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“Create a template for EVERYthing.”
That is what real estate coaching powerhouse Sherrie Storor told participants in a recent webinar hosted by the PropTech Group.
What templates are
Templates are a simple tool that can eliminate much of the admin work that plagues real estate agents.
At its simplest, a template is a blueprint for generating documents. You can create a real estate template for advertisements, postbox drop flyers, emails, and text messages. Using templates enables you to work faster and eliminate much of the boring administrative work that many of us hate.
Your CRM probably has some templates pre-installed. You can customise these or create your own. Despite the power of templates, only a minority of agents make full use of them.
That gives you the opportunity to save time and boost performance while your competitors sit still.
Save more than 15 hours with templates
Imagine you send out 500 emails and text messages in a given week, and each of these takes an average of two minutes to create. That would mean you are spending more than 16 hours per week creating these messages.
Using a template can reduce the average time it takes to create a message to just a few seconds. Let’s say five seconds for the sake of this comparison. Using templates, you can send the same number of messages. Instead of more than 16 hours, it would take less than three-quarters of an hour.
Examples of templates
Ms Storor is a good example of the power of templates. She said she has 19 separate email templates for buyers. She has 15 email templates for sellers, four for tenants, two for auctions, and one for pipeline sellers.
Ms Storor’s list includes 42 templates in total.
For illustration, here are the first five buyer email templates on her list:
1. Property inquiry
2. Follow up OFI email – more info
3. Follow up OFI email – no response
4. Follow up buyer email – one month
5. Follow up buyer email – six months
Super-powered templates
Templates become super-powered when you use a CRM that auto-populates them with contact and listing information and deploys them in automatic workflows.
Here’s a simple example. As you prospect for vendors, let’s imagine you add 10 new contacts to your CRM as potential vendor leads.
As soon as you create these contacts, your CRM can launch a workflow that creates personalised emails from templates for each of these individuals. The CRM also tracks which recipients open this email, which links they click on, and whether they reply.
Leads who don’t engage can remain on the drip email and text message list for nurturing.
Meantime let’s say two leads engage with your email. Your CRM can send each a second templated email that offers them more market info or suggests you come by to conduct an appraisal.
If one of the leads agrees to an appraisal, they can self-schedule a date using a calendar feature on your website. The other might need more work, and for that purpose, your CRM schedules a “call this lead” task on your to-do list for the next day.
This example makes clear how powerful templates can be, how much admin work they replace, and that combining templates with automation can supercharge your performance at no time cost.
The advantages of using templates
The alternative to using templates is to type each email yourself, from scratch.
Templates only need to be written once. Templates also enable you to avoid typos and mistakes to which we are all prone when creating something from scratch and in a hurry.
Because you reuse templates again and again, you can spend more time making them exceptional. That includes customising your templates to fit your personal character or your agency’s brand. Inject your personality into them. Brand them with appropriate colours and logos.
Templates can also be shared with everyone on your team. Each person can simply use the team’s standard templates, or they can further customise them for their own needs. The impact templates have on your business grows exponentially as you share them.
Templates save time, supercharge your performance, and can be shared with your entire team — whether that is an agent team, an agency, or an entire franchise network.
I encourage you to use the slow Christmas period to create templates for every document or communication you send repeatedly. The only question is, what will you do with all your free time?
By Joe Hanna, group chief executive and managing director of PropTech Group
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