How Real Estate Agents Prepare for Spring

Although many of us are still in the cold, frigid depths of winter, it’s getting close to that time of year when we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And that light is the springtime! Along with warming temperatures, blooming flowers, and increasingly sunnier days, the spring season in real estate typically means a hotter market, more appointments, more listings, and longer, busier days for agents and ISAs alike.

Whether it is true in all situations or not, the prevailing mentality among would-be home sellers is that the spring offers them the best chances to find the right buyer. Although it is very possible and, in some situations, preferable to sell a home during the fall or winter months, the statistics do tend to generally favor the springtime in most regions. In fact, homes sell an average of 18.5 days faster in May than any other month and for 5.9 percent more money.

What does that mean? That the majority of people, especially in regions with harsher winters, are going to want to sell their home during the spring season. What does that mean for you as a real estate agent or inside sales agent? That there is a lot of potential business out there waiting to be won.

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How to Prepare for the Spring Real Estate Season

For many agents and companies, business slows quite a bit during the winter months and then it’s craziness starting in April and May. The question is, how do you prepare for the craziness so that you and your team are not overwhelmed and missing out on potential listings and sales? Well, the trick is simple, use the slower time to get yourself ready for the busier time.

It seems obvious, but many real estate agents don’t successfully use their time during the winter or any other slow times of the year. Preparing for the spring real estate season means exploring new marketing options, improving your existing lead generation and sales funnel systems, making sure your team members have the resources they need or are using those resources to be as efficient as possible, and the list goes on.

Evaluate and Improve Your Marketing

As we already mentioned, for many agents, springtime is like floodgates opening for new leads and potential listings. But if the floodgates are open for you, that means that they are also open for every other real estate agent in your market as well. To get yourself and your business ready for the waters, you need to ensure your marketing is in top shape. That will allow you to capture as many of those new real estate leads as possible.

First off, go over your personal or your team’s website. The last thing you want is a bunch of springtime home sellers coming to your site only to find broken links or poor quality images. To avoid looking unprofessional at the worst time, go through your site, check all the links, make sure the images are looking good, update your About page, add any new customer reviews or testimonials, and make sure your copy and calls to action are as good as they can be.

Next, prepare marketing materials and schedule social media campaigns and posts in advance. Once you start getting busy talking to leads on phone, showing houses, and basically killing it in all your real estate agent duties, social media and other lead generating and nurturing methods tend to fall by the wayside. To help yourself out, plan out content in advance and then schedule it using a social media automation tool like Buffer or Facebook’s own scheduling tool.

Make Sure Your CRM Is up to Date

If you are keeping your contact list in spreadsheets, scraps of paper, or on cocktail napkins, now is the time to update and organize your CRM. Trust me, you will be pulling your hair out come the busy spring season if you don’t get everything in order now. Having a clean and orderly database within your CRM is the easiest way to know where you are at with specific leads, who you need to follow up with, as well as being reminded of important dates with existing or past clients.

So, dive into your CRM and make sure tags are right, emails are sending as planned, and you have all the necessary information for your contacts. Now is the time to do this before things get too crazy in the next few months.

Expand Your Knowledge

If you have some time over the next couple months, it’s always a good idea to sharpen your skills and your knowledge. Take advantage of training and coaching resources (like Conversion University), improve your phone skills with role plays and call reviews, work on your sales scripts, and learn new marketing techniques (like how to effectively utilize social media for real estate). We live in a time when excellent resources are never more than a few clicks away. But trust me, if you can’t find the time now, I bet you won’t be able to find it come spring!