Almost every business transaction starts with an online search today. It could be on a review site, search engine, social media platform, or listings website. The stronger the reputation for your real estate business online, the more likely the client will choose you over a competitor.
Managing the reputation of your real estate business means listing on these platforms, collecting and managing reviews, and using them to grow your business. An attended negative review or an unclaimed profile can drastically impact your online reputation.
This blog post explores the real estate reputation management world and the best practices to follow.
Table of contents
- What is real estate reputation management?
- Why is reputation management important in the real estate industry?
- 5 effective strategies for real estate reputation management
- How to choose the right reputation management tools for real estate businesses
- FAQs on real estate reputation management
- Conclusion
What is real estate reputation management?
Real estate reputation management is the process of monitoring how customers feel about your real estate business, taking strategic action based on the insights, and eventually influencing public perception by leveraging positive testimonials.
This is an ongoing process that every real estate business owner must invest in to grow their business and gain a significant edge over the competition.
Why is reputation management important in the real estate industry?
Customer relationships in the real estate industry come from trust, customer experience, and personalized service. You can prove your trustworthiness to clients when they interact with you. Online reputation management for real estate businesses can make it possible in the research stage itself.
Reputation management in the real estate industry can help businesses:
- Understand how homeowners and other clients feel about their interactions with the team and act upon their suggestions for improvement.
- Improve customer satisfaction rate by showing clients that they are listening.
- Leverage positive feedback and reviews by including them in marketing campaigns.
- Improve local SEO efforts and rank higher in local Google search results. The algorithm values reviews and overall star ratings while displaying the top businesses.
- Claim and update all listings for your business. This way, potential homeowners do not receive any misinformation or show up at the wrong address.
- Identify unhappy clients and resolve queries to improve customer retention rate.
- Reward employees who go above and beyond for the business and grow a cohesive team.
5 effective strategies for real estate reputation management
There are too many moving parts in managing reputation for a real estate business. All you need is a few processes to make a significant difference. Here is a list of a few strategies to adopt when it comes to real estate reputation management:
Automated review generation
Collecting as many reviews as possible must be a top priority for your business. Choosing a real estate agent, a property manager, or a rental property takes a lot of time and evaluation. The more positive reviews your business receives on niche-specific review sites like Zillow, the more a potential homeowner trusts you.
Unfortunately, if you leave it to the homeowner or renter to remember and write reviews, you may not capture all positive experiences. For best results, real estate businesses must:
- Send an automated review request to all clients via text, email, or other messaging services to share their experiences.
- Run drip campaigns encouraging customers to write reviews with gift cards and coupons. While you can’t pay for positive reviews, you can still run contests to help a random customer claim the reward.
- Make it easy for clients to write a review by sending a short link directly to the review site. This way, they can write the review easily instead of them having to spend time looking up the business.
- Encourage survey respondents and clients who message on various platforms to write a review.
Birdeye helps you create listings and collect reviews on 100+ sites with just a few clicks.
Manage Posts, Reputation, and Reporting across Locations
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Review response management
Just collecting reviews is never enough. All customer communications become fruitful when you engage with them, which is valid for reviews too. Just as it is in every industry, real estate business owners must make sure that they respond to all reviews they receive – positive and negative.
When you respond to customer reviews:
- You keep your business listings active. This shows potential homeowners and the listing websites that you are a legitimate business that cares about feedback.
- Clients know that when they choose this forum to share their opinions, the business will notice them. This encourages them to write reviews, helping your online reputation.
- Businesses can even persuade clients to remove negative reviews by responding with a resolution. This improves your overall star rating and builds a positive reputation.
Multi-location real estate businesses might find tracking and responding to every review challenging without a tool or a process. Using the industry’s highly-rated #1 review management software like Birdeye can help you:
- Monitor reviews as they come in from various sources in a single dashboard
- Respond to them with pre-written templates to save time and effort
- Automate review responses to make sure that every review receives a response promptly, improving customer experience.
Know more about Birdeye Reviews here!
Review management
It so happens that you can find a lot of gems buried in the sea of reviews. But it is a challenge to find those gems of good feedback if you don’t have a process. Manage your reviews so you never miss an important review, and turn the feedback you receive into actionable insights.
