How to Use Zillow’s Premier Agent App to Close More Deals

Zillow’s Premier Agent App is a free app specifically designed for real estate agents and is different from the general Zillow app for homebuyers. This article will show you how to use the Premier Agent App to close more deals, examining added features like lead nurturing, adding videos to listings and even managing your team’s pipeline.

While the app is free to any agent, signing up for Premier Agent Advertising can unlock the full potential of what Zillow offers. By allowing you to be the exclusive agent promoted on your listings, it increases the likelihood of a full commission, and you have the option to appear as a buyer’s agent on local listings of non-Premier Agents to expand your reach and acquire new clients.

Step 1: Download Zillow’s Premier Agent App & Sign In

The Premier Agent App is available to download for free on both iOS and Android devices. Notice that the Premier Agent App is not the same as the Zillow app offered for the general public to search for homes and is specifically labeled “Premier Agent” with the distinct icon shown below.

To sign into the Premier Agent App, use the same email address and password you are already using to access your agent account on the Zillow website. This is important so that your listings, contacts, and profile sync and so that you can get the most out of the Premier Agent App.

To get maximum benefit from Zillow and close more deals through advertising and the exclusivity it gives you on listings, purchasing Premier Agent Advertising and becoming a Premier Agent is incredibly beneficial. However, becoming a Premier Agent is not necessary to download and use the app, as it’s a very effective real estate CRM at its core.

Step 2: Optimize Lead Management

The Premier Agent App is a one-stop shop that works with all your leads within a single platform. While many agents log into a number of platforms, creating delays and confusion, Zillow’s agent app gives you better management and quicker response times to help you close more deals.

The Premier Agent App allows you to not only work with your leads from Zillow (of course), Trulia, RealEstate.com, and Street Easy (all Zillow Group-owned companies), but also integrates more than 35 of the most popular third-party apps so that you can easily work with leads coming in from almost anywhere. It’s impressive how many integrations are available from Zillow.

If you use services like BoomTown, Kunversion or Zurple, they all integrate into Zillow’s Premier Agent CRM platform, so that you can manage and nurture leads from your mobile phone or desktop computer. If you’ve been thinking of using any one of the platforms above and need a solid Internet data exchange (IDX)-integrated website, see our review that compares and contrasts them.

It can seem exhausting to have to go to four or five different places to manage your real estate lead generation efforts, so the Premier Agent App has made it easy to consolidate these into one location so that you can respond more quickly, gaining new clients and closing more deals. Without a single place to keep track of your clients, you can be faster and more efficient.

How to Connect Your Leads Into the App

If you go into “Settings,” you’ll find that Gmail is the easiest way in which you can pull in messages from clients across platforms and then access them right from the Premier Agent App. When you connect your Gmail account, messages will be pulled from multiple lead sources (such as BoomTown or Realtor.com), including the property information and contact information of the lead. Zillow will not read other messages, and they make a point to protect your privacy by only scanning for specific lead sources.

If you do not have a Gmail account and you aren’t interested in getting one, another option you have is to sign in for a Premier Agent email address. This email address is free for anyone with an agent account and can be used across platforms to pull in leads from other lead gen sources (Boomtown or Realtor.com for example). We recommend using Gmail so that if you decide to disconnect your Premier Agent app in the future, you still will have a primary email address that users are familiar with and in their existing Rolodex.

Lead Management

Zillow’s Premier Agent App provides easy-to-use lead management. The three main features that the app offers in lead management are the ability to categorize and search leads, review communications and respond to leads, and create tasks to keep up with all your to-dos. Being able to quickly find leads, stay on top of your communications, and never miss a beat helps you provide exceptional client service and will ultimately help you close more deals.

