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Technology promised to make everyone’s life easier, but until the wide world of integrations opened up—allowing different technology tools to communicate smoothly with each other—the effects were arguably hit-or-miss. But now we’re living in an era where you can integrate Venmo with your bank account without having to think very hard about it—or use your email and your social media login information for just about any account you could imagine.
Integrations have become so common that many vendors will build custom ones for you if the list of existing integrations doesn’t quite fit what you want to do.
But you can’t take advantage of tools you’ve never seen! From the most basic integrations available in real estate to sophisticated new opportunities you probably didn’t know existed, we’ve curated a list so you can get a sense for what’s out there. (And of course, if you need any help navigating the available integrations as a Placester customer, our support team can help guide you through the steps!)
IDX
Internet data exchange, or IDX, is the real estate shorthand for “the ability to display homes actively for sale on your platform.” It’s a data feed from the MLS to your website, which gives buyers (and aspiring sellers) the chance to see what homes are listed for in a specific market or neighborhood.
This is probably the most basic real estate website integration, but it can also be a moderately painful one if you’re working with a website platform that isn’t real estate-specific. You may have to install specific widgets to give you the ability to show those listings on your website, and any native widgets offered by your site provider might be clunky and hard to navigate.
Before you sign up with a website provider, ask about the vendor’s IDX integration options. The most basic real estate website integration shouldn’t be the most complicated for you to manage, after all!
Check out also: The Agent’s Guide to Selecting a Real Estate Website Domain Name
CRM integrations
For most agents, their CRM is the most important weapon in their arsenal to stay top-of-mind with their sphere and capture as much repeat and referral business as they possibly can.
Integrating your CRM with your website can help you automate ongoing tasks like creating new leads in the CRM for any new website leads, form submissions, account sign-ups, or pop-up submissions; you can also assign tags and add comments to CRM contacts based on website input.
Calendar integrations
A calendar integration gives you more control over your schedule while also increasing your flexibility and availability to your clients.
Digital calendars are a huge blessing to all of mankind in many ways, but especially to real estate agents; if you’re using a popular one like Google Calendar, then you can probably immediately integrate your website and your calendar so that events are created and canceled based on different triggers you’ve set up with your website. You can even set up a push notification within your calendar to let you know when someone has asked for a meeting via your website or one of its integrations.
And if you’re already using a digital calendar to manage your time, then you can also use a tool like Calendly to provide a way for website visitors to book time with you without overlapping with any of your existing commitments; advanced features will allow you to get super-specific with the types of appointments and amount of time needed for those meetings.
Project management
Are you using an app like Trello or Monday.com to handle any tasks that need to be taken around leads or transactions, to help keep everyone involved in the loop? Integrations with your website can create new cards or boards, archive items, and handle other tedious tasks that would otherwise require spending time to reconcile data sets.
Zapier can also help you integrate your website with platforms like HelpDesk, which give you a little bit more leeway in terms of customer support and guidance, by creating new tickets, adding people to existing tickets, and any number of other customer service-driven options.
Marketing automation
Email newsletters, drip campaigns, and other strategies can be amazing ways to keep tabs on the people in your network and deliver valuable, timely information to them. Integrations between your website and your preferred marketing automation or email marketing channel can help add new contacts to your lists; integrations can also alert you when certain linked are clicked or pages are visited from an opened email, or when someone unsubscribes from (or subscribes to) a specific newsletter.
Team communication tools
How did workplaces even operate without Slack? (Well, there were probably a lot more conversations happening out-loud, but that’s neither here nor there.) This “chat tool” is a lot more powerful than that description would indicate. You can create specific channels for different transactions or clients and add team members to those channels, create high-priority alert systems that will ping everyone who needs to be updated about a status change, upload and share files, and much more.
Integrating Slack with your website can automate many of these tasks, such as create specific groups when an action takes place, or alerting your team if there’s a high-priority query that’s just been submitted.
No doubt you’re using email to communicate with support staff, clients, vendors, fellow agents, and others who are doing business with you; it’s hard to imagine working without email in this day and age.
If you’re using Gmail, then you can probably already integrate it with your website to send a “welcome” email to anybody who fills out a form or asks to schedule an appointment, but there are also advanced options available that can give you the ability to automate email labels, replies, attachments, and more based on different website triggers.
Phone and SMS
Do you already use phone and SMS tools like Twilio or RingCentral? Website integrations can send SMS messages, book video calls, and even send faxes based on different triggers; you can create triggers around call recordings and voicemails, too.
Social media accounts
Not every real estate agent is a social media power user, but those who are probably can’t get enough of the ability to connect and engage (and do business) with people from a simple phone screen. Wrapping your website into your social media strategy can give you the opportunity to create alerts for search terms and search mentions (including some pretty cool geo location options), add users to specific lists, find information about those users, or even give you a heads-up when someone else whose account you’re monitoring acquires a new follower.
Facebook offers some cool integration potential with Pages; you can set triggers to display new recommendations and reviews in the appropriate place (or alert you so you can review them), and can also help automate and streamline posts to your page, just to name two quick examples.
Customize it!
Perhaps there’s a tool (or type of tool) that you don’t recognize on this list, or you’re unsure whether your current website platform would support an integration that you envision could make your life significantly easier. The beauty of integrations is that you can create custom communications between two apps or tools that mean the world to your business.
A good website vendor will likely have already heard a request just like yours, or something very similar. Reach out to your customer support representative, or head over to their online support area, and see what’s available integration-wise—and whether the thing you’re dreaming of is already available in some form. If it’s not, then you can likely ask whether a Zapier-supported or another type of custom integration could be added to your list of features.
