Real estate has always been a very competitive business, but low interest rates over the last decade have resulted in an extraordinary amount of buying and selling in the housing market. Property values have increased in many urban areas. With low interest rates, there are more first-time buyers in the market. The ways in which home buyers look for properties are also changing. More and more customers are communicating through e-mail instead of by phone. With MLS available online, more and more home buyers are contacting selling agents directly for more information, increasing chances of doing double-ended sales, but also increasing the amount of missed calls and missed opportunities. Pagers, e-mail, cell phones, fax costs and more, all make a difference to the bottom line. Agents are having trouble responding to every single client call, e-mail, fax or page. Real estate firms need flexible communications systems that reduce costs for brokers, but also enable agents to respond to home buyers quickly and to provide them with information whenever, and wherever. With a competitive real estate market, brokers need to attract the top agents in order to build a successful business.

Real estate professionals face a number of communications challenges

Increasing communications costs. Phone and fax equipment, multiple phone lines and more are all driving costs for brokers. Pagers, e-mail, cell phones, faxes and more are all driving up costs for agents. Traditional phone systems cannot easily accommodate employees working from home or on the road, and opening new offices often means buying an entirely new phone system.

Increasing customer service expectations. Being successful in the real estate business is all about the relationship with the customer. By themselves, older telephone systems simply cannot address the needs of today’s real estate professionals: low-cost long distance charges, never missing a call, and being able to access all messages in a single place, whether voice, fax or e-mail. With home buyers using a number of communications tools, it’s easy to lose track of important messages. E-mails, voice mails, faxes, and pages are difficult to stay on top of. Effective customer service requires bringing those different sources together so that you can make the sale.

Web-based property listings are reducing customer touch. Good rapport with a client is crucial to closing deals. A steady flow of referrals stems from the word-of-mouth advertising provided by satisfied customers. More and more, potential home buyers are looking to Web sites and online listings to do their house shopping rather than contacting agents directly.

Missed calls are missed opportunities. There are times when real estate agents simply cannot respond to home buyers. A young couple might be out house-hunting on the weekend, but when they phone the office to ask about the property, no one is there to take their call. This may result in a lost sales opportunity, but it doesn’t have to.

Objectworld UC Server can help real estate professionals meet these challenges.

All real estate professionals need to keep their eyes on costs, while investing in communications tools that will increase their chances of making a sale. Objectworld products cut costs and increase sales opportunities for real estate professionals with simple but powerful productivity tools. With Objectworld’s Unified Messaging, agents and administrative staff can keep all messages, whether fax, voice mail or e-mail, in a single location. With Objectworld’s Unified Communications, calls can be forwarded quickly and simply so that agents never miss an opportunity. And with Objectworld’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR), real estate firms can provide housing listings and descriptions around-the-clock over the phone.

Take the call, get the fax, read the e-mail, wherever, whenever. With Objectworld products, real estate professionals can stay on top of every opportunity wherever they are with call-routing, unified messaging and new message alerts. If a home buyer calls, e-mails or faxes, an agent can know wherever, and whenever and can easily retrieve the message. Agents, brokers, IT and administrative staff all use simple Windows-based software to manage messages, calls, and house listings. Managing call flows, organizing and prioritizing messages, and updating IVR-based property listings is as easy as managing e-mail.

Provide 24/7 talking house listings over the phone when you can’t take the call. With Objectworld’s Interactive Voice Response and Fax Server, agents can sell properties even when they can’t take calls. Provide home buyers with round-the-clock descriptions of properties with Objectworld’s Interactive Voice Response and Fax Server. Customers simply phone for more information, press in the housing ID (for example, the MLS number, or a housing ID number that agents can assign) and the property description will be read to them over the phone. Agents can record their own customized housing descriptions or generate them automatically with Objectworld’s text-to-speech capabilities. If customers need more details, they can request a fax version of the property description. If they want to talk to an agent, they can be connected if the agent is available or sent to voice mail for quick follow-up.

Lower costs. With Objectworld, real estate firms can eliminate redundant paging services, fax machines and cell phones while improving the flow of communications between brokers, agents, staff and customers. Objectworld products can also provide service to branch offices and mobile agents without requiring an entirely new investment. Agents and staff can also cut costs by sending, receiving, and forwarding voice and fax messages electronically.

Attract and retain the best agents and customers. For agents, a modern phone system increases sales opportunities through better, quicker customer service. For brokers, using the best in modern communications technology is key to retaining successful agents.

Extend your phone system with Objectworld UC Server Standard Edition or transition to VoIP with Objectworld UC Server SIP Edition. Objectworld UC Server provides unified messaging, unified communications, notification, voice conferencing, fax capabilities and more. Extend your existing phone system with Objectworld UC Server Standard Edition™ or switch over to VoIP with Objectworld UC Server™. With Objectworld, real estate firms can easily manage the telephony and unified communications requirements of multiple office locations, teleworkers and mobile employees from a single software. Objectworld UC Server provides the productivity and administration tools that businesses need to manage the system directly from anywhere in the system.

Protect your investment. Every day, computers are becoming faster and cheaper, and people around the globe are imagining new ways to communicate. Objectworld’s open, software-based approach means that as computers become faster and less expensive, your real estate firm will benefit directly in cost-savings. With Objectworld’s certified and supported Connect Partners, businesses can buy and upgrade third-party hardware and applications, like phones, media gateways, and video conferencing hardware and software, as they need to. Objectworld UC Server also provides flexible, secure and cost-effective integration with other phone systems.