When you’re a real estate agent, it’s important to continually grow and maintain your list of potential client leads. Working to attract leads can help you build your reputation as an agent. It can also help ensure the financial health of your business.
There are many ways that real estate agents can attract leads. Many of these strategies are human-driven, and they require hustle. Networking with business owners in your area, handing out business cards at parties and gatherings, and placing ads in local publications are some of the tangible ways that real estate agents grow their lead lists.
While consistently hitting the ground to attract new clients is an important part of being a real estate agent, the process of working to find your own leads can be slow, grueling, and inefficient. While meeting a potential client in person and convincing them to work with you can end up with a solid, fulfilling relationship for both parties, getting to the point of connection and commitment can take a while.
Because the process of manually building a lead list can be slow for a real estate agent, there are other strategies they can use to find listings to represent. Many of these methods rely on technology or pre-curated lists of potential clients. When agents get their hands on these pre-formed lists, they start with a leg up. That is, since these potential clients have already indicated they’re in some position to sell, there’s a better chance that they’ll be willing and ready to sign up to work with a real estate professional.
If you’re a real estate professional who’s gotten down the grind of attracting your own leads, but you want to get more listings more quickly, the following strategies can help. Using these resources and techniques allows you to be efficient in your lead generation and nurturing process, and it can help you do more business and bring in more income quickly. It can also help you close more deals so you can quickly grow your reputation in your area—making the process of bringing in your own leads easier.
Join the Lead Gathering Program of an Online Real Estate Listings Site
There are lots of real estate sites on the web that people use to find listings in their area or to do research about their local market or home price. Some of the most popular of these sites include Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com. Most of these sites offer a resource where property owners can type in the address of their property to see an estimated value for it. The sites gather the contact information of these property owners. Real estate agents can then sign up for a paid service offered by the sites to get access to these lists of contact information. While there is no way of knowing why a person was specifically looking up the value of their property, there is a good chance that some of these people sought out the value because they were at least thinking about selling. By reaching out to the people who’ve looked up their properties, you can get in touch with people who have at least indicated in some way that they may be interested in exchanging what they own for money (selling).
Pay Attention to For Sale By Owner (FSBO) Listings
Many people decide that they want to try to sell their residential property without a real estate agent. These properties are called FSBO. (Some commercial property owners also try to sell their properties FSBO, as well).Pay attention to FSBO properties, and when you see one listen, reach out with your contact information and an offer to help if the sellers ever need it. While many hopeful and idealistic sellers want to sell without the help of a real estate professional, in reality, studies show that 92% of all homes in the U.S. are sold with the help of a broker or an agent. So, if you are able to reach out and contact FSBO sellers quickly, you can make your name the first one that they think to reach out to once they decide that they need help selling their property after all.
You can use a digital resource to access a list of FSBO sellers in order to make this process even quicker and more efficient. One good resource for FSBO listings is REDX. REDX guarantees that you can get the contact information of FSBO owners the day properties hit the market, so that you can be the first real estate agent to contact them during the process.
Stay on Top of Probate and Vacant House/Property Listings
Probate properties are ones that are sold when an owner dies, bequeathing property to someone who doesn’t actually want to own it. Stay on top of probate properties in your area by visiting the local courthouse and getting a list of homes that will be for sale in probate court. Once you have a list of probate properties, reach out to the owners of the properties who may be highly motivated to sell the homes fast. Probate owners usually live out of state and don’t have the time to come to where the property is to help facilitate a sale. You can offer to list and represent the probate property to help make the entire process easier for the seller.
The owners of vacant properties are often similarly motivated to sell. While there’s usually no concrete list of vacant buildings in an area, you can keep a list of ones you see as you spend time in town. Then, research and contact owners to see if you can help them get the property off their hands. Some vacant property owners may simply be grateful for the offer of help to sell the property, and it can be an easy way to get a listing.
