Giving Back to Clients as a Real Estate Professional

ESV Reward Chinedu Ugbomor

In every aspect of business, the major reason why businesses exist is to professionally meet the needs of their clients, maximize profit, and remain in business as a going concern. In the real estate profession, and irrespective of the role a firm or an agent plays in the entire value chain, that firm or agency definitely exists to meet the needs of the immediate and future clients in a most professional way.

All over the World and yearly, the first full week in the month of October is recognized as Customer Service Week. The week is set aside to celebrate customers who are the reason why brands are in business. In the real estate space, most professionals have not really taken this advocacy seriously as a way of building their firms and remain in a healthy and profitable relationship with their clients.

Globally, forward thinking brands in the real estate industry have taken the Customer Service Week as a way of giving back to their clients, recognizing the empirical fact that business transactions are not a one off affairs. Every first week of October has been a boom period for the media industry in recent times. Some brands use this important week to celebrate their customers and even prospects in the media, especially the new media space.
As professionals in the real estate industry, the Customer Service Week (CSW) yearly presents a unique opportunity for us to celebrate our arrays of local and diaspora clients. Writing and publishing Customer Service Week notes via the media, email messages, text messages, calls and even special courtesy calls are all part of the unique ways of celebrating our clients. When this is professionally done, such customers are likely to remain with your real estate brand and continuity loyalty around your business. As a real estate firm, the more brand advocacy you build, the more clients you retain and win new prospects, and one of the proven ways to achieve this is giving back to your clients in diverse ways.

Identifying with clients in their moments of celebration and grief as the case may be is another veritable way of giving back to them. In doing this, real estate professionals should ensure that their brand identity is promoted through marketing and public relations tools like media advertisement, sponsoring of souvenirs, branding of the event space among others. As a matter of fact, giving back to clients is one of the unique ways of building real estate brands and businesses generally.
Other ways of giving back to clients include, helping them network, emotionally connecting with them during special events, meeting their needs in a most professional manner, maintaining high ethical standards in business dealings with them.
Offering of corporate gifts, tagging and giving them brand media mentions, special dinner with big ticket customers as well as other relationship building investments are all part of defining, maintaining and giving back to clients. As real estate professionals, the onus is on us to see our clients as the major reason for being in business and give back to them.
ESV Reward Chinedu Ugbomor is a Registered Estate Surveyor and Valuer. He is the Principal Consultant of Reward Ugbomor & Co, a firm of estate Surveyors and Valuers with diverse interest in the real estate market space. He sent in this piece from Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria.