28th March 2023
Written By
So, you’re thinking about setting up an estate agency business? We’d like to share with you some technical considerations before you get started.
You may be going it alone, or you may already have a team in place, either way, you’ve probably got plenty of experience working in, or running an estate agency business. Technical decisions you make now can not only help to streamline your day-to-day tasks, but also gather more client leads so you can focus on what’s important - running your business!
This is a biggy; I cannot stress enough the importance of having a reliable estate agency software package at your disposal. You may be thinking, “I’ll use the software package I’ve always used.”, which is fine, and why shouldn’t you? After all, you know how to use it, so you won’t need to spend time learning a new system. However, we’d urge you to research what’s out there. There are lots of solutions, all of which offering a slightly different proposition, each with their strengths and weaknesses. What’s important is finding a solution that’s reliable and meets your specific business needs. We’d recommend making sure they have the following two features as a bare minimum:
In days gone by when you’re looking to move house, you’d head into your local estate agent branch and inform them you’d like to do just that. Nowadays, people are much more likely to check out available properties online. We are of course, talking about property portals. Many of these EAS software packages have this feature baked in, so your properties will automatically be shown on Rightmove, Zoopla, On The Market etc as soon as you add them to your EAS, if you’re signed up to these portals of course (hint: you should be!). This avoids the job of manually uploading a property to each portal.
Whilst we’re on the subject of saving time, one of the most useful features of these software packages from a technical standpoint is the API facility. In basic terms, this is where the EAS provides the raw data for all of the properties within your EAS system. So what? I hear you ask. Well, this allows a company like Rumbl to ensure that properties you add to your EAS software are automatically added to your website. Add a property to your software once, and the rest happens automatically. Pretty cool, right?
Your website is your online representation of your business and these days, is often your first introduction with a potential client, therefore, it’s a perfect opportunity to make a great first impression. Take a moment to check out the websites of some of your competitors. You probably already know which of these makes a good impression and similarly, which don’t. Now look at these same websites on your mobile device. In 2022 over 70% of our estate agent client’s website users visited first from a mobile device which is why we focus on building responsive websites for our clients. Check out our article all about estate agency websites here.
When you launch your estate agency business website, it’ll take some time to start climbing those search engine results pages allowing those eager buyers and sellers to find it. The best way to get users to your website immediately is Google Ads. For this reason, it’s a great idea to allow for Google Ads in your marketing budget. We’ve assisted lots of clients in defining a set of targeted key search phrases to ensure maximum exposure for a defined budget.
If you’re looking to set up a new estate agency business, we’d love to hear from you. We’ve assisted many estate agencies with their technical requirements, so we’re perfectly positioned to help you hit the ground running.
