Part 5: Saving time managing properties

The single biggest reason estate agents fail to market their properties effectively, is that they don’t have time to do so. They’re busy corresponding with clients, arranging viewings, securing new properties to sell and closing deals. Who has time to market and advertise properties too?

Here, we look at just that problem and highlight several low-cost, simple and effective strategies for maximising your time selling and minimising the overhead of managing and marketing your properties.

Although some of this chapter provides an insight into a number of technical issues, the decisions you need to make are business, not technical ones.

You’ll be choosing between a one-time financial investment with low ongoing costs, managing your property details using one central system and a cheaper start up with escalating ongoing costs, managing property details ad-hoc in various systems.

In almost every case, from a single-person operation to a multi-office agency, the benefits of biting the bullet and choosing the first option are overwhelming, yet most estate agents choose the second.

In doing so, they consign themselves to a spiral of escalating costs and administration overhead that, in time, will cripple their ability to grow and expand their businesses. More often than not, this is simply because the decision appears to be one based on technology, when it is actually a straight-forward business decision based on cost and benefit.

• What’s the big deal?
• What is content management?
• Property portal as CMS
• Off-the-shelf systems
• Custom designed systems
• Importing and exporting
• Summary

What’s the big deal?

Let’s look two agents who have adopted opposite approaches to managing their properties. Let’s call them Tom and Jerry.

Tom recently set up his web site and is not yet convinced of the actual value that it offers his business. He sees it as an online brochure. In fact, it looks very similar to the print advertising that he’s been doing for years.

Because of his cautious entry into having his own web site, Tom was reluctant to invest much money until he could better assess whether the web site would bring him clients and, eventually, sales. He was fortunate that a friend of a friend was doing a web design course and needed a live project to practise on.

Although the site took longer to build than he had hoped, he did save a lot of money compared to the other quotes he received and he’s pleased with the end result. His site has all the usual stuff – pages that help his visitors find his office and some information about the local area together with details of his current property portfolio.

Tom didn’t expect a flurry of visitors as soon as his site went live but after three months of nothing happening, he decided to make some changes to the web site and also update some of the properties. He emailed the new information to his web designer friend who quoted him a price.

Already, Tom can tell that this is going to be a relatively expensive way of changing property details. His web designer has quoted him an hourly rate for web site changes and, although the rate itself is not unreasonable, Tom hadn’t considered this overhead in terms of cost and the time it takes to prepare the information for the web designer.

However, having only recently established his Internet presence, Tom is not willing to throw it all away before he has given it enough of a chance to succeed. He pays for the changes to be made and waits another two months.

It’s now five months since Tom’s site went live and, as far as he can tell, no-one is visiting his web site and they certainly aren’t making property enquiries there. Even though Tom’s property portfolio has changed significantly during the last two months, he’s reluctant to pay for those changes to be reflected on his web site when the last set of changes made no difference at all to his response rate.

His web designer has three suggestions:

1. Improve how Tom’s web site ranks in the search engines
2. Use a Pay-Per-Click campaign to draw visitors to the web site
3. Advertise Tom’s properties on several property portals

After a little consideration, Tom rejects the first option due to the relatively high initial cost, the unpredictability of the results, and the time it’s likely to take to see any kind of an improvement. Tom also rejects using a Pay-Per-Click campaign at this stage because he’s doesn’t see the point of drawing visitors to his web site if the property details featured there are already out of date.

Tom decides to test two property portals. He can try both of these portals without having to spend much money and he’ll be able to get his properties and web site in front of a much larger audience than his own web site alone will ever attract.

Tom signs up to the first portal and begins to enter his property details one by one. The system is efficient and, although it takes a while to become thoroughly familiar with how to enter his property details, Tom manages to get his entire portfolio loaded onto the first portal over a single weekend.

A week later, Tom has all of his properties loaded onto the second portal too and he’s already starting to see a slow trickle of property enquiries arriving by email. Ideally, Tom would like to link from the portal to his own web site but it is now so out of date that he’s decided not to.