Real estate businesses must manage their reviews to understand:
- Which locations are performing well and which are not. You can do this by comparing the ratings and review volume across locations and review websites.
- The most underperforming locations or team members to dedicate your resources to.
- How to improve customer experience
- How they fare against their competitors
- Which clients are ideal for requesting video testimonials, participating in referral requests, or pitching another property.
Review marketing
A business only succeeds at reputation management when it uses positive reviews to grow. Reputation management for real estate can’t be just firefighting by acting on negative reviews alone. Leveraging your positive feedback to influence public opinion and grow a more positive outlook for your business is vital.
Real estate businesses can leverage review marketing by:
- Sharing positive reviews on social media
- Posting customer success stories in marketing materials such as emails, billboards, and more.
- Add the review widget on your website to promote the high star rating of your business.
Social listening and monitoring
Customer reviews and feedback are not just on the designated review sites anymore; they are everywhere – especially on social media platforms. Homeowners like to talk about their experiences with real estate business on popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Your real estate business reputation can benefit by monitoring social media platforms to understand the overall sentiment towards you. Leverage social listening and social monitoring to do so by tracking a few essential keywords and engaging with clients when they post about your business.
Birdeye allows businesses to track brand mentions and specific keywords, and engage with your audience from a single dashboard so that you never miss a single conversation.
How to choose the right reputation management tools for real estate businesses
While real estate companies must prioritize reputation management, they also have a business to run. It is not cost-effective for business owners, agents, or managers to chase reviews or respond to them without the assistance of a tool. The right reputation management tool can help you scale your business while building a positive reputation at a competitive price.
Here are a few things that you must look out for when you choose the reputation management tool:
Automation capabilities
Reputation management has a lot of elements, and businesses must take control of all the processes and variables involved. Using an AI-driven solution that allows automation but with human supervision can significantly help scale reputation management with lean resources.
Birdeye helps real estate businesses:
- Automate review requests to all clients by integrating with their homeowner/renter database
- Automate review responses with AI-driven templates and rephrasing abilities. You can send professional responses to all reviews within seconds of them coming in.
- Leverage all positive reviews by automated posting to social media platforms with pre-designed templates and captions.
- Automate reporting (weekly, monthly, and annually) to understand how to improve online reputation.
Integration with systems
Your business must already have a customer data management system, agent data management, payroll management, etc. Your reputation management tool must integrate with these so that you can
- Send review requests to new and existing clients
- Assign tickets to employees
- Enable employees to send review requests for walk-ins
- Send periodic surveys to all homeowners to gauge satisfaction.
Birdeye integrates with 3000+ apps, including software that major real estate companies use such as Homegauge, Horizon, Sitelink, and Hospitable. You can integrate your customer management system with Birdeye to send out review requests online reviews automatically after a transaction and boost your online reputation.
Compliance
Every real estate business has a few regulations to comply with based on your specific domain and location. It is essential that the tool you use to boost your online reputation also helps you boost your compliance with some of the related regulations.
For example, in the United States, businesses must comply with the 10DLC regulation to send text messages to customers. So, a reputation management tool can only work if it complies with 10DLC for sending customer reviews or survey requests via text messaging.
Similarly, reputation management tools must help real estate agents make sure all their listings are accurate and do not misrepresent the property in any way.
FAQs on real estate reputation management
Real estate companies must focus on collecting reviews from their clients, engage with them on social media, and promote positive reviews to build reputation in the industry.
Reputation is extremely important in real estate as most clients choose agents, real estate businesses, and properties from word of mouth recommendations or online review sites.
Conclusion
Reputation management is of paramount importance in the real estate industry. Your brand is only as good as how the digital world projects it to be. Actively working on reputation management and ensuring an exemplary customer experience can significantly boost your competitive edge in the industry.
Managing multiple locations and catering to thousands of potential homeowners, renters, and other clients while building a solid online reputation is only possible when you have a comprehensive tool like Birdeye.
With a simple, easy-to-use dashboard, Birdeye helps real estate businesses manage listings, reviews, appointments, and social media channels. It is also an award-winning AI-driven solution that leverages technology to simplify data management and accelerate growth for your business.
Originally published
