The old saying don’t look a gift horse in the mouth may have to do with equine dental health and stem for an era long gone in human existence, but it may have a roundabout relation to the way realtors look at real estate leads. All leads are good and welcome, just so long as the agent does understand that even the warmest of leads can go cold quickly and fall off your radar in very short order. So that’s why all of them have value, even if some aren’t going to be as dollars-and-cents valuable for you based on their orientation. And this does tie into the best lead generation for real estate.
To expand on this, it will make sense that a realtor stands to earn a larger commission when a client sells a home through them rather than buys one. Does this mean seller lead generation takes priority for most realtors? Maybe so, but it’s not the best way to approach your client lead generation efforts. It is best to focus on lead generation more generally and openly and keep in mind that clients that buy homes may be selling them through the same realtor at some point down the line in the future.
Taking the same type of wide-net approach to online marketing for real estate agents is indeed recommended, but at the same time it’s okay to focus on one end of it more than the other if you’re going to have the greatest degree of knowledge about how to dig up one specific type of client as compared to another. But one important takeaway here; it’s best to be amassing as many clients leads as possible, and the ‘nature’ of those leads shouldn’t matter as much.
So we’ll keep our spotlight trained on just that one side of the coin here; generating real estate seller leads and what are the most effective approaches to doing that. And realtors who are looking to better with this aspect of building their PREC will also do well if they can work to improve their communications and interpersonal skills too, because that is also very a part of seller lead generation if converting leads into clients is something that is important for you.
Strategy Re Evaluations
Finding home seller leads can be challenging and even for experienced realtors who’ve been in the business for a considerable part of time. Anyone who’s stuck in a rut will do well to reevaluate their strategies for generating seller leads and what we have here are some practical and creative ways to help to maximize the return you get from the energy you put into real estate lead generation.
Implementing these tactics may be just what you need to gain an edge and even if you gain just 1 or 2 more seller leads a year the difference it can make commissions (particularly on detached homes in desirable locations) can be quite significant and a source of much higher earned yearly income in many cases.
So let’s get right to our list:
Leverage Existing Network to Ask for Referrals
This suggestion may come across as way too obvious, but the reason it is included with our collection of online marketing for real estate agent tips is primarily because it’s important realtors understand they don’t need to have to have fancy or expensive strategies in place. Instead what you do is lean on the people you know and have worked with in the past, including clients, lenders, and others who have had some type of professional working relationship with.
Consider this stat is you need to be more emphatically convinced of this – 36% of sellers who used a real estate agent in 2022 were directed to that agent through a referral. And referrals don’t often come without asking for them.
Use Social Media to Build a Personal Brand
Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are all social media platforms that can be used as part of best lead generation for real estate approaches today. And your real estate website can also be brought into the promotion and client-generation fold here too. No matter where you’re doing it, you can share value-add information and expertise on your local market to build your credibility. Sponsoring or organizing local and neighborhood events to get your name out there may also be a good idea too.
Send Existing Seller Leads Your Customized Local Market Updates
This will apply even for seller leads that you have deemed are now cold. There is still much to potentially be gained from keeping in touch with these people, so you should email up-to-date summaries of active, pending, and sold properties that match their search criteria and then provide context for the listings in the bigger picture for the local market. Your CRM can automate this for you. Consider utilizing a reliable real estate email marketing software to enhance your email marketing efforts and see more engagement with the material you send out.
Have CTA (call to action) for Home Valuation Prominently Displayed on Website
These CTA banners are commonly best displayed on community pages and in search results. They create an easy way start a conversation with potential seller leads and provide value to them, and prospective clients aren’t likely to request a market evaluation if they’re not serious about selling their home in the near future. This is something that tends to be true almost all the time and is one of the realities of seller lead generation in real estate.
Drive Traffic to Home Valuation Landing Pages
Continuing with that, a home valuation CTA is often very effective when they lead you to create these types of microsites specifically designed to attract seller leads. And especially when those sites are integrated directly with your CRM – just like your main website – and have full control over all the metadata, and most notably with the H1 tags that boost your organic SEO rankings when people use search terms that indicate they might want to work with a real estate agent soon.
Utilizing Google Analytics, Google Ads conversion ID, or Facebook tracking pixel to track conversions on the site is a good idea too and you should orient it so that the lead provides key information about their home, along with their timeline for selling in order to get the home value report. This is also much more conducive to routing your leads better, something that realtors always get better at with practice.
Incorporate Google Seller PPC Campaigns
Running seller lead campaigns at the county level is highly recommended here, and especially when used in conjunction with a seller site on its own domain. This ensures you’re geo-targeting an area that is sufficiently large.
Establish a Follow-up and Lead Nurturing System for your CRM
Part of working with real estate leads is that you never really know what a clietn’s foreseen home selling timeline might look like. Good tips here with a your CRM is to be using a combination of tags, action plans, drip campaigns, and real estate marketing automations to identify and choose automated ways to stay in touch well and still really promoting your services.