Categorizing & Searching for Leads

The Premier Agent App allows you to categorize leads with a number of tags, and to sort them by using your finger to swipe. The app gives you the ability to categorizes leads throughout your pipeline as they move from “new,” to “actively searching,” to “under contract,” and then “closed.” The app also allows you to search for a lead by name or email address. These features may not seem like something new if you’ve used another real estate CRM in the past, but with Zillow’s offering, you may no longer have to pay for an additional CRM and can use the free platform as your all-in-one solution. For example, when you have all your leads from all your sources in one location, you can simply search for a lead in the Premier Agent App and quickly pull it up, even if you don’t remember where it originally came from. This makes it easy to access all your leads and communicate efficiently whether you’re at your desk or on the go.

Reviewing Communications & Responding to Leads

The Premier Agent App allows you to review your contact activity, message history and time-stamped notes you have added for additional context. It also allows you to send email and text messages right from the app so you can make sure to respond to leads as soon as they come in. When this cuts across platforms, this is a timesaver as well as allowing you to seem “always available,” and up-to-date with whatever conversation was happening previously. Sometimes an old lead might text you out of the blue, and you don’t have your lead communication history in front of you which results in either delays in response, or a response that seems to not be fully up to speed on the context. If you have this information on your phone, there is no delay, and you can pick up right where you left off.

Create Tasks to Keep Up with All of Your To-Dos

Staying on top of all your lead follow-up can be difficult to manage. With Zillow’s Premier Agent App, you can easily create and manage your to-do list right from within the app. Texts, phone calls, and emails can come in while you’re already in the middle of a million other things. With this app, you can make sure that you never drop the ball by quickly creating a task when you get off the phone with a lead or receive a message from a prospective client. Then when you have a few minutes of downtime, you can go back to your list and see what things are waiting for your attention. If you do happen to forget something, you’ll receive a notification when that task is overdue. Your clients will appreciate your attention and dependability and you get the peace of mind in knowing you’ve delivered the level of service that will differentiate you from less organized agents.

Step 3: Manage & Track Your Pipeline

The Premier Agent App does a nice job creating a pipeline that follows your leads from beginning to end. By tracking your pipeline, you can clearly see where your leads are coming from, which are converting into clients and how many deals you are closing based on those lead generating services to optimize what’s working.

There are three primary ways that the Premier Agent App helps you manage and track your pipeline:

• Reporting on lead channel: Where the lead is generated from
• Reporting on lead type: Is the lead from a seller, buyer or another type of client
• Reporting on property price: Examining property prices of the leads you receive

By having these three reporting features available, the app allows you to examine where your leads are coming from and if certain services that you use are truly paying off. It is worth noting that if you are part of a team, you can have two separate reports — one for your individual leads and one for your team lead reporting.

Lead reporting is a critical feature that can help you save money and close deals. For those lead sources that are clearly not generating quality leads or producing outcomes, it may save you money to unsubscribe to them. For the lead services that are working for you, you may consider increasing your spend for greater output. In this way, the app can help you close more deals by bringing in more quality leads.

Step 4: Respond to Leads Quickly With More Information

We found the tools within Zillow’s Premier Agent App that make your responses quick and informed to be extremely useful. Zillow has put together a proprietary formula to not only be informed and have availability to respond immediately to leads that come your way but to also give you information not found anywhere else.

One of the less frequently discussed but most useful features in the Premier Agent App is the massive amount of unique information you get on your Zillow leads. For example, when you get a lead from one of the Zillow Group sites (Zillow, Trulia, RealEstate.com, or StreetEasy), you immediately get an instant alert on your phone. Pulling up the lead will show you a variety of useful information that gives you insight no one else has. You will not only find contact details but will see information about the listing they wanted to know more about (and details about the listing agent), their search behavior (including location, price range, number of bedrooms, and more), saved homes, whether they are pre-approved for a loan, and if they already have an agent. You will even see their photo and job title pulled from Facebook and social networks, when available.

When you use Zillow’s Premier Agent App, you not only know all the information but you can also respond immediately by calling, email or text or by forwarding it to another agent if appropriate. The app makes it incredibly convenient as well as gives you an edge in the information you have, helping you to win clients by understanding them in a way others simply cannot do.

