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Real estate professionals guide customers through what is, for most people, the single biggest financial transaction of their lives. It’s often an overwhelming experience for buyers and sellers, and it’s a huge responsibility for agents and brokers. The processes of buying and selling homes are complex. Not only are there many parts of a transaction to understand, but also many things to do. To effectively guide customers through these processes and truly add value to the customer, real estate professionals should offer buyers and sellers clarity, build trust and help them understand the process end to end. And that requires mastery of the arts of transparency and task management.
Technology offers real estate professionals new and increasingly efficient ways to deliver excellent service and value to customers. Many proptech solutions focus on solving a singular function—staging, showing, communicating, scheduling, electronic signatures and more—but what about the details of all the steps during a transaction? The complicated process of real estate transactions—with all the steps and tasks involved requiring specific timelines—is a lot for buyers and sellers to navigate and for agents and brokers to manage. Proptech tools are used for transactions to facilitate communication, collaboration, accountability, and transparency while keeping things on track. They also make buying and selling homes more efficient, but also much more transparent.
Transparency Builds Trust and Value
With transparency comes trust in and value from the real estate professional. Today’s technology solutions can help build trust and value and change the way transactions are executed to deliver better outcomes for customers.
For example, many real estate professionals have heard from disappointed potential buyers who missed out on a home purchase; yet after seeing the closing price, they say they would’ve beaten that number. Current market conditions—high demand from buyers and near historic low inventory of available homes—give sellers the advantage. Sellers can call for “highest and best offers,” which creates a blind bidding war. This blind bidding means that buyers operate with no knowledge of competing offers.
Proptech has moved into the open bidding space, introducing technologies that facilitate open bidding in real time. Final Offer, an agent-driven negotiation platform for residential real estate that delivers clear, real-time offers to all stakeholders, is one such proptech tool.
Final Offer creates transparency in the transaction process by allowing sellers to list the specific terms they are looking for, which streamlines the negotiation process. For buyers, all offers on a property are listed publicly, and price changes and offer updates are communicated in real time, allowing each potential buyer to make their best offer with as much knowledge about all competing bids as possible. In minutes, with the help of their agent, buyers can propose their own price and terms or make an offer the seller is committed to accept. The platform provides real-time offer histories so any buyer can make a winning offer.
Final Offer vets buyers to ensure that they are financially qualified to purchase. It also has a Final Offer Price link, which is essentially a buy-it-now button. In addition to leveling the playing field as buyers and sellers enter the transaction process, buyers are no longer left disappointed that they didn’t offer what they could, and sellers don’t leave money on the table.
Managing All the Moving Parts
For real estate professionals managing transactions, there’s never a shortage of things to track, even with a team in place. And managing that workflow to-do list while collaborating with buyers and sellers on any given home sale or purchase requires next-level organization and attention to detail to keep customers informed and to stay on track. Those details are crucial to real estate professionals and their client’s success.
Task management tools can solve multiple issues and maximize transparency and efficiency—if they’re the right tools. For example, agents and brokers often introduce multiple tools to stay on track, which can create platform creep. All those tools—and passwords—introduced to gain efficiency can result in added complexity. Platform creep can find its way in and create confusion even for the most organized users.
One proptech task management tool that can dramatically improve the buying and selling experience is Trackxi, a collaborative deal and task tracker for real estate professionals and their teams. The platform helps agents and brokers demonstrate value to clients and allows for transparency between partners, lenders, title/escrow stakeholders and others involved in the real estate transaction process. Using Trackxi’s task management and collaboration features, agents and brokers can assign tasks to the client such as delivering earnest money (now integrated with Earnnest) scheduling a home inspection or completing a loan application. Trackxi sends real-time alerts when deadlines are approaching and when tasks are completed, saving agents and brokers time they would spend sending updates, reminders or prompts to clients. It also lets the consumer know where things stand with their sale or purchase during the entire transaction process and helps prevent costly delays caused by missed deadlines.
Trackxi also easily integrates with tools many real estate professionals are already using, including calendars, email, Cloud CMA and SkySlope.
Technology, Transparency and Trust
The best way for real estate professionals to build their current and future business is by offering customers the best buying and selling experience—one in which they understand every step of the process and trust in the value their agent or broker provides because every transaction is transparent from end to end. Technology continues to find ways to streamline the business of real estate and improve the experience for real estate professionals and their customers by reducing stress, eliminating waiting times, and vastly improving communication and collaboration.
Using technology to increase transparency and build trust benefits everyone involved in a real estate transaction. And when customers fully understand and trust the process and the person who guided them through it, they will be back and they will send their friends.
References:
Contos, A.; “How Transparency Serves Consumers and Practitioners in Residential Real Estate,” Forbes, 12 February 2020, Online.
Final Offer, How It Works, Online.
Martin, E. J.; “What Is Open Bidding and Can It Help Bring Down Home Prices?,” Bankrate, 18 July 2022, Online.
Spencer, M.; “The Pitch: Trackxi Wants to Be the Software Real Estate Agents Have Been Searching For,” Portland Business Journal, 6 April 2023, Online.
Trackxi, Online.
