If you are still using the ‘traditional’ real estate tool, and the heart of your business rely on your spreadsheet. That heart is the single greatest barrier to increasing sales and growth, plus, your company’s greatest vulnerability.
The more you grow, the more burdensome a spreadsheet becomes on your time and bottom line.
Starting off with handful of listings and/or agents, a spreadsheet sounds ideal. It is quick, cheap (even free in some cases), and requires little technical background to use. That was day one.
What does that spreadsheet look like now? How much time are you spending to keep it up to date? How many users have access and are entering and updating listing and client data? Is that data formatted uniformly?
More importantly, is your spreadsheet helping you find who or where your best opportunities are?
Spreadsheet use has two major shortcomings – lack of metadata and poor searchability. Metadata includes things like property facilities, fixtures, interior design style, special features, nearby shopping, and transportation. While your spreadsheet may include fields for SQM, # of rooms, # of floors, address, price, contract, it is unlikely you have a field for every possible property attribute, feature, and detail.
More commonly that ‘extra’ information is entered into a single “note” field. That means you either need an excellent memory, and a team with equally excellent memories, or you are manually sifting through your listings every time you need to find matching inventory.
Try this, using your spreadsheet, sort, and filter for all available listings within a 5km radius that has 4 bedrooms, 2+ baths, a pool, on-site gym, that are mass transit adjacent, and are within your client’s budget?
Follow up the task, if your inventory lacks a matching listing, use your spreadsheet to find up-to-date listings from other brokers that *do* match with your client. Boo! You just missed a sales opportunity.
Don’t miss another sales opportunity because of your spreadsheet. Property Flow has a free starter plan that can manage all of your listings and get your business online with a public broker landing page and public property listing page.
