It’s as true as ever that nothing trumps the results of hard work, but when it comes to being successful as a person who is new to working as a realtor then it’s not always about hustling harder than others. You’ll be working in one of the most competitive businesses there is, and as a result you may have difficulty getting ahead simply by putting in more hours and working as hard as you possibly can to have your name very visible to prospective clients.
The reality is that you need to work smarter as well as harder. Nowadays every realtor is looking for the inside track to be first in touch with people who are ready to make a move in the local real estate market. That type of exclusivity isn’t easy to obtain, but it sure can go the longest way in building your real estate client base when those people are convinced to work that person as their realtor. This is why real estate lead generation is such a big deal now, and why getting real estate leads is more and more of a priority for agents.
It’s the reason why so many of them have signed up to take advantage of our online real estate lead generation system here at Real Estate Leads. Paid real estate leads can give you the opportunities you’re looking for with being first to talk to prospective clients, but there’s more that you can do to be proactive in drumming up new clientele for your real estate business and we have 7 specific approaches that we’ll lay out here in this blog entry.
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Optimizing Your Real Estate Agent Website
Having an attractive and professional website is important for any realtor. We’ll assume you have one, and then you need to take a step back and review all the major aspects. That’s because a real estate agent website is a really effective platform for lead generation.
Review your site and look over your online lead generation strategy for your website. The way you use CTAs, landing pages, and every other component should be laid out in the way that’s best for SEO as you won’t get potential new clients visiting your site to the extent you need if your site is not doing well with Search engine page rankings. Get a web-design professional to help you with this if it is beyond your means.
You should also use an analytics tools to track your website’s real estate lead generation and have a more solid and identifiable means of tracking where your leads are coming from and make sure they are being nurtured on your website in an effective way. You can also use these tools to see where your leads are falling off your website and work to optimize those pages and weak points.
The last suggestion we’ll make her is to add a Live Chat function to your site, and using it as a sales tool where you make yourself available to have real-time conservations with interested individuals right through the website. When you are able to answer the question of an online real estate lead or present them with key info in real time, it’s possible to push them down the funnel a little further.
All of this is on top of the obvious need to have quality content on the site, and the type of content that makes clear that you are a genuine real estate professional when it comes to homes being bought and sold in your part of the country.
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Utilize an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy
Most realtors these days will have set up a page for themselves on popular social media platforms. You may well have done the same, but you may not be using these resources to promote yourself as well as you could be. LinkedIn and Facebook are two of the platforms where realtors can better make a name for themselves, and here’s what you can do.
With Facebook you can switch to a business profile, and you can have this option when you first sign and create the FB account. By going with a business profile you’ll have access to different marketing tools which will let you advertise your real estate business more efficiently and keep track of its effectiveness.
The other big point for social media promotion is to be very choosy about the images you use. There is no overstating how important good pictures of properties are when you’re promoting your services as a real estate agent. But that doesn’t just apply to properties, as you need to have good quality images of yourself on the profiles and again you can and should hire a photographer if you’re not capable of taking those photos on your own and making them look really good.
With LinkedIn it is all about connecting once you’ve taken the first and easier step to optimize the professionalism of your profile. Look to see what other successful realtors you know are doing to that end, but it shouldn’t be anything that’s too elaborate for you to understand and emulate with your own profile.
As far as the connections, start thinking about people who could actually be real estate leads in your market as well as those that would make for great referral sources. Look to connect to real estate investors as well lawyers, mortgage lenders, tax and financial advisors, and of course other real estate agents where you may end up being mutually beneficial for each other in the future.
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Making Contact with People for Expired and FSBO Listings
Cold calling may never have the conversion rates that it once did, and many realtors don’t see it as valuable the way previous generations of agents would have. But making cold calls to people who you know are the owners of homes where their listing expired or they have chosen to be FSBOs (for sale by owners) is something you should definitely be doing because it is much more conducive to better real estate lead generation. The chances of conversion are much higher here than cold-calling just anyone whose number you have come by. Of course, that’s if you approach this lead generation strategy correctly.
With expired or withdrawn listings you want to start by making sure the listing is not still in the possession of another realtor. If it’s not, see what you might be able to discover about why the home didn’t sell when it was listed with another agent. It’s not always an inherent problem with the property itself. Sometimes, it comes down to insufficient marketing, bad photos, an unappealing description, unreasonable asking price, or something else entirely.
With FSBO listings you may need to be patient and just listen the reasons why the homeowner feels they can sell a home without a realtor, but in some instances you may be pleased to learn that the owner is disappointed with the lack of interest in their home and has now warmed up to the idea of working with a realtor. You won’t know until you make that contact, so just go into it being as professional and helpful as possible and see what gains you can make there.
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Go With a Paid Real Estate Lead Generation Program
This is what we do here at Real Estate Leads, and of course we’re going to speak favorably about what can be gained from paid real estate leads. They can go a long way when you want to scale your business and always have qualified leads that you can feel confident investing the time and effort in with the understanding there is a legit chance to gain a new client out of it.
We can vouch for the integrity and viability of what we have here, but you’re encouraged to figure out if each one is qualified or not. You can often see how reputable one is by reading others’ testimonials and getting an idea of whether or not they’ve received genuine real estate leads. We’ll add briefly that we have a lead qualification process here that has been proven effective for determining if a lead is worthy of being distributed to a realtor who has signed up with us.
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Strategizing to Receive Real Estate Referrals
Having former clients speak highly of you when they meet others who need to work with a realtor has always had so much value for any realtor. It is of course dependent on you provide excellent service and having those former clients be 100% pleased with the entirety of their home sale or purchase. But most realtors have the means of providing that, and we’ll assume that you do too. Waiting for the natural interactions with your SOI (sphere of influence) to pay off in referrals doesn’t have the best results. A strategy to get more referrals is needed.
Good ideas for real estate lead generation here including keeping in touch with past and present leads/clients. Don’t hesitate to ask for referrals too if you feel quite confident that the people will speak highly of you as a realtor.
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Nurturing Real Estate Leads
How do you nurture a real estate lead? Consider that a lot of leads that land in your lap may not be ready to buy or sell property yet. They’re simply not at that stage in your real estate sales funnel and that’s okay. You need to keep the lead warm until they’re at the point where they are ready to make a purchase or finally put the home on the market. Provide value through email campaigns, send them your newsletter, share content from your blog, follow up with automated emails to save time, or whatever else you feel with be equal parts helpful and keeping you in mind.
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Offer Incentives
This final suggestion here is sort of tied into the nurturing idea we talked about above, and one of the things you can do is remind prospective clients that they can visit your site and see that you have certain offers you extend only to clients that agree to list with you. One of the more common ones is to offer them free use of a moving van when they sell their home, and you can make that same offer to would-be homebuyer clients too. There are many different possibilities of what you can offer here, but it really just comes down to the basics of adding value for the customer as well as making their choice of you as their realtor that much more attractive based on what’s in it for them. Because there’s plenty of realtors out there and you can be sure many of them are as gifted with self-promotion as you are. What are you going to do to stand out?
