As a realtor, you most likely are familiar with the difficulty of managing lead information. Every day, you receive and process countless emails from leads inquiring about properties for sale or rent.
So it’s not uncommon to find yourself buried under countless email alerts and listing notifications. But an inability to capture incoming lead data swiftly means you are missing opportunities. Thankfully, automation can help you solve this issue. In this post, you will learn how to automate real estate lead management by extracting data from emails and moving it to Excel, Google Sheets, or your CRM.
Automate Real Estate Lead Management
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Data Entry Is a Huge Hurdle for Real Estate Professionals
Real estate professionals have a lot on their plate, with a multitude of tasks they need to perform daily:
- Following up with leads
- Meeting with sellers and buyers
- Making and answering phone calls
- Marketing
- Networking
- Taking care of paperwork
On top of that, many brokers are struggling to keep up with the constant flow of inquiries and contact form submissions, most of which are sent via email:
- Forms filled out by website visitors
- Emails routed from listing and third-party websites
- Emails from peers
Much of the listing and lead data is trapped within emails, meaning you have to move it to your system to get the most value out of the data. Doing this manually is often excruciating because you have to open every single email, examine the information within, and copy it to Excel or a CRM. This eats up a significant portion of your workday, leaving you stressing over unfinished tasks. And yet, these emails contain vital lead data, so you need to act on it fast to increase your chances of converting leads into customers.
In the Real Estate Industry, Knowledge Is Power
They say knowing is half the battle, and that certainly applies to the real estate industry. As a broker, you need to stay on top of market trends. Even more important is to know what’s happening in your area to gain an edge over the competition. This includes information on supply and demand, demographics, availability of certain property types, etc. The best way to gather a reliable source of information on the local market is to build a database of leads and listings.
Building this database is vital to the long-term success of your real estate business. The more data you have, the better you will be able to match the right clients with the right deals at the right time. This, in turn, will yield more referrals and a stellar reputation.
Thanks to the proliferation of real estate listing platforms, from Zillow to Realtor and Trulia to mention a few, you can reach a large number of potential leads. However, this means you will receive countless inquiries from different sources which makes lead management a time-consuming and overwhelming process. The good news is that you can take advantage of automation to remove this hurdle and focus on converting leads to clients.
Real Estate Lead Automation Helps You Free Up Time to Grow Your Business
Automation tools help real estate professionals run their businesses more efficiently. By removing the much tedious data entry out of the picture, you will free up the time to focus on the work that truly moves the needle for your business – building relationships, following up with hot leads, and closing deals.
In addition, you will find more time to perform other tasks such as conducting property tours, networking with potential leads and real estate professionals, marketing your business online, researching the state of the market, etc.
But there are even more benefits to automating lead data entry.
The Benefits of Automating Real Estate Lead Management
1. Respond to leads faster
Manual data entry will hinder the growth of your business because you won’t be able to keep up with the increasing flow of lead data let alone act on it. And if you can’t respond quickly to inquiries, your potential customers will turn to other realtors.
Automatic data extraction reduces the time needed for processing emails from hours to minutes and gives you accurate, structured data. This, in turn, allows you to quickly respond to leads, giving you an advantage over your competitors. For example, this data can be dumped into your CRM system and used to create follow-up tasks for yourself. Or you can automatically trigger an email response to engage the lead immediately.
2. Avoid human error
The repetitiveness of manual data entry causes concentration to eventually drop, so whoever is typing or copying data will make a mistake at some point like misspelling a name, entering an incorrect number, writing to the wrong address, etc.
These mistakes can lead to poor decisions, missed opportunities, and even a damaged reputation in case they directly affect a client. An automated data entry solution, on the other hand, eliminates the risk of human error – provided you set it up correctly.
3. Get listing data into your database faster
Your database is essential because it lets you keep track of contact information as well as other data like dates, days on market, prices, property features, etc. So the faster you can build it, the better you will be able to meet your clients’ current needs. Automating data extraction is the most efficient way to achieve this.
Additionally, as your database keeps growing, you can promote your services to a larger pool of potential clients via channels such as email marketing.
4. Spend more time selling and less time entering data
As we explained above, perhaps the biggest advantage of automated data entry is that you save a lot of time which you can spend converting your leads and closing more deals. When your agents have quick access to accurate data, they can easily find the best seller, buyer, or renter for any property.
How Mailparser Can Help You Automate Real Estate Lead Management
Mailparser is an email parsing tool built to automatically extract data trapped within emails, including the subject line, body, and attachments like PDF or Excel files.
By using Mailparser, you will be able to automate the data entry process, centralize all lead data into your CRM, and streamline your business. You can set up Mailparser to automatically extract data from:
- Listing emails
- Lead emails
- Website form emails
Mailparser can directly receive the emails sent to you via listing websites such as:
Once emails come in, you can quickly and accurately extract listing and lead data like:
- First name
- Last name
- Phone number
- Email address
- Availability
- Message
- Tour schedule
- Property information
- Property address
- City
- Etc.
Moreover, after you integrate this data into your database, you can gradually add more information as you get to know your leads, like the source of the lead, personal details, transaction history, lead status, etc.
