.
By putting some time and a small amount of effort into these tactics, you’ll find that the number of leads you generate will increase, and the number of those leads that convert will also grow.
