Real estate investors spend a lot of time on the phone. No doubt about it. To be successful you have to be able to offer service to our customers 24/7. After all, you never know when a motivated seller will call with a killer deal. One thing’s for sure:
If you’re not available, your competition will be.
But let’s face it – we are in this business to have freedom. We don’t want to be a slave to our phones all the time. Hiring others to field phone calls can get expensive. If you don’t want to hire a local person, overseas VA’s can be unreliable and have accents that might turn off your customers.
That’s where technology comes in.
Large businesses have been using answering services, phone trees and other phone tech to route calls and capture customers for a long time. Now it’s the small entrepreneur’s turn.
We’ve found three websites that can make a small operation sound like a big, professional business. No longer do you have to worry about your kid answering the phone when someone from your buyer’s list calls.
Freedom Voice
The first service we found was Freedom Voice. For as low as $9.95 per month, you can have your own 800 (or 855, 866 etc.) number to use in your business. You can also order a vanity number (800-REMogul?) or a local number to make it look like you are a hometown guy even though you are far away.
Freedom Voice also offers that chance for you to create a professional sounding voicemail and can even provide an actor to record the message for you. You can specify if you want a male, female, Spanish or other actor for the message.
For additional charges ($10/month) you have the ability to put the callers into a call queue and leave them on hold. For $69/month, you can have Freedom Voice record your calls (‘For Training Purposes Only,’ right?).
If you are happy with your current number and would like to use it for your business, you can port your number over to Freedom Voice. That way, you can take advantage of all the services of Freedom Voice without having to let all your business contacts know that your number has changed.
Another nice service offered by Freedom Voice (and the other two services as well) is the ability to send and receive faxes through the internet. The faxes will go to your email or will show up in someone else’s fax machine if you send it. Pretty cool.
Vumber
Vumber’s strength is the ability to organize your calls, put them in a spreadsheet format, and allow you to export them as a CSV file.
From the spreadsheet, you can
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Filter your calls.
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Block certain phone numbers.
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Send numbers to an ‘Out of Service’ number.
If you want to stop getting unsolicited calls from an angry competitor who is mad that you found the deal faster than them, Vumber may be the service for you.
Like Freedom Voice, Vumber can give you toll free and local numbers. To use Vumber, all you do is call your Vumber phone number and then dial the number you want to call. The Vumber phone number will show up in the person’s caller ID. You can also set up speed dial numbers so you just hit a single digit and it will call your best wholesaler buyer right away.
Vumber has three pricing plans. They mostly vary by the number of phone lines you would like and how many minutes you will need.
Grasshopper
We’re not sure if this service was inspired by the old ‘Kung Fu’ TV show, but it offers several useful services.
As with the other two services, Grasshopper offers all sorts of toll free and local numbers.
Grasshopper has a lot of options for voicemail and answering services. When someone calls in, you can set up a phone tree for them (“Press 1 for Donald Trump, Press 2 for Preston Ely, etc.”) to make it sound like you have a large staff working for you. The whole phone tree could route to your cell phone, but you can have options to go to ‘seller’s’ or ‘buyer’s’ or ‘contractors’ or whoever.
The phone tree could also provide feedback on which marketing campaign works best for you. You could have option 1 be direct mail, option 2 be bandit signs etc. Then just put the right option on each piece of marketing material and see what works best.
Grasshopper provides voicemail transcription for free, and it also has a way to have the caller identify themselves before you answer the phone.
Bottom line:
Whichever service you use, having some kind of answering service beats the pants off the old fashioned answering machine – especially as your business grows.
Tell Us What You Think
Have you tried these services? Do you have another service that you use? We wanna hear from you in the comments section below.
Make Your Business More Professional – No matter how small you are, you can still make yourself look like you are the big man on campus. Fake it til you make it.
Investigate a Phone Service – Phone calls can really disrupt whatever you are doing. Why not get rid of those distractions by looking into a good phone service?
Call Your Phone Service – If you already have a phone service, have you pretended to be a business contact and tried it out yourself? After you think you have everything perfect, call the number and make sure you hear what you want your contacts to hear.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.