A new report from real estate marketing platform Activepipe has revealed how brokers and real estate agents can best build trust with their clients.
The report, entitled The Trust Report: What consumers want from real estate agents, surveyed customers about their interactions with both agents and mortgage brokers.
“The new research that we’ve done is called The Trust Report, and it looks at how trust gets built in the real estate space between professionals and potential clients,” explained Kylie Davis, who authored the study for Activepipe, a platform that allows brokers to keep in touch with their clients.
“It looks at things that real estate agents and brokers do: the things that build trust and the things that destroy trust. One of the key findings is that the quicker and better you can build trust with your potential clients, the more likely they are to become long term clients, to use you repeatedly and to recommend you to friends.”
Brokers are one of the most valued sections of the property marketplace.
“Brokers have a really high trust score,” said Davis. “I did some research two years ago in that space, and found that people really value the service that brokers provide. With real estate agents, they want to, but this is the thing that brokers benefit from: agents have not been great at building trust.”
“When you are very vulnerable, when you’re looking at buying or selling a property, there’s a lot going on in your life. There’s a lot of decisions to make and it’s very bureaucratic. It’s adulting. You’re looking for someone to coach you through that. People expect that their agent will do it and if they don’t, the broker often steps into that role.”
For brokers, the message is clear on how they can best build trust with their clients.
“The main thing is to stay in contact,” she said. “With property in general, the period between transactions is so long – 7,8, even 10 years – there’s a tendency to expect that you’ll do business with someone once and then it will be so log before they need to use you again that you’ll need to convert them all over again.”
“But what we see in this research is that, if you stay in communication with past clients and provide good information to new clients, then you can grow your business exponentially. People don’t want to speed date every time they buy property, they want someone they can trust, to know that they’re safe and to be guided through the process.”
