Handling inbound calls in real estate the right way can make or break your real estate marketing campaigns.
They are often the result of a successful real estate marketing campaign and the better you can handle them, the better the conversion rates of your incoming leads will get.
This article will discuss how you can get inbound calls, how you can outsource them, and which real estate call center services you might want to take into consideration.
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The Meaning of Inbound Calls and Their Process
An inbound call happens when potential clients or customers call you first, so they begin the contact with your real estate business.
The opposite are the outbound calls that are part of real estate prospecting and are more proactive, which I already discussed in this article of mine.
So, the difference between inbound and outbound calls is a bit like the difference between pull and push marketing.
The cause for inbound calls is usually based on different marketing methods you applied prior.
That’s kind of obvious, because how would potential customers know that your business even exists in the first place without you doing some kind of real estate marketing?
When you are a smaller real estate business or an independent real estate professional, you will mostly be the person handling the calls yourself.
Depending on your situation, you may also use an inbound call center service that handles the calls for you (more about inbound call center services later).
The importance of answering the phone fast is emphasized by these 3 statistics:
- The vendor that responds first gets 30-50% of sales (source).
- When potential customers can’t talk to a real person, they hang up 67% of the time (source).
- For 75% of customers it takes too long to reach someone live (source).
So, it might be critical with regards to your real estate conversion rates to be able to handle inbound calls in an effective way.
And by the way, inbound calls in the age of live chats can also come in text form.
Here are 4 examples of some typical inbound calls, some more and some less relevant to real estate:
- Tech support (not relevant)
- Sales inquiries (quite relevant)
- Complaints (relevant)
- Contract renewals (relevant for property managers)
How to Get Real Estate Inbound Calls
First, you can apply these different real estate marketing methods already discussed in several articles of mine to generate leads:
- How to Write a Property Description for a Fast Sale
- The Facebook Marketing Strategy Guide for Real Estate
- How to Do Direct Mail Marketing for Real Estate Like a Boss
- How to Create Better Real Estate Business Cards
- How to Do Real Estate Content Marketing Like The Big Boys
- 11 Real Estate Marketing Video Ideas and How Long a Video Should Be
- Real Estate Leads with Google Search Ads – All You Need to Know
But besides these general methods and strategies to generate leads and thus also inbound calls, there are some rather concrete inbound call attracting tactics you could use.
1) Include your phone number at the top of your website
You might be surprised how many websites of real estate professionals don’t display their phone number directly at the top of their page.
If you don’t have it there, website visitors may eventually find your phone number after several clicks.
But to cause an action and increase your conversion rates, you want to have as little friction as possible and thus, as few steps as possible to take action.
2) Have a callback option on your real estate website
Strictly speaking, a callback doesn’t count one hundred percent as an inbound call, because it means that a website visitor can order/schedule a callback from you with the help of different WordPress plugins that can be included on your website such as:
3) Enable the phone number to be copied via mobile devices
This will help users that visit your website on their mobile phones, and makes your phone number clickable.
It only works when you don’t add the phone number as an image.
4) On Google Maps and in the Google business card also add your phone number
5) Take Advantage of Google Ads
Besides the call ads that you can run on Google Ads already discussed in this article of mine, you can always add your phone number in the usual ads there.
Potential customers seeing your ads, can click on the phone number in the ad and directly call you.
6) Add your phone number everywhere
I have already given some examples above such as adding your phone number on Google Maps, or the top of your website.
The overall idea is that you might want to think of many more places where you could add your phone number, where it hasn’t been added yet.
7) Take into consideration the different time zones of your potential customers
To serve the different time zones of your potential customers, you might want to consider extending business hours accordingly or if they are way out of your time zone, using an inbound call service during certain hours.
8) Use a type of lead magnet that gives an incentive to call
You could design a real estate lead magnet that is not some sort of digital download or free little video course but, for example, a free real estate consultancy.
This one needs to be thought through well enough, so you don’t end up wasting too much time giving too much away for free.
9) Have an omnichannel approach
In my article about following up in real estate, I already mentioned statistics about the importance and effectiveness of having an omnichannel follow-up system in place.