Tom continues using the two property portals as his main way of attracting visitors and enquiries and is pleased enough with the cost/benefit equation that he signs up to another property portal. Just like before, Tom enters his property details again, one-by-one.

When the details of a property change, Tom can make all the changes himself without having to pay a web designer to do this for him, however, he has to make the changes three times – once at each of the portals. As Tom’s property portfolio grows, this management overhead becomes a significant time burden and, on more than one occasion, Tom has featured the same property at different prices on different portals – mainly due to manual errors and time pressure.

Let’s see how Jerry approached the same situation.

Jerry was once in the same position as Tom – that of having started an Internet marketing strategy only to find it running out of steam. This time, Jerry is determined to implement some kind of system that saves him time and money. He begins by looking for a system that helps him manage his properties, clients and marketing initiatives.

Before starting his research, he draws up a list of the kind of things he wants this system to do for him:

• Manage vendor details
• Manage buyer details
• Manage buyer requirements
• Manage property details
• Match buyers to properties
• Display property details on his web site
• Send property details to advertising portals

With these requirements in mind, Jerry narrows down the solutions available and selects one. It costs him about a thousand Euros to get started but after six weeks or so he’s all set to start entering the details of his vendors, buyers and properties into his own system. After a couple of weeks of data entry, consolidating all the spreadsheets and scraps of paper onto the system, Jerry is ready to make the most of this investment. Compared to Tom, Jerry is now ready to enjoy the following advantages:

No ongoing web design costs

Jerry can make infinite changes to his property details which are instantly reflected on his own web site. Jerry will still need to pay for some design changes to his web site but these will be far fewer and will occur far less frequently than in Tom’s case.

Managing more than properties

Because Jerry chose a system that allows him to manage his clients as well, he saves time (and offers his clients a better service) by automatically matching buyers and sellers and by easily communicating with them via email.

Less wasted time

Jerry chose a system that is able to send his property details automatically to a number of popular property portals. This means that he can advertise them without any additional effort. When he makes a change to a property on his own system and web site, that change is reflected automatically on all the advertising portals that he uses, usually within 24 hours.

Fewer errors

As Jerry is making changes to his clients and properties using just one system, there is less potential for errors and mistakes to occur. When they do, they can be rectified in one place only.

More scalable

Compared to Tom’s system, Jerry’s will scale-up easily without additional cost as his business grows. This means that the extra business Jerry closes because of using such a system will contribute to his profit margin, not to funding an increasing administrative burden.

Lower cost

Comparing the real cost of the two systems (including the hidden administrative and time-related costs) Jerry has spent less than half the money that Tom spent – and that’s within the first six months of each of their web sites going live. As time goes on, Tom’s costs will continue to increase while Jerry’s will remain constant and predictable.

The biggest problem is that agents like Tom can’t quantify the hidden costs before they occur and by the time they’re well and truly going in the wrong direction, they’re unwilling to turn back and start from scratch again.

Mostly, agents like Jerry have already taken Tom’s approach before and experienced the same pain that Tom is now feeling. When they do have an opportunity to start again, they do things differently by:

1. Making a list of their requirements
2. Selecting a content management system to match

What is content management?

The phrase content management system or CMS means different things to different people in different industries. Perform a search for content management on Google and you’ll see millions of results.

If you try and narrow those results down a little by searching for content management and estate agent you still get tens of thousands of results, most of which will not help an estate agent with properties in Spain.

Even when estate agents know they need some kind of content management system, often this is as far as they get before giving up, frustrated and confused. Many of these search results will be for systems specific to estate agents – but outside of Spain. The ones that are adaptable will often cost tens of thousands of Euros.

Clearly, not all CMS’s are equal – hence the number of search results and confusion surrounding what CMS actually is, what it does and what potential benefits it offers an estate agent promoting Spanish property.

Fortunately, you can easily define what your content is - it’s your properties. In Jerry’s example, it was also his client details. At least we know what the ‘content’ is that we’re trying to ‘manage’ with a Content Management System.