By putting the data into your CRM or email system (Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc.), you can send automated emails out to anyone in order to engage them right away. They can be added to your newsletter list automatically. Tasks can be created and assigned to you or your assistant for follow-up.
Extract Real Estate Leads from Emails
No credit card required.
How to Extract Real Estate Lead Data from Emails with Mailparser
Let’s take the example of an email sent through the contact form of a real estate brokerage’s website. Here is what you need to do to extract your lead data from emails:
Step 1: Sign up for a free Mailparser account
Firstly, sign up for a Mailparser account here. This is free and you don’t need to enter credit card information.
Step 2: Create a Mailparser inbox
After creating your account, create an inbox and give it a name. This is where emails will go. Mailparser will generate a unique address for your mailbox so you can send your lead data there or set up your email provider to forward them.
Note that you can create a separate inbox for each listing website you use as well as your company’s website.
Step 3: Forward an email to your Mailparser inbox
Pick one email that you received from a listing website and forward it to your Mailparser inbox address.
Pro tip: you can set up your email provider to automatically forward emails to Mailparser. That way, you won’t have to regularly send email batches yourself.
Go to your Mailparser inbox and click on ‘Emails’ in the left-hand side panel. You will find the email you’ve just forwarded; click on it. You’ll see that no data has been extracted yet – that is because parsing rules are yet to be set up. Simply put, parsing rules are the instructions Mailparser follows to identify and extract real estate lead data from emails.
If you click on the tab ‘Original Email’, you can visualize the email’s contents.
Step 4: Set automatic parsing rules
Mailparser can extract data from emails on its own using automatic parsing rules. You just need to choose a setup that fits your emails. To do this, go to ‘Rules’ on the left-hand side panel then click on the ‘Try Automatic Setup’ button.
For this example, we are going to select the email titled “Message #439” from the dropdown list on the left then click on ‘Website Contact Form Email’ from the dropdown list on the right.
You will probably notice that Mailparser has pre-built setups for several real estate lead providers such as Realtor, Move, Trulia, and more. Each of these setups is designed according to the presentation and information typically contained in emails sent from the corresponding real estate lead provider.
Mailparser will show you the result of the data extraction. As you can see, all the information in the email has been extracted with complete accuracy.
After that, click on the orange ‘OK, start with this!’ button below and Mailparser will work its magic. It will create 11 parsing rules with the automatic setup, each corresponding to a data field. If you go back to ‘Emails’ and click on the email, you will find that the parsed data is displayed on the first tab.
Step 5 (optional): Add custom parsing rules
In case not all the data you need has been extracted, you can create a few custom parsing rules so that Mailparser can recognize and extract the remaining data. Doing this requires no coding skills – you just add filters that tell Mailparser how to locate the data you want.
To learn how to do this, follow this guide.
Step 6: Download your lead data or export it to your preferred cloud app
Now that the lead data has been successfully extracted from the email, you have a choice between downloading it to an Excel file, or exporting it directly to a CRM that caters to real estate professionals like Contactually, LionDesk, or BoomTown.
Directly download your lead data
To download your parsed lead data, go to ‘Downloads’ and click on ‘Create First Download Link’. From there, choose your preferred file format: XLS, CSV, JSON, or XML. Enter a name for your file and click on the download link generated by Mailparser to download your real estate lead data.
Remember that you can parse as many emails as you want, provided the data within is structured the same way. Mailparser will extract all the lead data into one clean file, effectively cutting down what would take hours to just a couple of minutes.
Export your lead data to a cloud app
Alternatively, you can export your lead data to a cloud application like Google Sheets or a CRM. Mailparser allows for integration with thousands of other cloud-based systems, either via a webhook – a tool that sends your parsed data to a specific URL on the web – or using integration platforms like Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate (Formerly Microsoft Flow). Webhooks allow you to send your data to virtually any application connected to the internet. Go to ‘Integrations’ and click on ‘Add New Integration’. You will find an array of integration options like Salesforce or Microsoft Power Automate. Choose one of these cloud apps if you already use it, or click on ‘Generic Webhook’.
From there, type a name for your webhook and enter the target URL then click on ‘Save & Test’.
And that’s how you extract real estate lead data from email Mailparser! Setting up the parsing rules is a straightforward process that doesn’t require any technical knowledge. Plus, you can always contact our support team if you need help.
Automate Real Estate Lead Management – FAQ
Can I extract lead data from Excel files?
Yes, Mailparser can parse data from email attachments, including Excel files. This blog post will show you exactly how to do it.
Can I extract other types of data?
Absolutely, you can use Mailparser to extract not only lead data but any other kind of data trapped within emails like customer support tickets to invoices to purchase orders and more.
Capture Lead Data with Mailparser and Close More Deals Faster
Using Mailparser eliminates the need to enter real estate lead data manually, which takes a lot of time and causes human errors. By automating the real estate lead management process, you will no longer find yourself drowning in email alerts and notifications. Instead, you will use the time and effort to respond to leads, convert them into clients, find the best deals for their needs, and ultimately make more money.
The adage “time is money” rings particularly true for real estate professionals. Try Mailparser’s Free Plan to extract real estate lead data from emails and see how much time and effort you can save while growing your real estate business!
Automate Real Estate Lead Management
