Using Automation to Help You Close More Deals This Year
Real estate investors use automation in administration, management, marketing, and accounting to free up their time to focus on what matters most – finding and closing deals.
Once you (and your staff) automate your real estate investing (REI) business, you can streamline your operations, handle more deals, boost revenue, and achieve a better work-life balance.
From lead management and appointments to bookkeeping and multichannel marketing, partial/fully-automated processes will help you scale without requiring much additional effort at each stage.
Automating various aspects of your REI business will help you direct all your energies on tasks that directly improve your cash flow, generate income, reduce expenses, or help you find new investments.
Here are the nine best real estate investor automation ideas that will help you streamline your operations and close more deals this year:
1. Automate REI Customer Relationship Management
Imagine you’re a wholesaler having –
- A couple hesitant to sell their abandoned house
- A cash buyer reaching out to ask if you have a good deal right now
- A seller asking for more details before they can book an appointment
ALL AT THE SAME TIME!
If you handle a lot of leads and clients but don’t use an automation solution to manage the relationships, your productivity can quickly plummet.
A reliable CRM platform can help you collaborate seamlessly with potential and current clients with ease so that no one slips through the cracks.
REIgrow with best-in-class CRM features can help you automate multiple aspects of nurturing and maintaining client relationships, from the start to closing the deal.
2. Automate Lead Nurturing Workflows
Don’t let your leads sit idle in your CRM. To close more deals, you need to keep nurturing them.
Seasoned investors automate the process of sending out relevant and timely emails, voice notes, and texts to move their leads through the funnel.
Drip emails or automated email workflows are easy to set up with real estate marketing systems like REIgrow.
The software can also send out voicemails, SMS, email and it allows seamless integration with other platforms like Zoom, Google Calendar, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, and more.
3. Activity-Based Real Estate Marketing Workflows
Activity-based follow-up emails are among the most effective ways to incorporate automation into real estate investing.
Such real estate marketing workflows can trigger custom replies to leads in different situations, such as:
- When a cash buyer requests a viewing
- A wholesaler offers a deal on a foreclosed property contract
- A seller books an appointment
- A seller signs a contract
- A website visitor downloads a resource or signs up for a list
4. Appointment Automation for Real Estate Investors
Many investors spend too much time scheduling appointments, which could be better spent meeting with potential clients.
Remember the occasions when you exchanged several emails or texts before you could finalize the time, place, and agenda for a meeting?
Automated scheduling can work wonders for many real estate investors.
General-purpose scheduling tools like Google Calendar and Calendly can be helpful, but they lack the tailor-made features that real estate investors might need. Also services like Calendly charge a monthly fee. In contrast, dedicated real estate SaaS platforms like REIgrow offer advanced scheduling functionality at no additional cost with a monthly subscription.
With REIgrow, you can sync your leads from the CRM, set your time schedule and gaps between appointments, configure reminders, and generate appointment-booking links—all within one system.
These systems can automatically send confirmation emails and reminders, and they can also integrate with your calendar to ensure that you are always available for meetings.
5. Automate Lead Generation Through Your Website
When people want to sell their undervalued properties or cash buyers want to find wholesalers, the first thing they do is run a Google search.
So, if you want to generate more leads through an online system, invest in SEO and PPC ads to drive targeted, high-intent traffic to your website and capture contact details with landing pages.
Real estate SaaS software like REIgrow can help investors quickly set up an SEO-optimized website with wholesale listings, landing pages for PPC ads or organic traffic, contact forms, and blogs.
Furthermore, you can set up automatic lead capture to sync organic/PPC leads with your lead pipeline for automatic follow-up, saving you time and effort every day.
6. Bookkeeping Automation – Get Your Accounts Under Control
For most real estate investors, bookkeeping is a hassle. It can be difficult to automate, but it doesn’t have to be.
Here is a quick tip: start keeping scanned copies of all receipts and documents in PDF format on the cloud (e.g., OneDrive or Apple iCloud). The next time a contractor emails you a receipt, quickly move it to the corresponding folder in the cloud. This alone can save you hours each month.
For greater automation, consider using an end-to-end bookkeeping product like Buildium, Bench, Sage Accounting, Zoho Books, or Intuit QuickBooks.
Such software can help you track expenses, pay contractors, and handle accounts receivables and payables.
Make sure your financial automation tool is synched to your CRM or real estate automation software so that your receipts, invoices, contracts, and other documents are up-to-date everywhere.
7. Contracts – Automate Transaction Management
Do you spend a ton of time managing contracts each month? Consider automating this aspect of your REI business with a transaction management solution.
Such software can save you hours each month by automating manual tasks, such as creating and sending contracts, tracking status, and chasing signatures.
REIgrow, for instance, provides proposals and estimates that real estate investors can send to their leads for better contract management.
Many real estate transaction management applications allow investors to create, edit, eSign, share, and track contracts from any device, at any time.
8. Automate Social Media Marketing Tasks
Real estate investors are often short on time. You don’t have all day to keep track of social media messages, comments, or reviews. Posting content on multiple channels can also be an extra task that you may struggle to find time for.
Many investors use tools like Hootsuite to schedule weeks’ worth of posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms at once.
If online reviews and social media presence are a crucial part of how you market your REI brand, you may also want to automate the flow of reviews, messages, and comments.
In this domain, dedicated real estate marketing platforms like REIgrow can help you automate various tasks, such as –
- Posting content on social media handles
- Tracking and responding to social media messages
- Segregating reviews on different portals
- Managing Google Business Reviews
9. Automate the Process of Capturing Reviews
Reviews validate your real estate investing business. People are more likely to trust what others say about your brand than what you tell them.
As an investor, you should actively seek out ways to automate the process of getting more clients to leave favorable feedback online.
REIgrow features automated workflows to help you capture, track and publish reviews. You can send an SMS or email to gather reviews from leads or clients, and track invites, receipts, ratings, and more.
Next, these reviews can be published to your Google Business Profile, which (if you have set up one already) will often appear in the search results next to your website and landing pages.
Google Business Profile reviews are great for SEO because Google ranks pages on the basis of what others are saying about them or how they are rating them.
Final Words
Don’t try to automate everything at once. You can gradually transition to a fully automated system as you scale up.
You will find apps designed to take the burden off your shoulders for every repetitive job in the real estate industry.
But, juggling between different mobile apps, browser-based platforms, add-ons, and desktop software can also become another tedious task.
Therefore, it pays to start your real estate automation journey with a robust software like REIgrow, which features most of the automations we discussed above. With multiple services, you’ll face a steeper learning curve, pay higher monthly fees, and still have to juggle between apps or try to sync different apps.
With a full-fledged real estate marketing automation solution, you can manage everything from your lead pipeline and follow-up communications to meetings, contracts, and finances within one system.
