| How To Handle Buyer E-mail Inquiries In case you never got one, here’s what a buyer inquiry can look like:
Dear (Agentname): I’m opening a new company branch
office and we must move our whole family in (month) to the Dana Point coastal area. We
have 4 elementary school kids and need at least a 4 bedroom, 3 bath, minimum 2,000 sq. ft
home, ideally gated neighborhood with ocean view, ideally in golf course community from
$450,000 to $550,000. Please let me know what’s available and where I might look for
homes there over the Internet."
Yikes! What do you do now? Here are some tips:
1. Answer promptly. If you don’t, the buyer will contact
another agent who will. So check your e-mail 2-3 times daily and answer within 4-5 hours.
2. Know what the buyer wants by "listening" for
clues and ways to "serve" him, just you would in person. From the words the
buyer above used, you can deduce that he likely has the following concerns: Relocation,
moving, commercial office property, storage, local city information, utilities, taxes,
school quality, security/privacy, golf courses, web sites that offer consumer MLS
searching.
3. Start by making yourself a list of the
"concerns" that you identified. Then, refer to this list as you write your
reply. It should be a succession of paragraphs citing local conditions as they apply to each
concern that the person expressed.
4. At the end of each paragraph, include a web site address
that enables the buyer to go get even more information about that topic. For
example, for city information, you could send: http://www.focusoc.com/cities/ and
http://www.danapoint-ca.com. For relocation, send: http://www.virtualrelocation.com/. For
golf, send, http://ocnow.com/recreation/onthegreens/guide/ or
http://www.focusoc.com/town/golf.html. And for schools, send them to:
http://www.theschoolreport.com/list/US/homeseekers/home.htm.
For MLS searching, send them to
http://www.homeseekers.com/oc/ or http://www.Realtor.com. Or, to your Realty chain’s
corporate site, which often blocks out names of listing agents and/or agents who
are not part of your firm.
How do you find sites relevant to the buyer’s concerns?
On a search engine you search for them using key words. Then you copy the sites’ URLs
(web site addresses) and paste them into the e-mail you’re writing to the buyer.
(When you search for golf courses, you might use key search words like: golf courses,
orange county, dana point, california.)
You get the point. Rather than just answering back saying
(duh) you’ll be happy to help the family, why not offer real "tools" that
perfectly serve the buyer’s immediate wants and needs? After all, most web-savvy
buyers already hunt for homes over the web before getting an agent to handle the
final in-neighborhood search. So, if you help buyers do more of that independent research
that they like, they will like you more.
5. Don’t be afraid to e-mail a buyer back and ask for
more specifics "so I can better pin-point exactly the kind of home you want."
Remember, to the Internet-savvy buyer you are just a photo on
your web site and the words in your e-mail messages to him. He cares little about the
number of acronyms you have after your name or how many sales trophies you’ve won. So
never highlight that stuff.
He does care that you listen to him and show an almost
uncanny fathoming of his wants and needs. If you can do that, he’ll stick with you
all the way through his successful escrow.
© William Koelzer, 1999 |
