For many consumers, buying a home isn’t a one-man mission — it’s a group effort. The homebuyer is often working hand in hand with a spouse, with family members, with someone they trust. Not to mention the ensemble cast of agents, lenders and contractors helping them roll that ball up the hill. So the online homebuying process isn’t as simple as a few searches on your website, a phone call and a showing. Many of these folks are scrolling through your site, emailing every listing that piques their interest to a partner or two, who emails a few interesting listings right back. Searching for homes, when it’s not daunting, is a uniquely exhilarating activity, one that’s frequently made more exhilarating by sharing it with a loved one. So why do so many real estate brokerage websites focus on capturing just one lead at a time, when that lead may not be the only voice in the decision to buy a home? Why not find a way to make your site allow for a more collaborative home search?
Of course, that’s exactly what TRIBUS is doing with our collaborative home search feature. At TRIBUS, we are gluttons for productivity. There are few things that make us feel better than trimming the fat on even the smallest processes in real estate. This product — which is gaining some leverage in the real estate technology field recently, but is an original TRIBUS creation dating back to 2014 — saves time and energy for both for your customers and your agents.
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Collaborative Home Search for Your Leads
Think of the collaborative home search feature like a dating app for homebuying. A lead registers on your real estate brokerage website, and signs up a collaborator. Then, instead of taking the time to shoot links back and forth and comment on each other’s choices, they start searching through properties at their own speeds — rating each on a scale of one to five stars. When both parties rate the same home highly (four or five stars), boom: it’s a match. Both collaborators get an immediate email alerting them of the homebuying love connection (pictured below), branded for your brokerage. The email features contact information for the assigned agent, and now they’re one click away from setting up a showing of that property.
It’s not hard to see the tangible benefits of this kind of system for your customers. Besides streamlining the two-person home search experience, it also adds a new sense of excitement to it. There’s something thrilling about seeing that notification pop up for one of our “it’s a match” emails; it removes the intimidation that can sometimes come with searching for homes, with the sheer amount of options and all the zeros attached to the price tags. Instead of being a drag, a collaborative home search is a shared experience — two people envisioning what life will look like in each home they rate highly. And all it takes is four or five stars to put them on the road to buying that dream home for themselves.
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Collaborative Home Search for Your Agents
Now let’s go around the to the other side and talk about what this all looks like for your agents on the backend. Once the initial lead comes in and is routed according to your brokerage’s custom lead routing rules, the assigned agent will be able to track their activity, including when a collaborator comes on board and all the properties the two of them view and rate. Within your brokerage CRM, as you’ll see below, the lead’s collaborator is listed alongside all their other details and activity, and vice versa when you click through to the collaborator’s profile.
If the agent wants, rather than manually checking in for when there’s a collaborative home search match, they can set up a very simple Zapier integration that automatically sends out a text message or email so they can follow up on that match right away. Obviously, this feature presents several advantages to a real estate professional. You’re essentially getting two leads for the price of one, and able to cut out the middleman by talking directly to every voice that matters along the way toward buying a home.
Most importantly, though, your agents get particularly meaningful engagement out of these leads. You get to see them express their opinions and feelings to someone they already know and trust, giving your agents more insight into what makes their leads tick. This, then, sets the agent up with a deeper understanding of how to dialogue with their collaborating leads. Because the leads are more excited by sharing this experience with someone else, they’ll also be more excited when the phone call from your agent comes in. The emails leads receive when there’s been a collaborative home search match may be automated, but the way your agents correspond with them can be all the more insightful.
Learn more about TRIBUS’ collaborative search.
