I was recently asked by one of our enterprise real estate brokerage partners to put together a presentation to be delivered to a group of 500 agents with the topic of: "10 tips and tricks to improve your business in 2024." The presentation was so well received that I wanted to turn it into actionable steps that could be shared with brokerages across the country, regardless of which technology platforms you have deployed in your business. 

As the Vice President of Sales for Delta Media Group, I spend much of my day-to-day time interacting with large brokerages and figuring out ways to increase agent engagement with marketing & technology platforms. In my opinion, the tips outlined below are best practices that every agent, regardless of production level, should be able to accomplish in a single business day to set themselves up for success. 

Tip #1 — Evaluate your current website and make sure your online brand represents your actual business today. If I had a dime for every real estate agent with a headshot from the 1990s, I would be able to take my family on a trip to Disney World. The National Association of REALTORS®' (NAR) data shows us the majority of millennial homebuyers will look up their real estate agent at some point during the transaction process. When your clients find your site, you want them to feel confident they've made the right decision by working with you. 

Updating your website doesn't need to mean a complete website redesign. Taking just a few moments to upload a modern photo of yourself and making a few updates to your biography outlining your specialties, interests, and expertise is really all that's needed. While it's also beneficial to have things like Market Landing pages and cover the key areas you service, the reality is that your brokerage website should already have this information, and larger brokerage websites will always trump agent websites from an SEO perspective. 

Tip #2 — Make sure to have your contacts in a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). So often I hear about real estate agents being afraid their broker will "steal" their customers if they're uploaded into a CRM. In nearly a decade of working in this industry, I've never heard of that actually happening. It's like parents scaring children by telling them there's a razor blade hidden in their trick-or-treat candy. This kind of thing won't happen with any reputable brokerage because the act of them doing that would effectively kill any and all trust agents in the marketplace would have about that company.

CRM tools are immensely effective at helping sales professionals organize their sphere of influence and proactively prospect for new business inside of that sphere. The average real estate agent has 300 contacts in their database. You should make sure you have customers organized neatly and enrolled in marketing automations that will allow you to track their behaviors with your website and email marketing. This type of automation will reveal your best candidates for new business and increase your reach in your market area with very little work. 

Tip #3 - Find an online newsletter program and use it. In the DeltaNET®, we have a program called "My Customer For Life - AI-Driven Newsletters" that will dynamically send content relevant to your customers' interests to them on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly cadence. This type of automated newsletter system should contain fresh content (not articles from 5+ years ago) that's engaging to your customers. Our stats are clear: Engaging newsletter content has a 60%+ open-to-click-through rate on our platform. Short 4-5 paragraph articles about topics like buying, selling, or owning real estate will go a long way in keeping you top of mind with your customers without needing to write your own copy. 

Tip #4 - Utilize Social Media without having to manage your social media. So many REALTORS® feel like they need to run their own social media accounts, which can be immensely time-consuming for very little ROI. As sales professionals, time would be far better spent farming your database than running a Facebook or Instagram page. But I see far more agents choosing to spend hours a week on their socials instead of on proactive prospecting. 

There are various options in the marketplace for services that offer automated content to run to channels like Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. These are automated posts that can be set up to run on their own for things like new listing alerts, price reductions, open houses, etc. These automated social media management services often include real content solutions as well, where true content like blog articles are published to your social channels so your pages get filled with more than just new listing updates. Most of the options on the marketplace range anywhere from $20 to $150/month, depending on what you're looking for. This type of set-it-and-forgot social management will keep your channels growing without the time investment. 

Tip #5 - Utilize Market Watch Reports. Let me be clear, these are not just saved searches. A Market Watch Report should contain all of the activity happening within a market (such as a neighborhood, subdivision, city, etc) and run to your customers on a routine basis. The most effective market updates typically run at least once per month and show the number of homes in the market, average asking price, how many homes sold at or above list value, new home sales over the last month, and call to action for the customer to find out what their home's value is. Good Market Watch Programs should be more than just email reports. They should be set up to run scheduled updates delivered to your social media channels and even be featured on your websites. 

Tip #6 - Take advantage of modern open house technology. With homes staying on the market longer, we've seen a major uptick in open house activity over the last year. In the interest of being more effective at these open houses, we encourage real estate agents to download and use open house apps available online. These open house apps will commonly feature the ability for customers to scan a QR code as they enter an open house. Using their phone, they can sign in to the open house (which automatically adds their information to your CRM), and then you can ask them a series of questions to collect more information about the customer and qualify the lead.

High-quality applications like Open House Connector® will even tie your open house guests into automated drip campaigns and follow-up action plans. Someone who attends your open houses will automatically receive market updates, emails, and other information about upcoming open houses. And the agent never needed to do a thing. 

Tip #7 - Download your CRM App from the iOS or Android App Store! Any CRM with its salt will have a mobile app version to download on your personal or business phone. Downloading these types of CRM apps will open your business up to additional insights you wouldn't otherwise see. For example, once mobile apps are downloaded on your phone, you're able to receive push notifications with updates about activity from your customers. If your CRM app is tied to your website or marketing platforms, then you can even receive real-time updates like when a customer is visiting your website or has just opened or read an email you sent them from the platform. This allows you to be far more engaged in the business and make quick phone calls when you know a customer is active. 

Tip #8 - Make sure you have saved searches set up for your customers…AND NOT JUST IN THE MLS. I guess the most important thing is that your customers receive new listing alerts — but that doesn't mean you should just settle for setting it up in the MLS and being done with it. Many website platforms that offer a search component also have built-in saved-search capabilities for your clients to set up their own searches or for you as their agent to set the search up for your customer. The major benefit of setting up the saved search through your website Mar/Tech program is that you have so much more tracking, AI-driven task creation, and dynamic campaigns that can run in the background based on how your clients interact with their saved searches. If you settle for just the MLS search, yes, your clients will get new listing updates, but you'll miss out on so much more automation that keeps your clients even more engaged. 

Tip # 9 - Pay attention to your CRM notifications. This sounds like a simple request anyone can follow, but I've seen my real estate agent's phone, and I know there are hundreds of text messages, thousands of emails, and an entire CRM full of notifications that he has never touched. Granted, my father-in-law is my REALTOR® so it's unlikely that your clients are ever going to see your cell phone, but the point is that if you can stay on top of your inbound notifications for things like customer activity, it will make you much more effective in your response times for clients. Ultimately, the best CRM is the one you use, and as more and more AI-driven task creation creeps into CRM tools, the purpose is to help make agents even more effective salespeople. So don't let these technological advancements go to waste! 

Tip #10 - Respond to your new lead opportunities in five minutes or less. In the same vein as Tip #9, agents must respond to customer inquiries within minutes, not hours. If someone is visiting your website and submitting questions about properties, looking up their home's value, or asking for a showing on one of your listings, you need to respond promptly to that request. Research has shown that businesses that get back to their customers within five minutes of an inbound lead are 100 times more likely to get back in touch with that prospect. If you're responding to them an hour later, or even the next day, odds are you have lost this opportunity to pick up new business. 

Most lead management systems support SMS text message notifications or even push notifications to your phone whenever a lead is assigned to an agent. If you're driving or with another client when the lead comes through, it's important to at least have auto-responders configured to let the customer know you'll get back to them within a few minutes, and to expect your call. A simple auto-responder could be enough to prevent the customer from popping over to Zillow, where you'd lose the opportunity altogether.