With 24 years of experience in the real estate industry, Valerie Timms has seen a lot of changes during her career. “I remember the first time a buyer sent me a text message on my Nokia phone, wanting to enquire about a property. And I thought to myself, is SMS the way forward? Surely not,” she laughs.
Valerie is the first to admit she was wrong about that one. And she’s also one of the first to embrace new technologies as they come along.
Currently a Sales Manager at Ouwens Casserly Real Estate (OCRE) in Adelaide, Valerie deals with a wide range of clients — investors, buyers’ agents, upsizers, downsizers, first home buyers, and more. But one thing unites them. “These days, they all expect us to use the latest real estate technology and give them the ability to access property information, 24/7,” she says.
It’s why Valerie has embraced Realtair. Here, she shares three ways she uses Realtair to transform how she connects with vendors and buyers.
With the market at an all-time high, there are more offers on every property than ever. And if these offers are being made in various ways — via a printed form, an SMS, or a website, for example — it can be hard to keep track of it all.
“As an agent, collating all those methods of offer can be tricky. What I love about the Realtair platform is the ability to generate a QR code for each property, which directs all buyers to the same place to make an offer,” says Valerie. “It makes it so much easier for us to control.”
Valerie and her team promote the QR code at open inspections, to make it easy for prospective buyers to scan and go directly to the offer page. They use a similar process for handling pre-registrations at auctions.
“There’s nothing worse than turning up to an auction with no real idea of who’s going to bid. So getting pre-registrations is just the thing that we want to be doing. We say to the buyers, ‘You’re going to be a bit nervous on the day. Register beforehand so we can then just simply give you your bidding paddle on the day. It’s really speeding up the process and helping us gain a good understanding of how the auction’s going.”
Valerie and the team at OCRE use several tech platforms to communicate with buyers and sellers. There are FaceTime walkthroughs, chats over Messenger, email, a CRM — the list goes on.
Yet she says that Realtair is proving a winner when it comes to communicating with vendors. “The idea of being able to book an appraisal right after hanging up the phone, or to be able to send a Digital Introduction out to a prospective vendor in just a few clicks — this immediacy is gold,” says Valerie.
“After all, who has the time, or a spare assistant in the office, to jump in the car with a pre-listing kit and drop it off? Realtair gives us the ability to do all this digitally, and it works for both us and our clients.”
It’s also proving incredibly valuable for market appraisals. In the past, Valerie would post printed market updates every few months. Now, with Realtair, she can send a Price Update out to a new client straight after speaking to them — and then automate the process of resending Price Updates every few months.
“Now, all our clients automatically receive Price Updates and the time it has saved our team is immense,” she says. “It frees up our agents to communicate more often with their vendors and have higher-level conversations. And it also means more time to spend with their own families instead of working 14 hours a day.”
The ability to prepare a polished, professional proposal in just a few clicks — while sitting in the car straight after a meeting — is one of Valerie’s favourite features of Realtair.
“As agents, we all love to visit a vendor in their home and list it then and there, on the spot. Having the market proposal from Realtair pre-prepared is really helpful here — we can run through the proposal on an iPad, and it’s an exceptional way of presenting to a client,” says Valerie.
“But of course, we don’t always win the business right then and there. With Realtair, I can literally sit in the car after an appraisal and finish the proposal within minutes, adding fees, marketing and the method of sale that we discussed in the meeting. I can then send them an SMS link to the finished product. That’s gold.”
For Valerie Timms, Realtair isn’t just a software platform. It’s a tool that reshaped how she does business.
“I get an alert every time someone opens a Digital Introduction, a market proposal, or a contract on a property they need to sign. This alert gives me immediacy — I know I can just put in a call and say, ‘Hey, how are you going with that?’ It’s such a help when you’re on the road, meaning you can stay completely connected to what’s going on,” she says.
“With Realtair, you don’t need to be tied to your desk at the office. You could be on a beach in Hawaii if you wanted to be and still running your business.”
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