The ‘management’ part is equally simple. Although not a hard and fast rule, a definition of management in this context is:

“A process whereby one can add, remove and change content without any special training or skills.”

Most content management systems which you will be evaluating will consist of three parts:

1. A web site which is visible to the public and displays your properties
2. A database that contains your property and client details
3. A management interface to the database that allows you to add, remove and change client and property details

For an estate agent selling Spanish properties, this is likely to be the type of content management system that will allow you to realise Jerry’s benefits and avoid most of Tom’s pain.

Although there are good content management systems that are free to use, they will almost always require some technical expertise to install and customise for your own requirements.

Many off-the-shelf content management systems will not be specifically designed to manage property details. While they can probably be modified to do so, in most cases, the effort required will cost you more than starting with a system designed for estate agents.

Similarly, most estate-agent-specific CMS will not have been designed with the Spanish property market in mind. In this case, most of the customisation work required will be in defining locations, property types and property attributes. Again, in most cases, this will represent a significant cost that should be avoided, if at all possible.

It’s wise to start by considering content management systems specifically designed for estate agents with Spanish properties. That way, you don’t need to pay for any unnecessary customisation work and you’ll be up and running as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Lets take a look at the three broad categories of content management, starting with the most simple.

1. Property portal as CMS

Property portals like Kyero.com offer a built-in basic method of managing property details – a property specific CMS. If you already have a basic web site like Tom’s or are just getting started and don’t yet have a web site at all, using a property portal as your main CMS is a good way to get up and running quickly with the minimum of cost.

Most portals will also offer a method of getting your property information out of the portal automatically so that you can use it on your own web site. This is a vital requirement because, without this facility, your hard work of entering property details remains ‘locked’ in the portal and you’ll have to expend that effort all over again to use your property information in another location. This is precisely what you want to avoid.

If you’re getting started using a portal and think you might want to use it as your main way of managing property information (even temporarily), make sure that there’s an easy method of getting your property data out of the portal, ideally in an industry-standard format.

Kyero.com uses a file format called XML to make your property data completely transportable. Detailed information about how to use the file is also freely available so that you can re-use your property data with the minimum of effort.

Kyero.com actually makes use of this XML file format to create a web site for you using a purpose-built kit. This free web kit is a great way to get started with a sophisticated web site at the lowest possible cost. The kit itself is available as a free download.

The web kit will require some customisation by a competent web designer. Even so, this represents a web solution with a total cost of around 200 Euros which, with a single mouse click, is automatically synchronised with your property information on Kyero.com.

By using the XML file to join your web site with the Kyero.com system, you can host your web site anywhere, on any type of system and have any web designer customise it for you.

This gives you tremendous flexibility and independence but, most importantly, it means you need to manage your property details once only.

The main drawbacks of using a property portal as your main CMS are that you have little control over how you manage your properties. For example, if the portal doesn’t include a property type of ‘restaurant’, then you won’t be able to use this particular facet on your web site.

Similarly, if the portal uses locations like ‘Costa del Sol’, you might not be able to specify a property as being in ‘Velez-Malaga’. If these things are important to your business now or might be in the future, then using a portal as your main CMS may not be the best decision.

Of course, if the portal offers an export facility then you can always move your property data at a future date if this becomes important. That’s why it’s an essential first-step to evaluate your needs so that you don’t get stuck with something that your business will quickly out-grow.

In summary, portals are a great, low-cost way to get started and, if they provide a flexible way to move your property data, they can provide a quick and cheap web site solution too. If you need facilities which property portals don’t currently offer, or you already have another CMS in use, then it’s probably better to send your property data to the portal and use a different CMS method to manage your business information.

2. Off-the-shelf systems

Typically, these contain the same elements outlined earlier:

• public web site
• database
• management interface

By using this type of CMS, you will benefit from the ability to completely customise how you manage your property details. The degree of management and features will generally tally directly with the cost of purchasing and operating such systems. Some solutions you purchase outright while others are available for a monthly subscription.

