3 Secrets to Collection Success

Location, location, location – the 3 most important things in real estate. Have you heard this? If not, you’ve probably never bought a home. That is the first thing out of a realtor’s mouth. What you really want is a cozy family room, a big kitchen, a large master bedroom with separate walk-in-closets, new carpet, a super theater room, etc. All the realtor wants you to focus on is where the darn house is located and what the relative property values are; and, of course, the highest purchase price you can possibly afford (or not) to increase their commission.

If you could list the 3 secrets of collections success it would be Contacts, Contacts, Contacts.

How can you increase your contacts? How can you get those darn agents to make more calls and talk to more accounts? How can you show more contact attempts to your clients to prove you’re working their accounts hard enough?

Well, you could require your agents to work 15 hours a day. You could eliminate all bathroom, smoking, lunch, and personal cell phone breaks. That would go over really well, wouldn’t it?

You could require your clients to only give you current, accurate phone numbers when they submit their assignments. Like that’s going to happen.

You could hire agents that have no personal life and would love to sleep in the back room and work seven days a week, sun up to sun down, or later. Fat chance!

OR, you could work smarter with IAT dialing technology.

What can a dialer do best? Dial and make contacts! We in the industry often say “just keep it fed, baby” and get enough accounts, phone lines, and agents to reduce any “resource” bottlenecks.

We all know about the increase in productivity of a “predictive dialer,” but have you also heard about

• Message Broadcasting
• Message Delivery
• Automated Payments
• List Scheduling
• Hosted Services
• Manually Dialing from the dialer
• Increased right party contacts
• Account scrubbing for valid phone numbers

A word of caution: Before you go crazy and add all these dialer features into your collection strategies, don’t forget to “plan your work, and work your plan.” Think about each of these options and how they can improve your number of contacts and therefore improve your collections. Then go crazy and add in the right dialing technology for you and see your productivity and profitability soar!

Of course, there is more to real estate than location and there is more to successful collections than contacts, but don’t forget the most important basics of each.