Do you really know who responds to your real estate marketing commiunications

Listening to the echoes coming back from people in your suburb can tell you a lot about what makes them tick.

But this is most effective when combined with data about them to begin with.

Let’s say you send out an advertising campaign and get a response. That’s great! People responded!

But out of how many? Which ones did not respond? Why?

Let’s take a look at feedback, and how it can be used with suburb data to really get to know your people.

Why is feedback important?

Your success is based upon your business model matching the demands of your market.

You may have hit upon a combination that matched their needs early on (perhaps after much trial, error and research), but needs change, attitudes change, and which communication they respond to changes with subtle social shifts.

So you need to keep in touch with these shifts.

When done right, collecting feedback opens a dialogue between you and your community, and affords opportunity to get members of your team working together and taking pride in their work better than before

How to collect feedback

Even your means of gathering feedback can give skewed results. People of different ages may regard a survey, for example, as more or less of an inconvenient intrusion on their time. Young people may close your website immediately, so that your only respondents are older residents with plenty of time. Not exactly a true result.

Modern methods of feedback include analytics from websites. They found their way onto your site, stayed three minutes, then left.

Which site linked them there? What did they do while they were on? Watch your video? Read your listings? Which ones?

When done right, feedback collection can be a source of morale in two ways.

First, if you empower your people, from the front desk to your sales team, to collect feedback informally and with enough authority to act upon it, then you will get to know better who is calling, what they want, and how you can help them.

This could come in the form of a receptionist fielding calls – “Plenty of young people asking after big houses to share with their friends this week, so I got Sheri to call them back” is a good sign of the process working.

Then, with good trust and communication within your own office, your agents can know who best can handle each inquiry, and refer each other to provide the best service as a team.

Each of these pieces of information lead to transparency of the overall picture of the market base as well as the minutiae on what an individual within it might like and be like.

Comparing feedback to response

More than this, starting with accurate data on all the people in your suburb means that you can compare response to actual numbers, and find out who is not responding.

You want to know why.

You also want to know if this is a good response rate. Is a response of 8.5% good for people 25-35 nowadays?

In order to know if this is good, you will first need to know how many people you have to start with.

Data on your suburb is invaluable to get to know your potential clients, and their movements. Perhaps there is an influx of young people looking to rent from February. Given the student calendar, this is a familiar migration pattern.

The increase in responses at that time, then, may not be because of something you did, but because of a rise in demand in general. This is something vital to know so that you don’t go chasing shadows.

Matching people to properties

Being able to build up a profile, a persona of a person based on their demographics – age, income, life status – then finding out how many people there are in your area who match that description will enable you to work out what kind of properties will be in demand, and take action on that.

Gearing your communication to your people

Conversely, you could find out what kind of properties you have in your area, and make a campaign to reach out to the people who would like them.

Hopefully you have used the data, tested to see what they respond to, and are in a position to know how to reach them and have them respond. Is lifestyle more important than room size to them? Use language of community, connectedness and liveability. Is it the quiet? Pictures of leafy green streets.