Again, one of the most important elements of any CMS is that you can easily import data to it and export data from it. If not, you might be severely limiting your future options.

An up-to-date list of popular systems in this category is available here.

How should you choose between each of these systems? By looking at your list of requirements and coming up with a plan for at least 18 to 24 months.

It’s not always easy or desirable to switch between systems, even when they each offer import and export facilities. Take an educated guess at the facilities your business is likely to need over the next two years and choose the system that most closely matches. If that’s a difficult thing to be sure about, perhaps you would be better off using a portal or a CMS Service in the short term as a stop-gap.

3. Custom designed systems

If you’re not using any of the previous types of system, you’re probably already using a CMS that was designed and built especially for you. What’s great about this type of solution is that it does exactly what you want it to do today and it’s also completely customisable to accommodate your future needs.

The main disadvantage is that, generally speaking, customised development means cost and potentially, delay. Even with the best planning in the world, your business requirements will almost certainly change, and your current CMS will almost certainly need revising to meet them.

Actually, this is a potential disadvantage of all the different types of CMS we have looked at in this chapter, it’s just more true of your own custom-built system. The development burden always falls on you whereas with the other CMS solutions, they may well already be under development to meet your needs or those of other users.

Again, one essential aspect of your own CMS is that it must be able to send your property data to other destinations without having to enter all the details again. Your CMS absolutely must be able to import and export.

Importing and exporting

If you are already using some form of content management and are not exporting your property data to be used elsewhere, you’re missing the single fastest way of leveraging your most valuable content – your properties.

If your system cannot export to property portals like Kyero.com, it’s a relatively simple task to implement this functionality and, more often than not, it can be achieved within a couple of days and cost less than 500 Euros. It’s a one-off cost that will bring significant long-term business benefits.

The best people to create the export from your system are the original designers of it because they know how the data is structured and how best to access it.

The general process is as follows: The receiving system (property portal in this case) publishes a specification of how your property data needs to be formatted. View the Kyero.com XML specification. (As you can see it’s something for a programmer to look at).

Your programmer creates a process that formats your property details in accordance with the specification of the receiving system.

Once tested, the process runs at regular intervals to update your property details automatically on the receiving system – by default, the Kyero.com system processes property information every 24 hours.

And the bad news is ..

Every system has it’s own proprietary specification of how it wants your property data formatted. This means that the export process you create to send your property details to Kyero.com may not work with any other portal.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that the Kyero.com XML specification is widely accepted as a de-facto standard. Many property systems accept XML feeds designed for Kyero.com and, there is an ever-increasing number of systems and portals which can readily exchange property information directly with Kyero.com and with each other via Kyero.com.

Despite this rather annoying lack of standards in the world of importing and exporting property details, it’s the single most important thing you can do to make the most of your property collateral.

Summary

You can see why Tom is where he is can’t you? All this talk of CMS’s and importing and exporting generally goes on between technical people. The more they talk, the more complicated and expensive it looks to a non-technical person.

That’s a shame because there are some big business benefits to be derived from using just one content management system to organise the distribution and publication of your property details.

If you haven’t yet started selecting a content management system, try using one that’s available from a property portal. If nothing else, it’s a quick way of helping you decide what you do or don’t want from a content management system.

If you’re already using a CMS, or planning to do so, make sure that it is capable of sending your property details to popular property portals. If it’s not, investigate the likely time and cost of getting such functionality developed.

The sooner you take the plunge, the sooner your business will realise the benefits. Of course, if you’re already travelling down the path that Tom chose, it’s hard to turn back and start again. At some stage though, the benefits of managing and automatically distributing your property details will become compelling.

Next: Part 6. Property photos that sell

Article Contents

1. Introduction to Internet marketing – why market on the Internet at all?
2. Listing properties – making the most of your most valuable content
3. What’s wrong with your web site? – 10 mistakes that keep visitors away
4. Making sense of statistics – hits, pages, cookies, visits and visitors
5. Saving time managing properties – exporting and distributing property details
6. Property photos that sell – professional photography tips

 

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