Property ManagementAutomated E-mails Improve Service to Customers
HomeShark"s done it for years. Realtor.com and HomeAdvisor are doing it. And now, other large brokers are doing it, too. Windermere, the most prominent brokerage firm in the Seattle, Washington tri-state area is now offering the service - automatically e-mailed new listings to customers.
Automatically e-mailed new listings is one of the hot new agent services that is here now and here to stay. How much time and labor does an automatic e-mail system save the individual agent? You can imagine. Once you set up an e-mail system, it is no big deal to mass e-mail your new listings to your farm contacts, but these large companies have the advantage of being able to pull the data for you and sending it all over the world to interested buyers.
Automated e-mail listings makes brokers more money by providing good quality information to their customers.
As part of Windermere"s overall service and a feature of their ground-breaking personalized search program, participating brokers can educate their customers, sit down with them and create a personalized home search and then if the customer wants to be e-mailed with new listings as they come on the market, they can just put a check in the appropriate box.
Windermere"s director of information services, Allen Benson, cautions, "It is important that we get the customer"s permission before we send any e-mails."
Benson, who oversaw the development of the application interface with Windermere"s database, says the e-mail request results have been phenomenal already. Although personalized home searches have been up for over a year and a half, the system was ripe for enhancement.
The first Friday the service was offered by Windermere less than three weeks ago, over 4,000 people signed up for the service. The following Tuesday, there were over 2,800 new listings in the database that matched consumers" search requests. The system then sent out 1,400 e-mails to consumers. The listings come from all brokers who are participants in the Northwest MLS.
"It"s a hell of a system," says Benson. "But we give full credit to all the brokers in our community and Northwest MLS."
Other large companies have also had success with automated e-mail listings. Coldwell-Banker, has a national network, and e-mails its own listings to customers.
Why does Windermere send other broker"s listings besides its own? Windermere is part of a unique system that does not share its listings with any of the large home search sites, preferring to remain proprietary. The brokers share the listing information on over 30,000 properties in central Washington and west Washington.
"We have a very strong broker-to-broker relationship," explains Benson, "and the brokers in this area believe that they should be providing the information to the consumer, not someone else."
"Consumers want to see all the properties that are available in the local MLS," he says. "It cuts out the time it takes to go in and look for a home."
The primary advantage for consumers is the timeliness of the listings and the time savings they experience by not having to look for homes themselves or rely on someone else.
"Listing information is three weeks old before it appears on some Internet sites," says Benson. "And listing data is only valuable if it is current. On our site, we update the data everyday."
Because Northwest MLS brokers agree to share the listings, customers can go to Windermere"s Web Site and access the full MLS. They can fill out a Personalized home search, select city, price range, and which days they would like new listings e-mailed to them.
So the agents don"t lose the customer, the consumer is directed back to the site to look at the property, and contact the agent, if desired. Many times, customers will sign up for the service through their agents, or the agent will create a personalized search for them.
Currently, Windermere.com is the only Web site in the country to offer this e-mail feature combined with full access to local MLS data and over 100,000 home listings.