07 Dec A Hypothetical Situation:

A prospective buyer visits your real estate property looking for a home to purchase. A leasing agent or even property manager greets him or her with a less than chipper or helpful attitude. As the prospect is shown the property and informed of its hopefully many benefits, your leasing agent continues their lackluster sales performance. At the end of the showing, your once potential prospect might be turned off from your property simply because of a horrible interaction with your leaser.

What does this mean? Did you lose a potential renter or buyer? Probably, but it also means so much more.

This is where real-time reviews can either be your best friend or your worst enemy.

Using their cell phone, the unsatisfied prospect could be posting a negative review of your property on multiple platforms in only the time it takes for them to walk to their car. (Twitter, Facebook, Blog, etc….)

Scary right? Now all of their friends know of the terrible sales experience. It gets worse. With the recent addition of social search to Google, people searching for your property on the Internet could possibly stumble upon their Twitter or Facebook update. Now the bad review goes beyond just their friend group.

So what can we do about this?

The answer seems simple. You outperform any consumer expectations. Is this possible? Maybe not, but it is an admirable goal.

What else?

A Trendwatching.com article suggests that companies should be extremely involved with the review process. This would mean monitoring reviews and responding to them, or actually providing a platform for reviews in order to gain insight and participation ease.

The reality is that people are going to say things about your property/brand. Why not take advantage of the good and bad? If you responded to someone’s positive Twitter comment about your property with a thank you, do you think that would help the chances of them buying or renting from you? You better believe it would. What if you apologized for the bad experience and invited them back for a special visit? It would definitely help.

This is something we need to be thinking about for next year. Real-time reviews will become more common as time passes. Are you ready to handle the good and bad? Let me know by leaving a comment below.