How to be recession ready as an Estate Agent.

March 2020 should have taught every business how to be crash ready. Remember those moments of wondering what would happen next? Making drastic cutbacks and wondering why you even had some of those expenses in the first place?

Then gradually, over time, as with so many things, the pain began to ease, and here you are, back doing pretty much the same thing you were doing pre covid. Schools are a wonderful example of this. During Covid and once they returned to school, my son and daughter did all their work on an iPad, with no textbooks involved. Now, every day they troop off into school with an 8kg bag on their back full of paper.

Why? Because it’s the norm.

During Covid, companies and entire industries looked to innovate and automate. To make savings whilst also improving their business, then we got lazy.

But some agents have continued to push the boundaries in search of removing costly and unappreciated heavy lifting from their business. But what is that, and how are they doing it?

Costly and unappreciated heavy lifting is the manual tasks that we don’t really think of as cost in our business that take up lots of time for very little reward and that our customers don’t appreciate. For example, calling applicants to see if they are still looking. Trying to get through to portal enquiries to qualify them and get them booked in. Attempting to call through the database looking for market appraisals. Calling for viewing feedback. Posting to multiple social media sites manually, the list goes on and on.

To do all these things requires manpower, and whilst we are often looking for ways to cut costs by removing subscriptions, the bulk of any company’s outgoings is in the manpower, so when you add up the cost of doing those costly and unappreciated heavy lifting tasks the money really starts to rack up.

Then when the slower market arrives, the problems start to mount up too. Lack of automations around those tasks has led to being overstaffed. Lack of intelligence in your software around staying in touch with people has led to a lack of opportunities, and those two things combined can spell disaster very quickly.

The key to avoiding these problems as the leader of the business is to always be looking to automate as many costly and unappreciated heavy-lifting tasks as possible, continually nurturing your database for the long term and to have some systems in place that will alert your team on who and when to speak to people for viewings and market appraisals to be the most efficient.

Matt Giggs, speaker, trainer & Mentor to some of the best Estate Agents in the UK and Founder of the Giggs Group of Estate Agencies, gives his thoughts on how agents can be better prepared for a downturn and if he feels that having Lifesycle has helped prepare his businesses better for a downturn?