When you think about a home buying company, you might imagine that you need to be localized around the town or region where your business operates. That’s certainly how it used to be but in the modern world, there’s no reason that you can’t build a virtual home buying company with employees scattered across the country or even the globe. Of course, you have to put some effort and resources into making sure you can work well from remote locations and still provide a great service for your clients. So here are five tips on building a virtual home buying company you’ll need to know.
Turn Your Paperwork Into Digital Work
This first step might sound simplistic and unrelated to real estate, but it’s a crucial step in establishing how easy and turnkey the process can be for your employees and clients. It seems silly to conduct the entire home buying process online and then require clients to come into your office to sign paperwork. Instead, all of your “paperwork” should be digital and easily sendable to clients. No more need for a printer or bulky scanner and certainly no need for in-person visits. They should be able to review and sign documents electronically and each action should alert you and your clients about the steps taken in the process.
There are plenty of tools you can use, including DocuSign, Google Forms, HelloSign, and more. Mastering this process will help make the transaction smooth and set the tone for an entirely virtual home buying scenario. Whether your plan is to help clients buy homes on the open market or buy homes for cash, you’re going to want to streamline this process to make it simple and modern.
Centralize Your Communication
If you’re going to have key employees and partners located in various places, you’re going to need a central hub from which all communication can flow. You want a virtual one-stop shop where all of your important and critical documents, information, and processes are stored. This, in a nutshell, is centralized communication.
The benefits are many but they include increased transparency between departments, allow everyone to communicate with the specific audience they need, help maintain scheduling, allow for critical tracking, keep documents secure, and increase productivity.
There are lots of programs and resources that can help you centralize your communication, but we personally use Slack and Google Drive.
Set & Track Weekly Goals for Your Team
It goes for any business, but especially in the home buying industry, goal setting is an indispensable way to align and track goals across employees and departments. It allows you to quantify actions and results so that you can reward, critique, or improve your employee’s performance. In the end, it will show you where team members need to improve and where they excel.
As a virtual “we buy houses” company, finding good goal-tracking software is critical. Since you won’t be face-to-face all the time, you’ll want a way for everyone to check in, report on their results, and receive feedback easily. Management can set goals for employees but employees are able to set their own goals as well, which helps establish landmarks on the way to bigger goals. And as part of the software or program, there will be a dashboard that makes it easy for goals to be shared and tracked at a company level as well as an individual level.
Utilize Scripts
Because your home buying company is virtual, you’re not always going to get that critical one-on-one time in person. That means there’s going to be a lot of training online via online chat, video conferencing, and email. That can work just fine but it also makes it critical that your company establishes a clear way of doing business, especially for those on the front line dealing with clients. That’s where utilizing scripts can come in handy.
First and foremost, they help the company ensure that the salesperson or client-facing employee is aligning with the messages that you want to represent the business. You don’t have to worry about them veering too far from your core values because it’s all been spelled out for them to learn and follow.
Sales scripts are also very beneficial to the employees as they help improve how you sound when speaking with potential clients, improve the impression that can make in a short amount of time, help build rapport with others, decrease the amount of stress you’re feeling, and help generate more leads and close more deals.
Create Company Core Values
We briefly mentioned in the previous section that scripts help ensure that your employee is staying close to your core values. You might be wondering what those entail. Basically, core values are the beliefs that guide your company and its actions. They’re not just about how you plan to make money but rather what kind of company you want others to see you as in the world. They define your brand and influence the way you and your employees conduct business. So it’s crucial to lock down good core values when you’re running a virtual company so everyone knows how to tie back everything they do when representing the brand.
As a home buying business, you might want to establish core values such as working with integrity, conducting yourself with honesty at all times, seeking improvement with every new interaction, or thinking about how we can better the community as a whole. Take some time with your core values and try to figure out how to find the right balance and strike a good chord so that employees want to represent them and your business, no matter where they might be located.
Guest post courtesy of Alfie Frenilla