Under the Sells-Scope: Spacio

You’re probably aware that some of your brokerage’s listings need foot traffic, and some of your agents need to learn how to show properties. So you do the natural thing and pair newbies with seasoned agents to host open houses.

But how well are you able to track the ins and outs of those open houses? Sales agents sometimes forget to follow up with visitors, or they may misplace the open house sign-in sheet (or it’s “accidentally” used as a drawing sheet for a rambunctious child at the open house).

This is where an app like Spacio can help. As a newcomer to the real estate app world, I took Spacio under the “sells-scope” to learn its benefits and drawbacks. This is my unbiased, unpaid impression.

Spacio deals a powerful blow to some of the problems related to open houses. I see it as akin to Open Home Pro for managing brokers and team leaders. Spacio makes real-time tracking of an entire team or brokerage’s open house foot traffic and leads accessible to its managers.

Can Spacio help your office, team, or agents work smarter to nurture open house leads, or will they end up working harder? See the breakdown below, and you be the judge:

Features That Help You Work Smarter

• A visitor sign-in screen you can brand.
• Unlimited agent reporting per office.
• Real-time reporting, which includes:
• Revealing which listings get the most foot traffic.
• Total number of open houses held per agent, team, office, and so on.
• Which agents did and did not host open houses.
• How many agent hours were spent at open houses.
• The number of leads and lead quality (how many left contact info, who was unrepresented, who was prequalified).
• Sorting options displaying the number of listings, agents, and locations of your firm.

Features That May Cause You to Work Harder

• Reports do not maintain firm branding. (I don’t want to "jimmy" my logo onto the report.)
• Reports don’t track e-mails sent, opened, responses, and unsubscribe rates, so you have to rely on outside e-mail marketing tools.

For Sales Agents

Features That Help You Work Smarter

• The iPad app works offline if the Internet connection is spotty at the open house.
• Automated, customizable follow-up e-mails can be sent with the listing details.
• Up to six custom or stock questions (such as “Are you working with an agent?”) can be added to help you flesh out your leads.
• Preregister visitors with a custom link to your marketing materials.
• Send e-mails to registrants before, during, and after the open house.
• Autopopulate MLS data, reducing or eliminating data entry, in locations where the MLS permits this.
• Download sign-in data to a CSV file, which may easily be uploaded to your CRM.
• Autosync lead information to BoomTown, Contactually, Market Snapshot, or Top Producer.
• Use an intuitive reporting dashboard that lets you see which visitors are leads (without agents), where they are in the financing phase, and which listings generated the most traffic on particular days.
• Develop PDF reports for keeping sellers in the loop.
• Showcase your testimonials on the visitor sign-in screen to help convert unrepresented open-house visitors into clients.

Features That May Cause You to Work Harder

• No e-mail validation. The system won’t reject fake addresses such as MickeyMouse@Nowhere.com. (I’d love to see the same validation feature that MailChimp and others use.)
• Your MLS may not have a relationship yet with Spacio; if not, you will need to enter data.
• It does not yet sync with Zapier or other automation apps so that contact details can be imported automatically to other contact managers.
• You may use a different CRM, so you will need to configure and manually upload the CSV file after each open house.
• There’s no Android app yet.
• The seller PDF reports do not include the company branding, and they’re not automatically sent to sellers.

For Open House Visitors

Features That Help You Work Smarter

• Visually impressive, clean design with real estate company branding.
• Private e-mail sign-up option where visitors may be assigned a Spacio e-mail for privacy; this may relax the fear of giving a perceived “sales predator” their direct e-mail address while maintaining a way of communication.
• Simplified Chinese translations available for each field on the sign-in screen.
• They can read your agents’ testimonials to help them feel safer in giving their contact information.

Features That May Cause You to Work Harder

• No additional language support. (I would love to see Spanish and other common languages.)

As you can see, Spacio may just be that helpful open-house tool that teams and firms have been looking for. And since Spacio is still in its first year of development, I anticipate that some of the “work harder” points (which I noted in my February 2016 trail of the app) will eventually be addressed.

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