At Call Porter LLC, we offer call answering service for real estate investors who are trying to grow their business without working inside their business.
To accomplish that goal, we’ve hired and trained a top-tier team of U.S. based representatives to answer inbound lead phone calls for real estate investors like yourself. More specifically, each person on our team is trained to talk to and convert motivated sellers — the inspiration for our sales scripts and training comes from How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (a fantastic book, by the way).
You drive the leads (through whatever marketing channels you prefer) and we answer, qualify, and screen those leads, scheduling a follow-up call with the prospects that are most motivated to sell.
That’s our niche. We’re good at it. And we focus our efforts on always getting better at providing quality service for our customers — for investors who need competent and affordable salespeople answering the phone for them.
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But that’s us — that’s our business and our commitment.
A quick Google search will show you just how many real estate answering services there are to choose from.
That’s a lot of results.And making a decision as to which one is right for your business can be a real challenge. If you’re looking for a simple answering service that’s built to talk with motivated sellers and convert inbound leads at a high rate (saving you time and making you money), then Call Porter might be a great a fit for your business.
But we’re under no illusions. For some real estate professionals, Call Porter isn’t a fit.
If you’re needing an answering service to talk to buyers or answer clerical phone calls or you’re a real estate agent, for instance, then you’ll want an entirely different service.
Point is, it doesn’t take long to get lost trying to find the right live answering service for your business.
Which is why we put together this article — to help you vet and choose the right service for your current needs so you don’t waste time and money making the wrong decision.
Here are 8 things you should consider before committing your budget to a real estate answering service.
1. Cost of service
Most high-quality live real estate answering services aren’t cheap. Affordable hopefully, but not cheap. Since the business model requires well-trained, on-site representatives to answer inbound phone calls, the overhead is high and so too is the cost.
In fact, if the cost isn’t somewhat steep, then be wary — there’s a good chance that the company is outsourcing their call answering service to inexperienced or outright untrained reps who might not even be located within the U.S.
For some businesses, that might not be a problem. But in real estate where trust comes at a premium, anything less than expert sales representatives won’t suffice.
You’ll get what you pay for, so ensure you’re paying enough to get high-quality service.
Additionally, I recommend choosing a service that scales with your business. This means you’ll never be paying more than you can afford and it also means that the real estate answering service provider will be more motivated to help grow your business — the more you grow, the more they grow. It creates a mutually beneficial relationship.
This is what a typical pricing model looks like that scales as your business grows. This is the type of pricing model you’re looking for.You can explore our Call Porter pricing model over here, which does indeed scale with your business.
2. Speed of response
Before choosing a real estate answering service to work with, make sure that they are fast when responding to phone calls. In fact, how quickly the call center’s reps respond can make or break your business.
Consider, for instance, that the odds of contacting a lead decrease 100x if that lead is contacted in 30 minutes rather than 5 minutes. Similarly, the chance of qualifying that lead decreases 21 times.
Here’s a visual representation of that data.
But how do you know how quickly the real estate answering service will answer your inbound phone calls (or if they’ll answer them at all)?
Try giving them a call during their open hours to see how quickly they answer the phone and how attentive they are to your needs. If they don’t serve you well, then there’s a 0% chance that they’re going to serve your prospects well.
Chatting with the company for a bit and asking some questions will tell you a ton about the service they provide and how quickly they answer your inbound phone calls.
Which is why, at Call Porter, we take pick-up rates and answer times so seriously: our average answer time is just 12 seconds and we answer 99.93% of all calls live (meaning they don’t go to voicemail).
3. Included “features”
Most established real estate answering services won’t just answer you’re inbound phone calls, they’ll help automate the entire process for you. They might offer text message notifications or follow-up services as well.
To choose the best bang for your buck, you’ll want to know about the extra “features” the company offers.
At Call Porter, you can find out more about how our process works and what other features we offer over on our FAQ page or (better yet) by signing up for our demo (it’s free).
4. Reputability
Perhaps more important than anything we’ve discussed so far is the general reputability of the real estate call service you choose to work with. While newly established companies will often be less pricey, there’s a risk involved in choosing to work with them. Namely, few other people have worked with them, meaning you don’t know whether they’re trustworthy or not — there’s no way to tell.
