Maximizing your property sales and boosting referralsMaximizing your property sales and boosting referrals89% of homeowners sell their property through an estate agent, which means that agents need to be at the top of their game in order to attract and retain clients amongst stiff competition.
Combine that with the fact that only half of the sellers said they were satisfied with the selling process, and you have a lot of dissatisfied customers.
Whilst this shows the real estate market in a surprisingly negative light, it can also be seized as an opportunity to stand out from other agents. If you could provide a high-quality service and an efficient method to guide your client through the property sale process, referrals will soon be replacing customer dissatisfaction.
‘Make sure everyone who works with you or for you, feels the need to tell others about the incredible experience’ – Chris Murray
Clear processes help you continuously improve your services by optimizing the tasks you do every day, week, or month. With concrete instructions for your team and opportunities to automate time-wasting data entry, you can concentrate on the bigger picture and maximize property sales.
To help your services stand out, we here at Process Street have compiled 8 real estate checklists for estate agents to either use themselves or recommend to their clients. They include a comprehensive guide to the property sales process in addition to everything from a home inspection, cleaning, staging, and listing.
Want to dive in and go straight to the checklists? Here they are:
A thorough weekly clean pays dividends when it’s time to sell a property, and with the correct process in place, you can arrange a house for sale with minimal effort.
I know, I know, everyone hates washing up (some more than others), but rather than resorting to buying stocks in disposable plates a homeowner can just run this house cleaning checklist!
In the hands of a homeowner, this checklist will serve to keep a property in prime condition and clean the entire household in record time.
What does this have to do with real estate agents? Simple; referrals.
By giving your client base this checklist, you make your sellers feel like more than a bunch of ones and zeroes attached to a bank account. After all, you want to be more memorable than their local cashier, don’t you?
“Why do I need another cleaning template?”, you might ask.
To put it bluntly, there are jobs that go beyond the human limits of enthusiasm which need to be tackled head-on. The internet isn’t littered with “Most Hated Household Chore” posts for nothing (it’s cleaning the oven in case you were wondering).
This Pre-Listing Cleaning checklist covers every nook and cranny a buyer could use to find fault with a property. By giving this to a seller (and maybe some sneaky time management tips), you provide an incentive to get shit done.
Not only do they stand to gain by increasing the sale price of their home, but the property is far more likely to sell quickly. The best part though? You can still pass the work around the house; everyone’s moving out so there are no excuses this time!
Home staging can be a delicate process; good staging is so elusive that it often prompts questions akin to modern art.
With our home staging guide, however, you can easily break into the market with a bang.
There are professional home stagers who see to it that properties spend up to 80% less time on the market than those which are unstaged. Fantastic! Now you just need to convince your seller to part ways with $6000 for the privilege.
Yes, we didn’t think that bit of news would go down too well either. Thankfully, with this checklist, your client can bypass the need to hire an expensive professional, whilst both they and their realtor still reap the rewards.
The seller who receives this will be walked through the best practices for the house in general (interior and exterior) along with instructions for specific rooms to maximize profit. This includes how to arrange furniture, color choices that appeal to the widest audience, and advice on how to improve rooms by rearranging (or removing) furniture.
The listing process is stressful, primarily because anything overlooked or miscalculated can result in an inaccurate property price which sets you off on the wrong foot. Key factors such as tax records and neighborhood safety can make or break an asking price, and so caution needs to be exerted.
Surely a small mistake in price wouldn’t go amiss though? Wrong. Even a slightly over-priced property will take longer to sell, and the longer a property remains on the market, the more likely it will sell for less than the asking price or even actual value.
This checklist ensures that no piece of information in calculating the price of a property is overlooked; from structural damage to facilities and location to nearby utilities. It also includes various methods to calculate the final price and advice on where to list the property.
Statistically speaking, the average buyer views the house they will eventually purchase at least twice; whether open house or private, viewings are the estate agent’s chance to truly shine and sell the product they represent.
True, a quality, clean and staged property may not need much encouragement to sell, but a successful viewing can increase the sale price even further than the previous steps whilst obliterating any thoughts of price negotiation.
This is especially true for open house viewings, which both serve as fantastic advertising and can form impromptu bidding wars between interested buyers.
In short, this is one of the most important real estate templates you could ever see. After all, successful advertising can stick in minds for years with the right implementation.
This checklist details the process for achieving success with both open house and private viewings, including vital information about the home to prepare beforehand, methods for marketing open houses and tactics to present the property in the best way possible.
The bread and butter of any sale, the real estate sales process is the master checklist, and perhaps the most formidable beast of any collection of real estate templates.
From the first handshake with a seller to finalizing the property’s closing period, the sales process can be long, arduous and full of pitfalls.
If, however, the entire process is documented and run as the standard for each client, you have very little to fear in terms of incorrectly processing a certain stage of the sale, or simply (as every human does) forgetting a vital piece of the puzzle.
This checklist serves as an all-encompassing guide for an estate agent in the sale of a property from start to finish. It can also serve as an easy way to gather together links to our Pre-Listing Cleaning, Home Staging, Listing and House Viewing checklists, with further help in securing the deal and finalizing all of the paperwork.
What’s the worst-case scenario you can imagine if you bought a property? That you pay too much? Or perhaps your roof caves in because a termite infestation went unnoticed. That’s just a taste of what’s possible if a home inspection is not carried out correctly.
Even more annoyingly, the “professionals” a buyer can hire in order to inspect the property they wish to purchase may not even be required to have any qualifications in the field! In short, the seller you represent is faced with the stuff of nightmares when their turn comes to buy.
Why not take advantage of this dire situation? By supplying our home inspection checklist you can cut out the risk of an under-qualified professional taking your client for a ride!
Not only is this useful for creating referrals, but your seller can choose to either perform this task themselves or give it to a home inspector of their choice. With tasks and tips to examine that state of a home’s foundations, garden, electrics and more, all of the basics of a home inspection are in one easy-to-use guide.
All rental properties require cleaning before a tenant vacates; this is nothing new. If not performed properly, however, the property owner can rightfully confiscate part (or even the entirety) of the tenant’s security deposit. This is due to the fact that the owner will then pay for a professional cleaning service with the funds; wasting away up to the equivalent of two month’s rent!
Why should you, as an estate agent, care about this? The answer is simple; for the same reason that the house cleaning checklist is important to relay. Extra information that is highly useful to candidates outside of your current client base provides the basis for creating innumerable referrals.
This guide details how a tenant can clean their property and regain their full deposit with minimal costs.
Whilst professional carpet cleaning is mandatory, by following this checklist a tenant can keep expenses down to solely the cost for the carpets; hence, they will end up paying closer to $70 than $700. Highly detailed instructions on cleaning bathroom fixtures, ovens, laundry rooms and the rest of the home create a foolproof guide to receiving their deposit in full, and enabling you to onboard new tenants as soon as possible.
Why not integrate these checklists with the tools you already use?
Process Street offers a wide range of automation capabilities that allows you to set up trigger-based actions to connect our checklists with over 1,000 tools including G Suite, HelloSign, and Salesforce.
If you don’t have any workflow automation set up in your business yet, don’t worry. It’s surprisingly easy to get started.
Here are some ideas of specific tasks you could automate:
If you’d like to read more about the impact of process automation how you can further automate your business processes, download our ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation.
The guide will walk you through:
Take a peek at some of the other checklist packs below to see which ones you can implement in your business.
Need more tips or guidance on how to get the most out of these templates? Mention them in the comments below and we’ll see what we can do!