The same is true for your overall marketing activities to attract the right people.
If you use several communication or marketing channels, you can better increase the motivation of people to call you compared to just using one channel.
Using multiple marketing channels is, for example, when you run a Google search ad and also a Facebook campaign that retargets the same people that clicked on your search ad.
How to Outsource Real Estate Inbound Calls
We already saw in the beginning how important it is to be able to reply to inbound calls, because 67% of callers hang up when they can’t talk to a real person, and for 75% it takes too long to reach someone live.
The issue at hand for real estate pros with a smaller business is that they can’t answer the phone one hundred percent of the time.
They might be with a client, have a meeting or need to do something else important where they can’t be interrupted all the time.
For these cases, outsourcing your inbound call handling to a real estate call center service with inbound agents can come in handy.
What are inbound agents, and what do they do?
Should you outsource your inbound calls to a real estate call center service, usually different inbound agents will handle incoming calls for you.
Most of the time, you can pre-define what they will need to do with your incoming leads.
Unless they are not already well-experienced in real estate sales and negotiations, they shouldn’t do the high-stake communication for you.
They should rather just be the first human being your potential customer can talk to and do things like pre-qualification, answering common questions and help you schedule a follow-up call (depending on how the pre-qualification turned out) that would then be carried out by you.
In other industries than real estate, inbound agents also do basic things like troubleshooting product or service issues.
This could be also a use case for a property manager, where the focus is more on customer service.
Of course, if you are a real estate agent and would like to make your aftersales part a bit stronger, you may also have a stronger focus on customer service and then use inbound agents for that with pre-defined use cases.
A good real estate call center service will be able to follow your pre-defined instructions and scripts.
In this context, you may want to read my article about how to automate your real estate business.
It describes how you can identify different repeating tasks and create an operations manual out of them, so you can better outsource them.
The better you can identify, define and describe the tasks related to your inbound real estate calls, the better the real estate call center service of your choice will be able to handle this first phone contact when you can’t respond to the phone immediately.
How Many Calls a Day Can a Real Estate Call Center Take?
There may be the case that you have a really good marketing campaign going that brings you in a flood of calls per day that definitely can’t all be handled by you.
In this case, you might wonder how many calls a day a call center can take, but you may also wonder about their call center metrics.
So, first, how many calls can a call center take?
A call center agent can take up to 50 calls per working day (source) and since I don’t know about call centers that employ just one agent, you are more than likely covered with regards to handling all your real estate inbound calls.
By the way, if you really want to get nerdy about the number of inbound agents you will need, you can take a look at this interesting online calculator (source).
It is rather addressed to call center businesses wondering how many agents they would need to operate.
However, there are other metrics of call centers you might need to take into consideration and thus help you make decisions on a real estate call center service.
Some of the metrics I will provide you here are more and others less relevant from the perspective of real estate customers that want to use a call center.
Before deciding on a real estate call center, you may want to ask the respective provider to give you some of the metrics.
10 Call Center Metrics to Take Into Consideration
More Relevant for a Real Estate Pro
1) Abandonment Rate
This means the number of calls that do not even connect to an inbound agent and hang-up before.
Just a busy signal doesn’t count for the abandonment rate.
2) Average Talk Time (ATT), After Call Work (ACW) and Average Handle Time (AHT)
The average amount of time an agent talks to customers is the average talk time (ATT).
The time an agent needs to wrap-up a call is the After Call Work metric (ACW), and the Average Handle Time is when you combine the two aforementioned metrics (ATT and ACW).
3) Service Level and Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
The service level is the number of seconds an agent takes to answer calls.
The lower this number is, the higher the service level can be considered to be.
4) First Call Resolution
This number measures the percentage of customer calls that could get resolved the first time.
5) Cost per Call
While this is rather from the perspective of the call center, it is also important to know it as a call center customer.
So, this is the cost of a call arriving and being answered.
6) Call Quality
This metric asks the question of how well an agent deals with customers. Industry standards don’t exist in this regard.
Each call center usually has a list of criteria to determine the call quality.
It can be things like how agents can resolve a call, and how they answer and end the calls.
