What would you do with an extra 6.5 hours a week?

You could make about 65 more cold calls, or hold 13 more viewings, or you could take a power-nap every day of the week.

Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day – blame the Egyptians for that one. So, if you can’t make more time, what can you do? You can save it.

Enter your CRM system to automate tasks, manage relationships and make your agency more efficient – saving you time (and money). Every wasted click is a wasted moment, and it all adds up.

Here are our top four ways to save hours every week...

Shorter meetings focused on what matters

Let’s say your agency’s daily meeting runs for about 30 minutes – including all the general chit-chat that’s probably a bit light. Every day, you stick to the same agenda. Each of the team opens up their diaries and gives an overview of their viewings and market appraisals for the day ahead and you divide the leads that have come in overnight between your negotiators.

That 30-minute meeting, run from Monday to Friday, eats into two and a half hours of each team member's working week. And that’s not even counting admin time spent scheduling and the meeting, getting the tech to work or exchanging pleasantries when the meeting finally kicks off.

In fact, the average person spends 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings – and that was pre-Covid. Now, the first 10 minutes of any meeting is filled with “Is my microphone working?” and “Can you see my screen?” – you know, the fluff. And all that fluff adds up.

Instead, configure your CRM’s dashboard to surface agent performance, your prospecting pipeline, expiring listings, important contract dates and activity and reminder streams so everyone in your office can see what’s going on.

You’ll enter your daily meeting with context, and only need about 10 minutes to talk through any urgent matters that have cropped up.

Time saved: with at least 3 hours a week in staff meetings you could easily save an hour here.

Better KPI reporting

Once a week you assess the sales pipeline, general performance of your listers and negotiators.

Rather than pulling in information from different sources or multiple spreadsheets, work out what's most important to your agency then configure a report for it so your CRM does the heavy lifting.

At a minimum, you’ll be wanting a list of: appraisals (conducted, won and lost) listings (new, current and expiring) the activity taken in relation to their listings (e.g. viewings, calls, etc.), and contracts.

This basic reporting will save your agents or admin from having to manually set search parameters and pull all of this information out of the system once a week. With easy-to-read, automatically generated visual reports dashboards always available, your team will have at-a-glance access to their performance.

Additionally, your team is able to monitor their performance towards their target and take action to improve.

Minimum time saved: at least 30 minutes per agent, plus a lot more focus on the things that matter.

Automated listing alerts

Great news, you’ve just signed up a new listing. But the clock is ticking and you want to show your seller that you’ve already got a basket of hot buyers ready to come and take a look.

Your standard approach to ‘Just listed’ campaigns might be pretty old school - creating a flyer and dropping it in letter boxes. But how much time would you estimate that takes?

At a brisk walk, the average person can cover three miles in an hour. How big is your area? Say your agency focuses on a five mile radius – to walk every street within that five mile radius would take dozens of hours.

However, best practice is for agents to do about three hours of flyer distribution and door knocking a week. Is that really the best use of your agents’ time?

Then there’s the writing, designing, printing, folding of the flyers (if an agent isn’t doing it, then they’re at least spending time approving this stuff). You do the maths… That’s a lot of time wasted on delivering flyers that only a fraction of homeowners ever read before throwing in the recycling bin.

Still, if you want to be seen as the go-to agency in a geographic area, you have to be seen.

We’ve got two hot solutions for time saving here. The first is from your CRM and should be pretty automated. Your listing details are matched with buyer profiles, and a templated email with all the property details is automatically sent to all the matched buyers. Within minutes of listing, you could have calls to book inspections.

The second time saving solution is digital advertising. Digital ads can put your latest listing, ‘Just solds’, agency bios – whatever you want – in front of 79% of your core area when they’re active and engaged online.

Designing, creating and placing ads on Facebook, Instagram and the Google Network can be technical, time consuming and include a lot of hair pulling if you are new to it. But, with a tool like Spoke that automates the set-up launching a digital campaign takes less than five minutes – leaving your agents more time to focus on enquiries.

Minimum time saved: 2 hours and 30 minutes a listing.

Automate the time-consuming repetitive tasks

Listing and selling property is a process, one repeated thousands of times a day all over the country, and where any mistake or missed opportunity could be seeing your agency missing out on thousands of pounds in revenue each week.

Embracing automation within your current CRM or using specialist automation tools like Zapier or Tray.io will deliver time savings within hours of implementation.

From auto-sending an email with specific property details to incoming buyer leads, to auto-confirming viewings PropTech is arming agencies with tools to put the repetitive but vital tasks on auto-pilot.

Minimum time saved: we’ll bet on the low side and just stick with 30 mins a day.

That all stacks up to a staggering six hours and 30 minutes per agent, every week.

It’s about working smarter, not harder. Tech tools like Rex Software can take over a lot of the heavy lifting, leaving your agents with more time to spend generating rapport and selling properties.

*Mark Hinkins is a Sales Consultant at Rexlabs, which creates software-driven solutions to help estate agents and agencies canvass, list and sell more efficiently. Rex is its estate agent software and automation platform, and Spoke is its smart digital marketing tool.