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The real estate process is long, stretching over weeks or months, and most of the time is spent making and receiving phone calls, visiting properties and conversing with sellers. One point of confusion from a sales person, or a poorly maintained site can cost any serious buyer a deal. That's why real estate mystery shopping is a vital resource for real estate developers and brands looking to get a real, bottom-line answer on how their teams and real estate websites perform with a genuine buyer.
What Is Real Estate Mystery Shopping?
Real estate mystery shopping is a technique where a specialized mystery shopper agency deploys a trained evaluator disguised as an actual prospective home buyer, who calls the sales office to request information about a home, visits the office and/or the property, and follows the same process a real customer would. They put the sales team on the phone, discuss plans and prices, schedule a visit to the floor, and watch the salesperson's whole demeanor – none of which is the salesperson aware of!
The evaluation is anonymous which means it records true behaviour, not what the presenter has practiced for an inspection. If you have multiple projects or cities to sell in, it's a dependable and comparable method for leadership to gain a clear view of what is going on, versus just sales figures or occasional visits on site with senior management.
Why Real Estate Customer Experience Deserves Close Attention
The customer experience of real estate is created by several dozen small moments — the time taken to answer an inquiry call, if the sales executive remembers the previous conversation, if the site visit is organized, or if promises on the phone are fulfilled on site. Unlike a general retail buying, the buyer is highly aware of inconsistencies when making his property decision due to the very high cost and emotional involvement.
The evaluation of a mystery shopper usually takes into account:
- Responsiveness and professionalism in the first inquiry call
- Does the sales executive know the budget and needs of the buyer before pitching?
- Organisation of the site visit and readiness of samples from the flat, the safety measures at the construction site.
- Whether it was a consultative or transactional overall experience.
These touchpoints provide a consistent customer experience that can either make or break if it's strong or weak, and if the experience is strong, the prospect may convert into a serious buyer, or at the very least, he or she will move on to another project without raising any alarm.
The Critical Role of Lead Management
In real estate, a single inquiry can take weeks to close; in fact, lead management is one of the most critical (and often the most poorly managed) components of the real estate sales process. Mystery shopping can be used particularly here to track a lead's whole journey – was the initial enquiry made and followed up in time? Were customers contacted by the sales team but not too aggressively? Was the buyer provided with uniform information on multiple calls, or information altered mysteriously between calls?
Through mystery shopping, a number of common lead management issues are identified, such as:
- Failure to follow-up after the initial enquiry or failure to make a timely follow-up
- If the pricing or offer information is different on each call, it's inconsistent pricing.
- When a lead is passed from one sales executive to another, loss of context.
- Following a site visit, the lack of a clear next step communicated.
However, many real estate leads are not followed up as well as they could be, so improving lead management is one of the most impactful things a mystery shopping program can do, especially if due to poor follow-up, the leads result in the loss of interest.
Measuring Sales Conversion Through Real Interactions
At the end of the day, the goal of all your improvements in the customer experience and lead handling is to convert the leads into sales. This provides real estate brands with a direct way to gauge actual behaviors that influence conversions, as opposed to merely analyzing the number of bookings.
Evaluators determine if the sales executive:
- Established rapport and trust instead of hastening the sale.
- Answered questions or objections regarding the price, location, or possession time confidently
- Set the right level of urgency; avoided the use of pressure tactics.
- Provided a clear explanation of the next steps documentation, booking amount or follow-up visit
Developers can use these behavioral metrics to correlate them with transactions over time, and determine which activities actually help a prospect to convert to a booking, and which ones, no matter how good-intentioned are simply working against them.
Aligning Real Estate Marketing With Ground Reality
When it comes to real estate marketing, it's easy to make promises like luxury amenities, prime location benefits, world-class construction. Mystery shopping is an important tool in assessing whether the sales experience and site visit actually delivers on these promises. An incongruence between what is marketed and what is actually available is not only a loss of a sale, it erodes trust and can quickly become a 'word of mouth' and internet review problem in a market where reputation is important.
Mystery Shoppers will look at whether:
- Amenities and possession dates displayed in marketing material are accurate sales executives do not misrepresent
- The experience of the site visit is as described in the advertisements and lifestyle.
- On-site pricing is consistent with what is advertised online or in brochures.
This consistency is important to the marketing and sales teams to be able to work from the same play book – otherwise the hype created by a campaign is unlikely to be matched by the rest of the site and you risk losing a prospective customer before they have even started to engage.
Turning Mystery Shopping Data Into Real Improvement
The benefit of a real estate mystery shopping program is not just the report, it is the activities that come after it. These findings are used by leading developers to:
- Retrain sales teams on objections identified in the evaluations, such as follow-up discipline, or on identified gaps, such as objection handling
- Try to adopt a standard site visit procedure across projects for a more consistent buyer process
- Compare the results of sales offices or project sites to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
- Clean up marketing messages that don't align with the actual buyer experience
Ideally, mystery shopping should be done on a regular basis every quarter or more often when major project launches, but when the cycle of mystery shopping is on-going, it becomes a feedback loop for real estate brands to continuously narrow the gap between their promises and their products.
Conclusion
With so many projects on offer, buyers are comparison shopping, and they are doing a lot of research prior to booking, the sales and site visit can make or break the deal. Partnering with experienced mystery shopping companies gives developers real, honest feedback on how they respond to inquiries, manage leads, and guide prospects through the sales funnel to closing, and whether the sales promises are fulfilled. Mystery shopping is not simply a monitoring process; it's a competitive edge for any real estate brand dedicated to enhancing the customer experience and converting more leads into sales.