Optional Concierge Service

If you are a particularly busy agent, the concierge service offered by Zillow’s Premier Agent Advertising program could be a game changer. Concierge services are free to Premier Agents (just opt-in) but not available to others. Once you are enrolled in Premier Agent Concierge, your notifications are muted, and all leads are immediately responded to and vetted by a Zillow representative who will ask your lead some basic questions. One of the things they will do is to make sure it isn’t spam, provide assurance that it’s an active buyer, and then transfer the client to you over the phone. There are also response features for teams through the Concierge service that can be customized.

Step 5: Optimize Your Profile & Listings

If you want to crush it on Zillow, you have to have a profile and listings that showcase your skills. Fortunately, you can update your profile and boost your sales right from your the Premier Agent App to get more attention on your listings, better client reviews, and close more deals. Best of all, it will automatically sync your details across Zillow, Trulia, RealEstate.com, and Street Easy giving you a one-stop-shop for managing your personal brand.

Two ways in which Zillow’s Premier Agent App allows you to optimize your performance are through your profile and through your listings. One way to make your profile stand out is to have current reviews and show your activity in the market accurately. By clicking on the “Profile” button, the app allows you to maximize your reviews by requesting them directly from your phone. You can also upload past sales to keep your account up to date.

The second way that the app allows you to optimize yourself on the platform is through your listings. On the iOS version of the app, you can click on the “Listings” button and then upload a video to your listing. You can add a video walkthrough to your listings and monitor the performance of your listings through the Premier Agent App.

The great thing about adding a video to your listing is not just the increased engagement you’ll get, but also that Zillow will rank your home higher than others in the same search category because it contains a video added through their app. Anyone is allowed to create the video (professional videographers or others), it just requires the listing agent approval to post it. Getting your listing to have increased engagement and visibility helps you close more deals.

Listing Analytic Features

If you want to view your listing performance within the app, you can certainly do so. Simply click on the listing and there should be an “Analytics” button. You should be able through this to see views, saves, comparable homes on the market and how your listing is comparing with other listings currently offered. This is a great feature for both the agent and information to show your listing clients.

Bonus Feature: Review Zillow’s Educational Resources for Agents

The Premier Agent App provides further resources for you to close more deals by maximizing your knowledge base as an agent, and as a Zillow user. You can access this educational area in your app at the bottom of the menu under “Resource Center.” The Premier Agent Resource Center includes a blog, training, and a toolkit of scripts, templates, and client handouts.

Premier Agent Blog

The Zillow’s Premier Agent Blog is surprisingly good. There are posts on topics that all agents can benefit from like productivity, lead generation, lead conversion, trends and general marketing topics. We particularly liked that if you were a new agent, you could learn such topics as how to calculate the return on investment of a marketing campaign that can help you be more effective with your ad dollars.

Scripts

The scripts offered through the Agent Toolkit that were effective, useful and relevant. The scripts varied by topic and contained ones you’d expect, such as for sale by owner (FSBO) scripts, as well as nontraditional scripts we loved like asking clients for reviews or scripts to use by text messaging.

Templates

The templates section of the Agent Toolkit was wonderful. It provides templates for everything from an agent resume to templates for real estate flyers. When you start to explore the features that Zillow integrated into the real estate agent app (and desktop website), you realize that they clearly had the pulse on what agent’s need.

Client Handouts

From free client checklists on fall maintenance to winterization, Zillow offers you a number of ways to offer your client service that goes above and beyond the norm. The handouts are well thought out and have a range of topics, including those on home buying, lending and listing your home.

Overall, the resources available to those who use Zillow’s Premier Agent App were surprisingly good. While very general, there was certainly something for everyone and a way for even the most experienced agent to streamline their workflow or learn something new.

The Bottom Line

Zillow’s Premier Agent platform has perks that span far beyond your desktop, and their free app can help you integrate your leads so you can become an efficient powerhouse. The Premier Agent App includes remarkable features for every agent, even without the additional benefits of paid Premier Agent Advertising. By providing lead management, tracking, reporting, listing optimization and quick communication, the app allows you to have a virtual office in your pocket and ultimately close more deals.