Building a follow-up plan based on the lead’s engagement level can also be a part of the best real estate lead generation approaches. One example might be automatically enrolling a seller lead into an action plan after you’ve tracked them visiting your real estate website however many numbers of times. The action plan can have call tasks and automated texts and emails to make sure you’re reaching out at just the right time. Those using a AI tool can automate initial engagement with the lead to help qualify them and alert an agent when the lead is ready to start moving towards becoming a client. AI tools are also handy to help re-engage older seller leads without asking a whole lot of your time and effort.
Create Seller-Focused Content
Some realtors will be writing blog posts on how to prep your home to sell or a landing page with tips on the home-selling process, or having those blogs written for them. It’s a good idea either way, but you need to be understand what is seller-focused content so that you are helping augment the other ways you’re targeting these leads. This content can be used as landing pages for ads, in email marketing, on social media, and for attracting visitors to your website as well.
Cold Calling for Expired Listings and FSBOs
Listings that have expired from the MLS and FSBOs (for sale by owners) can be a great way to drum up seller leads more directly, and often these leads will be hot as the owners continue to be very keen to sell. Although leads from expired listings might be frustrated after poor experiences with other agents and reassuring them while making clear you’re different as an agents can be connected to seller lead generation too.
Build a Networking Group of Local Service Providers
It is very likely that there are many local service providers —painters, carpenters and contractors etc. – who you know in the same way because of the nature of what you both do as a profession and the overlap between the two when it comes to what clients will need in the way of services. Forming personal relationships with these companies can be a great way to hear about homeowners who may be selling their home soon. Establishing a mutually-beneficial referral arrangement between you probably won’t be difficult to do, and it may be a huge plus for your real estate lead generation effort.
Open Houses for Seller Leads
A common approach is for realtors to attend an open house that is being hosted by another agent, and usually just to get an idea of the market. But it is true that the opportunity to work with home sellers clients may exist, although most in attendance will admittedly be looking to buy a home. But you may meet home seller clients here too, and these are genuine opportunities to meet people who are ready to buy or sell. They may be serious about listing their home or are just curious to see what other homes in the area are like, either before submitting an offer on a home or deciding to list the home the currently own.
Leverage Facebook Ads
The ways to utilize Facebook for seller lead generation are nearly endless, but one potentially overlooked strategy is to focus on specific interest groups that may help generate real estate sale leads for realtors. Think about specific interest groups that would be inclined to choose a realtor like you when proceeding to sell their home. What is it about them that would make them lean towards choosing you as a realtor? Use Facebook to find these people and start building relationships.
Assist Distressed Homeowners
There are instances where a homeowner is forced to sell, and if a realtor knows how to be tactful in approaching these types of real estate leads then it can be an excellent way to gain new clients who are selling a home. You will do well to tread lightly here when working with this segment and you certainly don’t want to come across as a vulture. Instead, listen to their needs and help them sell their home and move on from this current situation.
Convert Renters into Sellers
Owning a home isn’t for everyone, and that can be especially true for people depending on the nature of their lives and where they are in them. And many of those renters would be prefer to be homeowners if that were possible. And maybe it is. Explaining these costs to your clients, while also helping them understand the true value of their home, may be enough to convert them into sellers and this is also rolled into the best lead generation for real estate.
Get Onboard with a Team of Experienced Listing Agents
Being able to turn to other listing agents because you’re a part of their referral network can be a quick and easy way to get more leads fast. It may not be the best fit for those who’d like more to work on their own, there’s really no substitute for benefitting from the collective years of experience that others in your field may have and are willing to share with you.
Be Connected with Home Flippers and Real Estate Investors
Purchasing and then refurbishing old homes is increasingly popular with real estate investors, and some of these homes may be flipped shortly after. Realtors can do well with online marketing for real estate agents when they make contact with these individuals and convince them that they are as good a choice as any to have these homes sell fast in the way they’d like to see them do so. They’ll likely be motivated to sell fast and frequently, and this may mean you establish a client quickly and one that may well be buying more real estate through you in the future.
Host Events
Everyone likes to socialize, so giving would-be clients an opportunity to do it and enjoy themselves may make it more likely they decide to list a home with you as their realtor. The most important thing is that it should be fun for everyone. The more people who leave talking about it — and you — the more likely you’ll be recommended to others when it comes time to sell a home.
Other good suggestions as we wrap up this blog entry is to use predictive analytics and machine learning to identify seller leads you already have. Tools that analyze your database to identify leads most likely to move in the next six months exist and more and more regularly realtors are taking advantage of them.
Tracking and identifying lead sources and tactics that are most successful in delivering home seller clients for realtors is so highly recommended and especially considering the number of realtors who are looking to do the same thing for themselves but aren’t doing anything different from the competition.
