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Part One
onwards and upwards Software Lawrence Higgins opens our three-part series on agency software
with a steer on where technology is taking the technical support side of selling houses and managing lets.
A
ll estate agents know that their true skill, and the real reason why clients will pay their fees, is that they can get that horse to drink – once it is
at the water. Where estate agents sometimes require
some secondary help is getting that horse to the water in the first place, but help is at hand, because not only are the technological methods which help agents to deliver the customers that allow them to tie up those deals becoming more abundant, they are also becoming more sophisticated. Mark Goddard, Group MD of GMG Property
Services, says, “Estate agents are very engaged with software at the moment, they are becoming more sophisticated in their use of software and more dependent on it; there has been a sea change in terms of how they’re using the products – they’re getting smarter about what they use and how they use it.” The software has progressed to keep up
with agent’s need to develop business in difficult trading times; even the most committed sales agents are now moving on. Nick Hubbard at Estates IT says, “Estate agents have diversified to add sustainable revenue streams such as property management.” Glyn Trott, Director at LetMC says that the
cloud computing nature of its software allows it to be integrated with leading sales and marketing software, giving customers the best of both worlds. “Our clients have to think outside the box when it comes to their USP, as there’s much more competition to contend with,” says Trott. And the technology is coming from far and
wide, Goddard says, “America leads the way and many of us involved in the industry have a close eye on the use of social media to see if it really will revolutionise the way the home moving process works as the property portals have done over the last decade. “An excellent home-grown example of a
really clever tool that we wouldn’t have thought of just a few years ago has to be the Search and Match functionality implemented by Property Place within Facebook which allows you to find a home based on the locality of friends, family and places of work and interest – this type of product could open up a whole new targeting method for agents.”
www.thenegotiator.co.uk
“Social media may revolutionise home moving.”
TheNegotiator l August 2012 l 27
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