Pushing Dirt

I’m far from the first to highlight the merits of using email auto responders to save time and respond to sales inquiries quickly. It was suggested by guru of the month Tim Ferris in his four hour work week book. I expand on the concept by offering a solution using Gmail that is free and easy to implement even if you’re not particularly technically astute.

If you’re a commercial real estate agent or an owner marketing space available for lease, or even if you’re advertising widgets or some other nonsense where you get a ton of time consuming inquiries, set up an email based auto responder to address frequently asked questions and allow you batch your responses to all these inquiries to a regular, occasional interval.

In my situation, I get a lot of property inquiries by email with many of the same questions. For each new listing I am advertising only with an email address tied to an auto responder, one email per property. Don’t include a phone number in the ad; my experience is that when advertising online most folks that respond for some reason pick up the phone when given the choice, even if you’ve provided an email option as well.

You can do this for free with gmail. Open a new account for each property or category of inquiry, set it up with email forwarding (if you like) to your main email account. Then turn on the vacation auto responder built into gmail, and type your FAQ and instructions in that auto responder.

You can test one my first effort with this by sending an email to 1739brightseat@gmail.com. This response is for inquires about a warehouse I’m marketing for sale or lease in Landover.

My expectation is that this will save me hours on end. There are certainly lots of subscription auto responder services out there that can manage dozens of responders, include attachments, etc. but the gmail solution is free quick and easy and allows you to experiment with the concept and see if it indeed saves you precious time. If you deal with sales or customer service inquiries on a daily basis I wager it will.

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I’ve been in touch with Your Man in India about getting a personal virtual assistant.

I’m going to experiment with having him/her handle tasks that keep me away from sales related activities, e.g.,

-personal calls to companies, vendors, etc.

-Following up with prospects that have visited my listings (following a simple script. I will handle the most important leads and any work that requires a real estate license)

-maintaining marketing reports

-maintaining my database….particularly bulk additions to the database

-market research

This is all to supplement my company-provided in-house team. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

I don’t know if overseas outsourcing is the panacea that Timothy Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week makes it out to be…

I tried it with a project to build an owner database and was disappointed with the results.

I think a full or half-time commitment to a single overseas assistant could be the best bet as you could train the individual to meet your expectations and learn your business.

If you’re interested in trying this, a good place to start is Finn Johnson’s RE Back Office. Finn comes from a commercial real estate background so he understands our needs. He can offer the overseas assistant solution you might be seeking.