Real Deal REInvestor Network

Are you considering using an outsourced answering service for your real estate business?

I have used answering services for multiple businesses. If you are looking for a company to take your incoming calls, so you don’t continue to paper your car with bright yellow sticky notes and take calls from sellers on your cell phone while you’re sitting in the Wendy’s restaurant bathroom “taking care of business”, I would recommend it. People ask me if there is a best company and I think there’s plenty of options that can do you right. I’d say consider talking to PAT Live, especially if you are in the real estate business, and have experience with their service being excellent.

You can also consider whether a live answering service is really what you need, or if you want you can implement a ‘phone tree’ system such as those enabled by two companies I’ve used regularly GotVmail, or ifbyphone. These services have an automated ‘phone tree’ of options, some of which when pressed by the caller will lead to you live on the phone, some to recorded information, and some can easily be diverted to a call center as discussed before should you desire. Regardless, this solution will cut down on frivolous calls reaching you-- or calls with questions that can easily be answered with recorded information (like “where is the property?” or “what is the lockbox code?” or “if I don’t pay my rent can I still live here?”).

I have used call centers to take calls from my marketing campaigns to the foreclosure list and its very effective. They have operators on staff that can take your calls and email you immediately when you get a message that meets your pre-set "don’t bother me unless it's X, Y, or Z" criteria. The benefit is they manage all of the operators and train them for you so you don’t have to do it.

I’ve also worked with answering services for event registrations, order taking, and appointment setting.

There’s a drop in effectiveness a lot of times when we the business owner let someone else do something for us – because often we can do it best, right? But that drop in effectiveness is often countered on the other side with a great increase in efficiency. That’s because while the call center is taking and screening calls, you the business owner can simultaneously be focusing on other priorities.

Note here that I don’t recommend that you send calls to an answering service that you can’t train them what to say. If you’re new, talk to your incoming calling clients yourself and get comfortable with it, find out what the best questions to ask are and the hot buttons. You can then teach others what to say and when and how once you know how to do it yourself. Otherwise, you’ll get mediocre results with an answering service and your money is better spent elsewhere.