And trust me, if the company has credibility identifiers (testimonials, case studies, etc), they’ll wave them around to benefit their marketing efforts. Which means if you can’t find any credibility builders on the company’s website, be careful. You’ve either found a brand new company or one that isn’t getting its members authentic results.
Call Porter grew by a whopping 450% in 2018 and we’re now answering thousands of phone calls for hundreds of investors around the nation every single month.
And to ease our own prospect’s minds, we have a page full of customer testimonials over here. Our home page even has a recorded conversation that one of our Call Porter reps had with a member’s prospect and turned into a $36,000 deal — you can go listen to it if you’d like.
5. Expertise of representatives
When you hire a real estate call answering service to talk with your inbound leads, that service will only be as profitable or as effective as the representatives who are actually answering the phone.
If those reps don’t know what they’re talking about, if they’re inexperienced, or if they’re outright unfriendly, that will directly impact your business’ reputation.
People talk. And the last thing you want to do is hurt the reputation of your real estate business in the market’s that you operate in. For that reason, try to ensure that the call service you decide to work with hires and trains reps that will maintain your business’ healthy reputation.
At Call Porter, for instance, all of our sales reps are based out of the U.S. and professionally trained with our battle-tested sales curriculum.
Don’t settle for anything less.
6. Specific niche
The answering service that you choose to work with should have a niche. That is, they shouldn’t be generalists.
In your case, that niche should be real estate. Even better, for real estate investors. And better yet, for real estate investors and trained to talk to motivated prospects (or exactly whatever the service is that you’re looking for).
The more specific the niche, the better quality service the company will provide for your business.
That’s why, at Call Porter, we focus exclusively on answering inbound lead phone calls and converting motivated sellers into qualified leads. That niche makes us excellent at what we do rather than being generalists and mediocre at everything we do.
Be wary, though.
A quick niche-specific Google search clutters the page with generalist answering services.
Avoid these general call centers and choose an answering service that will fulfill your specific needs with the expertise that leads expect from your real estate business.
7. The company’s process
It’s important to understand how the answering service you choose works.
Not just how you sign up, but what exactly happens after you sign up for the real estate answering service? How long does it take for them to start answering your phone calls? Once they do, is there anything you need to be doing to maintain service with them?
These are all questions that can either be answered on the company’s website and/or by calling the answering service and talking to a sales rep.
You can find the Call Porter process over here.
Basically, it consists of 3 dead-simple steps that’ll have us answering and converting your inbound leads in under 48 hours.
- You’ll receive a custom phone number.
- You’ll add this number to your marketing materials.
- Call Porter then handles all of those calls so you never again miss a deal.
Each answering service will have a slightly different process for answering your inbound phone calls. Just make sure that you understand what that process is before making a final decision.
8. The representative’s sales training
Each real estate call answering service will tell you that their sales reps are “well-trained.” Some of those companies are being honest and others are not — the trick is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
How do you know which companies actually have well-trained reps?
The best way to find out is to call the company and ask about the kind of training process their call answering representatives go through. Again, one of the worst things for your business’ reputation is to hire a call answering service with poorly trained reps backing it.
Poorly trained reps won’t just convert less leads, they’ll also make your business look bad in the markets where you operate. For that reason, ensure you’ve chosen a call answering service which puts its representatives through a rigorous and niche-specific training curriculum.
This applies to your real estate business as much as any other business.Finding the right real estate answering service for your business…
You want to find and hire a call answering service for your real estate investing business.
You want more freedom to polish business processes, pull more leads, and grow your business. But, of course, you can’t much do that when you’re busy answering the phone all the time.
But finding the right service to work with is easier said than done.
Not only do you need to choose a service that fulfills your specific needs (inbound lead call answering VS. clerical phone answering, for instance), but you also need to choose a service that’s reputable — one that knows what it’s doing and has a series of customer testimonials and case studies backing it.
How do you choose?
Well, the above 8 considerations are a great place to start.
And when you’re in doubt, give the company a phone call and talk with them about their service — few things will give you as much clarity about their company as talking to them on the phone.
If you’re interested in working with Call Porter, then you can give our sales team a call over here. And if you’d prefer to give our service a test run and see it for yourself, you can schedule a free demo with us.
Either way, we wish you the best in finding a real estate answering service that works for your business. If you have any additional questions, feel free to leave a comment or give us a call. We’d love to talk with you. 🙂