Pair with a Home Stager
While this technique is not as fast or efficient as getting a list of pre-qualified leads, pairing with a home stager is a great way to get leads that won’t take your time or energy. Pair with a home stager, and then when they are contacted about a job staging a home, the stager can recommend you as a seller’s agent. This can be a very useful way to get motivated seller listings, if the clients do not already have an agent. You can return the favor by recommending that home stager when you have seller clients who haven’t yet found someone to help them stage their home during the sale process.
Pair with Home Flippers
Another good partnership to establish for any sellers’ agent is a home flipper. If there is someone who is known for buying homes and renovating them to sell, partner with them, and have them use you as your sellers’ agent each time they are done with a renovation and ready to sell a home. These clients will use you again and again and be easy, steady business. You may also pair with a real estate investor who regularly buys and sells properties to make money. You can represent them each time they are ready to sell.
Use Facebook Ads
With Facebook ads, you can get your information out in front of very targeted audiences: be it people in your area or those who exhibit online behaviors of people who may be wanting to sell their home (looking up its value, browsing listings, researching stagers, etc). Facebook’s ability to get very specific with who they target (and the amount of data they’re able to collect on users) makes it one of the most effective and efficient ways to actually get connected with the right leads. Facebook’s algorithms make their ad audiences scarily accurate. This means that you can get your information out in front of the very specific audience who may just be looking to sell and need a seller’s agent.
Contact Owners of Expired Listings
Access current real estate listings via your MLS or an online real estate database. Search current listings by date, and scroll to the oldest listings. Look at properties that have been on the market for a long time, or ones that seem to have old/not updated/few photos. Reach out to the owners of these properties to see if they need help relisting their property, or if they’d like the guidance of a new agent to help them refresh their listing. Checking nearly-expired listings every day is a good, fast source of potential leads that may be looking for some help getting their property sold.
At the end of the day, there is no exact science to getting listings for real estate agents. Instead, attracting potential clients is more like an art, where agents combine both their own efforts to connect with the people who might become their clients and the usage of pre-gathered or pre-generated lists. By combining the two strategies and using them both wisely, real estate agents can solidify a reputation as a sought-after, successful professional to work with—and bring in the amount of income necessary to sustain and grow a real estate business.
Rely on Internet Data Providers
There are Internet-based real estate data services that can provide you with a list of motivated sellers that may be great potential clients. These data services mine public records to find potential property owners who seem like they could be ready to get rid of their property. These lists are curated by a variety of factors, including owners who have encountered financial hardship or foreclosure; those who have experienced divorces or who have college-aged children who may be becoming empty-nesters; and more. Data providers can also give you lists of commercial properties and property owners you can contact to see if they’d be willing to sell. Many of these sites also have predictive analytics capabilities, which can analyze factors about properties and their owners and let you know how likely they will be to be ready to sell. These sites, thus, can ensure you focus in on leads who are likely to become your client, and to avoid nurturing potential leads who are not actually ready to sell.
Create Your Own Home Valuation Page
Rather than rely on another real estate site to buy lead lists, create your own home valuation landing page where people can type in their information to find out the value of their property. Optimize this home valuation page for search, using the right keywords for your area and the type of properties you are looking to represent. Once you start getting traffic to your page and people are handing over their contact information, you can reach out to them to see if they are looking to sell and if they would want your services as their seller’s agent. Setting up a home or property valuation page that just sits on the web will naturally attract potentially interested clients and will be a low-effort way to gather a list of qualified leads.
To learn more about one effective strategy for finding qualified leads who might want to become real estate clients, check out ProspectNow. ProspectNow is the most complete property and owner database on the web. It offers both commercial and residential real estate agents the chance to access qualified leads who may be ready to work with them to sell property. The database currently has 102,984,952 residential properties, 38,871,625 commercial properties, and 23,442,332 properties predicted to sell. It also contains helpful information like property owner contact information (including phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing address) and predictive analytics that can help you gauge how likely it is an owner is ready or willing to sell their property. This is a huge resource of potential clients who can ultimately help you grow your business. By relying on a tool like ProspectNow, real estate agents can tackle one side of lead generation quickly and efficiently so they can focus on doing great work for their clients and helping to establish their reputation in their market.