Monday, 28th of July 2008 at 03:00:05 PMDuring the beta testing, I ran across the menu option of Reverse Prospecting. Hmm, this looks like fun, I thought to myself. Coming from a background in building and designing Marketing systems for companies of the like of MBNA and American Express, I knew how Reverse Prospecting could be used and was excited about the opportunities this tool had to offer.
In the context of FlexMLS, reverse prospecting allows you to take one of your listing and ask the question, which agents have searches that match my listing? What this will allow you to do is call/email to bring attention to your listing and hopefully actively match in a new way a buyer for your seller.
So, I’m throwing a party to celebrate FlexMLS launch..
And I’m using a vacant property to host it at and I thought of inviting those agents that may have a prospective buyer to check out the house before hand (and get some food and wine). So I ran the reverse prospecting option on the listing that will be hosting the party. Came up with 14 agents. Which is impressive since most agents haven’t set up their searches in the new system. So I sent them an eMail announcing the party.
I would show you some screen prints of this activity, but it is really straight forward and one of the screens would show you agent names, phone numbers and email addresses, something they may not appreciate being shared with the world.
Basically, under contacts, is a reverse prospecting option, click that. Select the listing(s) that you want to reverse prospect, and bam, you have a list of agents and their contact information. My only suggestion to make this better is to offer an eMail (those agents) option from this page or allow an export of the list to use in a trusty little CRM tool to contact the agents, but hey, it is still 5 times better than anything we had in Tempo.
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Hi Craig,
I saw the reverse prospecting feature & had the exact same reaction as you – sort of a “how cool is that?!”
My 2nd reaction was “oh man, this is going to create a TON of spam from agents who are telling me their property is perfect for one of my client-searches.”
Look – before any of you start spamming me, realize that if your property was perfect, and it’s in the mls, and my search finds it, and assuming my prospect is ready to buy, we would have already made an offer! No need to email me, thank you.
Upon further review, it looks like agents on both sides need to sign up for this feature. That means only the agents who sign up for spam will receive spam.
Overall, though, I’m loving FlexMLS.
Hi Chris,
I’m honored to have you reading my blog!!
Yes, I agree, I don’t mind the emails, I do believe the phone calls will become a problem more than anything.
I would only set the reverse prospecting on clients that I feel are close to making a purchase and don’t mind hearing from agents that have something to tell me that isn’t necessarily on the MLS yet.
For example, I did get a call from an agent Tuesday that had a property that matched my client’s search. Initially I was “great it’s starting already”, but she actually had value in her call changed my mind. She was letting me know that her client was going to offer closing costs and down-payment incentives, that they would be updating the MLS soon, but wanted to let us know to let our clients know right away. I appreciated that and sent the note to my client.
I wouldn’t like it if she just rehashed everything that was in the MLS, tell me something of value and in an eMail is best of all, it’s not interrupting my day that way.
I see this as a future blog post “Reverse Prospecting Etiquette”