Keeping buyer briefs and matching them by hand
How the Real estate pack keeps buyer briefs beside listings, why no buyer is matched automatically, and how to work the briefs for a new listing.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Real estate businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
A good agent carries a mental list of buyers: the young couple who want three bedrooms near the school, the investor who buys anything under a certain price with a tenant in place, the retired teacher who will only consider a ground-floor unit. When the right listing comes in, the agent picks up the phone before it reaches the portals.
The trouble is that the list lives in one agent's head, or in a notebook, or in a spreadsheet on one laptop. When that agent is on leave, or leaves the agency, the buyers go with them. A buyer brief written down in the agency's own system keeps that knowledge where everyone can use it.
What a buyer brief holds
The Real estate pack in Achekam's Industry CRM add-on is for an estate agency's sales and lettings. It keeps two kinds of record: a Listing, with its viewings and offers, and a Buyer brief.
A listing moves through stages from Appraisal to Mandate signed, On the market, Under offer, With the conveyancer and Registered or let, or is Withdrawn. A buyer brief sits beside those listings as a record of what someone is looking for.
The pack sets the words the screens use, its record types, pipelines and workflows, so the agency works with "listings" and "buyer briefs" rather than generic records. What makes a brief useful, though, is what the agent writes on it. Agree a minimum for every brief:
- the buyer's name and how to reach them;
- the areas they will consider, and any they rule out;
- the type of property and the size they need;
- their price range, and whether finance is approved or still to be arranged;
- must-haves and deal-breakers in the buyer's own words;
- the date of the last conversation.
A brief missing the price range or the areas cannot be filtered usefully. Make those the non-negotiable fields in the agency's own rules.
No automatic matching
The pack does not match buyers to listings automatically. A person filters the buyer briefs. It also keeps no trust account, does no rental management and publishes nothing to property portals.
That may seem like a gap, but there is a sound reason for keeping a person in the loop. Buyers rarely mean exactly what they wrote. The couple who said three bedrooms may happily take two and a study. The investor's price ceiling moves when the yield is right. An automatic match on the words in a brief misses those buyers, and floods agents with poor matches that teach them to ignore the list. An agent who reads the briefs knows which rules bend.
Filtering briefs when a new listing comes on
When a listing reaches the market, or better, when the mandate is signed, an agent works through the briefs. A routine that works:
- Pick out the briefs that name the listing's area, or the neighbouring areas buyers often accept.
- Narrow them by price range, allowing some room either side.
- Read each remaining brief in full, including the deal-breakers.
- Mark the buyers worth calling, in order of how well the listing fits.
- Call them before the listing appears anywhere public, if the seller has agreed to that approach.
Doing this at mandate stage gives the agency's own buyers first sight, which sellers appreciate and which often shortens the time to an offer. How listings move through their stages is covered in the listing pipeline.
Calling buyers and recording the outcome
Each call should leave a trace. In the Industry CRM, tasks can have subtasks up to three levels deep, and a workflow creates its tasks stage by stage. A practical pattern is one task per new listing to "call matching buyers", with a subtask for each buyer chosen, closed with the outcome:
| Outcome | What to record on the brief |
|---|---|
| Interested, wants to view | Viewing booked; update the brief's last-contact date |
| Not interested | The reason, in the buyer's words |
| Brief has changed | Update the brief there and then |
| Already bought elsewhere | Close the brief |
| No answer | Try again; note the attempt |
The reasons buyers give for saying no are the most valuable part. A buyer who turned down three listings because of the road noise has told you something the brief did not say. After viewings, the visitors' feedback goes to the seller; see viewing feedback.
Home-page counts that come from records
The Industry CRM's home page shows counts, and none is typed in by hand. They come from records, tasks or the ledger: open records, records in a stage, pipeline value, overdue tasks, tasks due today, key dates in the next 7 days, won this month and revenue this month.
For buyer briefs, the counts that matter are the ones about follow-up. A growing number of overdue tasks means calls to buyers are not being made. Because the counts are built from the records themselves, they are only as good as the agents' habit of closing tasks and updating briefs, which is a reason to insist on both.
Keeping briefs current
A stale brief is worse than none. It sends agents to buyers who bought months ago and hides the ones still looking. Build a routine:
- review every open brief at least monthly;
- call buyers whose briefs have had no contact for a while, to confirm they are still looking;
- close briefs for buyers who have bought or stopped looking, rather than leaving them open;
- update a brief the moment a buyer's requirements change.
Buyer briefs are personal information, and they should be accurate and kept no longer than needed. In South Africa, the Information Regulator is the POPIA and PAIA regulator, handling information officers' registration, complaints and enforcement; Nigerian and Kenyan agencies answer to their own data protection regulators.
When the agency switches the Industry CRM on, it picks one of twenty industries, and switching to another later keeps every record. An agency choosing Real estate should start its briefs from the list its agents already carry.
Ask each agent this week to write down their five most active buyers as briefs, and use those as the first test of the filtering routine when the next mandate is signed.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
