Six ways to save time and money with CMS
Do you employ staff or have multiple offices or advertise properties in more than one publication? If so, a Content Management System will save you time and money.
Do you sell property in different geographical areas or have commission sharing agreements with estate agents? If so, a Content Management System is a must-have business tool.
Content Management quickly pays for itself by facilitating more sales and smoothing the process from listing a property to closing a deal. Despite this, many estate agents still manage their businesses manually – mostly because CMS can seem complicated and expensive. In reality, it is neither.
What is CMS?
Most systems consist of three parts:
- A web site which is visible to the public and displays your properties
- A database which contains records for your properties, vendors and clients
- A management interface which allows you to add, remove and change records
Six ways to save time and money with CMS
Compared to managing your business information manually, a CMS offers the following advantages:
1. Fixed web design costs – Rather than pay a web designer to change property details on your web site, a CMS allows normal office staff to do it themselves.
2. Managing more than properties – By automatically matching the requirements of buyers and sellers, a CMS saves you time, offers your clients a higher standard of service, and makes it easy to keep a record of your communications with them.
3. Less repetition – By distributing your property details electronically to marketing portals, a CMS allows you to effortlessly advertise on several sites at the same time. When you make changes on your own system, they are automatically reflected on all the other sites.
4. Fewer errors – Managing your business information using just one system means there’s less chance for errors and mistakes to occur. If they do, you can rectify them quickly and easily in one place.
5. More scalable – A CMS enables you to grow your business without increasing costs. This means that the extra deals you close because of using a CMS will contribute to your profit margin, not to supporting a growing burden of administration.
6. Lower cost – A CMS will generally pay for itself within the first six months of use. As time goes on, your operating costs will remain constant and predictable.
Three kinds of CMS
1. Property portal – Most property portals offer a basic method of managing property details. If you have an old web site, or none at all, using a property portal as your CMS is a good way to get up and running quickly with the minimum of cost. However, make sure there’s an easy method of getting your property data in and out of the portal – preferably in an industry-standard format.
2. Off-the-shelf – Some solutions are purchased outright while others are available for a monthly subscription. This type of CMS offers a lot of flexibility in how you manage your properties, vendors and buyers. Again, make sure you can easily import and export, otherwise you might severely limit your future options.
To choose, make an educated guess about the features your business is likely to need over the next two years and choose the system that most closely matches. If that’s difficult to do, consider using a portal in the short term as a stop-gap.
3. Custom-designed – This type of bespoke solution does exactly what you want it to do and is completely customisable to accommodate your future needs.
Unfortunately, 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. Again, your CMS must be able to import and export.
Summary
There are substantial time and cost savings associated with using a Content Management System to take care of the management and distribution of your business information.
If you haven’t yet started, try using a property portal to manage and distribute your property data. If nothing else, it’s a quick way of helping you decide what you do and don’t want from your own system.
If you’re already using a CMS, or planning to do so, make sure that it is capable of sending and receiving your property details using an industry standard format called XML.
Kyero.com uses XML to make your property data completely transportable. Detailed technical information about how to use it is freely available so that you can distribute your property data with ease. This gives you tremendous flexibility and independence but, most importantly, it means you only need to manage your property details once.
- Find out more about Content Management Systems which are already compatible with the Kyero XML standard.
- Find out how to make your system compatible with the Kyero XML standard.
- Find out about the Kyero compatible web site kit.
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