Less Relevant for a Real Estate Pro
1) Adherence and Shrinkage
How good an agent sticks to their schedule is defined as adherence.
It is the relation between the time an agent is working and the paid time.
This is more relevant to measure the performance of call center staff.
2) Punctuality and Attendance
These metrics are rather self-explanatory.
Punctuality means that an agent shows up on time for their working shift and also being on time after breaks.
Attendance means if an agent shows up for work in the first place.
3) Occupancy
This metric measures the capacity for the call volumes.
It checks how well the agents are scheduled for the call volumes.
4) Turnover
While this is also a metric for internal call center use, it is also good for you to know how the turnover is.
It checks if members of staff choose to leave or if they are being asked to leave (fired).
(source)
All Metrics at a Glance
| More Relevant for a Real Estate Pro | Less Relevant for a Real Estate Pro |
|---|---|
| Abandonment Rate | Adherence and Shrinkage |
| Average Talk Time (ATT), After Call Work (ACW) and Average Handle Time (AHT) | Punctuality and Attendance |
| Service Level and Average Speed of Answer (ASA) | Occupancy |
| First Call Resolution | Turnover |
| Cost per Call | |
| Call Quality |
7 Real Estate Call Center Services
Ending this article, I will provide you with a selection of seven different real estate call center services that received the highest ratings on Cluth.io.
I selected only the ones that would be suitable for rather small real estate businesses, and that are U.S. based.
On each of their websites, I checked individually if they also serve the real estate industry.
1) Davinci
- Virtual office space
- Live receptionists
- Web chat services
- Meeting spaces
Pricing:
No pricing information is publicly disclosed.
You can check it out here.
2) answerconnect
- Live call answering
- Live chat support
- Appointment scheduling
- Video calls
Pricing:
No pricing information is publicly disclosed.
You can check it out here.
3) VoiceNation
- Mobile app
- Call patching (forwarding urgent calls)
- After hours live answering
- Bilingual operators
- 24/7 service
- Order processing
- On-call scheduling
- Reports and analytics
- Call screening
- Live chat
- Online dashboard to manage scripts and calls
- US-based operators
Pricing:
- free 7-day trial
- $39/month for 20 minutes (only this one doesn’t have custom scripting)
- $89/month for 50 minutes
- $249/month for 150 minutes
- $449/month for 300 minutes
- $799/month for 600 minutes
You can check it out here.
4) AnswerForce
- Personal answering service
- Virtual receptionist
- Appointment setting
- Lead capture with CRM integrations
- Order taking
Pricing:
No pricing information is publicly disclosed without leaving your contact information.
You can check it out here.
5) Answering Service Care
- Live answering services
- Appointment scheduling
- Call recording
- Bilingual operators
- Custom on-hold music
- Post-call follow-up emails
- On-call scheduling
- Salesforce integration
Pricing:
- 50 minutes for $49/month
- 150 minutes for $145/month
- 250 minutes for $225/month
- 500 minutes for $440/month
You can check it out here.
6) Ruby
- Live virtual receptionist and chat 24/7
- Live call answering
- Call routing by type of call
- Optional bilingual answering
- Appointment scheduling
- 7 hold music choices and option for custom music
- Local area phone number
- Toll-free numbers
- App for notifications
- Voicemail transcriptions
Pricing:
- 50 minutes for $199/month
- 100 minutes for $309/month
- 200 minutes for $589/month
- 500 minutes for $1369/month
You can check it out here.
7) easybee
- Live answering 24/7
- Message taking
- Call forwarding
- Bilingual answering in English and Spanish
- Scheduling
Pricing:
- 50 minutes for $69/month
- 100 minutes for $109/month
- 200 minutes for $199/month
- 300 minutes for $279/month
- 400 minutes for $369/month
You can check it out here.
Complete Pricing Overview of All Mentioned Real Estate Call Center Services
| Provider | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Davinci | n.a |
| answerconnect | n.a |
| VoiceNation | $39 - $799 per Month |
| AnswerForce | n.a. |
| Answering Service Care | $49 - $449 per Month |
| Ruby | $49 - $449 per Month |
| easybee | $69 - $369 |
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