The Key Strategies To Generate Real Estate Seller Leads

As a real estate agent, it is essential that you invest adequate time and effort to generate and convert seller leads. The advent of the internet and digital mediums has brought about a large-scale change in the way we approach and interact with prospects.

For anyone engaged in the real estate business, it is crucial to keep building relationships. Both your social circles and professional circles of contact have to be built and nurtured so that can start generating quality real estate leads.

In this article, our experts have selected a few key strategies that all real estate agents should adopt in order to acquire a higher volume of real estate seller leads. These strategies have been divided across the fundamental, the new-age, and the lesser-known categories for the ease of the readers.

The Fundamental Strategies To Generate Seller Leads

The first category that we are going to outline is the core or elementary real estate lead generation strategies that all realtors aspiring for success must have as part of the real estate business strategy. These fundamental strategies do not require any extra skill sets and can be incorporated into your day-to-day schedule of being a real estate agent.

Direct Mailing

Even if you are not that inclined towards making cold calls, you should certainly not ignore direct mailing. A direct mailing is much less intrusive from the receiver's perspective and far more effective from the sender's perspective.

In a direct mailing seller lead generation campaign, you can either canvass the neighborhood and distribute your business flyers and business cards carrying all the relevant contact information, or if your brokerage team already has interested buyers, you can even send direct mails to the families living in a particular neighborhood.

You introduce yourself and give a brief outline of the kind of house you are seeking. Give a brief idea about the potential buyers you have ready and ask if any of the homeowners would be interested in selling their house.

Drip Mailing

Drip mailing is highly different. In drip mailing, the real estate agent has to set up a continuous line of communication with many potential clients for months together. It is a known fact that each consumer is going to meet up with a few different real estate agents from various brokerages. Everyone accepts the fact that generally, the clients end up hiring the real estate agent they last interacted with.

Now, this is where drip mailing comes in handy. A client could be looking to sell the house in 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or even after 1 year. You must always ensure that the interaction you have had with the client does not get wasted. Keep sending them emails frequently so that they remember you and when it comes for them to decide to list their property, you are the real estate agent they call.

Organize Open Houses

As old as the profession, an open house is one of the best ways to acquire new seller leads for agents. A lot of future sellers visit open house events. They come to these events to get an idea about the property market, to see how a house can be staged, and other aspects required in selling a house. These are serious clients and can be qualified as strong seller leads.

As a real estate agent, it is your responsibility to get ahold of their contact details and impress them with your knowledge about the local real estate market and your expertise as a realtor. Chances are high that these potential sellers may contact you soon and ask for your assistance in selling their house.

Request For Referrals

No real estate agent aiming for success in the real estate business should skip this fundamental strategy for getting new seller leads. After the completion of every successful home sale, make sure that you request a referral to their contacts from your satisfied sellers. These referrals are going to fetch you new seller leads. As you are someone who has helped a family member or friend, the potential customers are going to be more inclined towards hiring your services.

The New-Age Strategies To Generate Seller Leads

In the second category, we are going to shift our attention towards some of the newer strategies, which can be helpful to boost your seller leads. These are strategies that can bring about a quick change in the number of seller leads that you might be accruing.

Online Real Estate Leads Generation Platform

One of the best benefits of digital progress is the development of online real estate leads generation platforms. These platforms basically bring together the real estate agents and the potential house sellers. This ensures that the leads generated through this medium are qualified and well worth your time.

For instance, Dorrmat, a leading real estate platform, brings its years of experience and infuses the benefits of technology to provide a continuous pipeline of quality real estate seller leads and buyer leads to all the real estate agents registered on the platform.

It has a robust system that lets you incorporate the seller leads directly into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system provided.

Have a Real Estate Website

It is essential in this day and age to have a professionally designed and properly maintained real estate website with blogs. The first thing that most of us do when we hear about something new is to carry out a quick online search and view its website.

Therefore when you have a well-crafted website it ensures that your site visitors can potentially become your new seller leads. Make sure that you regularly upload interesting and informative content about the real estate business in general. You should also include photographs of your newest sold listings. This will be helpful in building a connection with all those of you who visit your website.

Target FSBO Listing / Expired Listings

Most agents do not consider going after expired listings or For Sale By Owner listings as they believe that their efforts would not pay off and these are hard to convert seller leads. We are here to clearly state that this is not the case.

These unsold homes are a great prospect and the homeowner in most of these cases would be very strong and committed seller leads. With the right approach, you can not only manage to convince these clients to hire you as their realtor but also help them to successfully get their property sold for the right asking price.

Paid Advertising

One of the popular ways in which real estate agents try to maximize their seller leads is through paid advertising. There are many avenues in which you can choose to advertise. The most popular online alternatives are Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and Google ads. These ads mainly require an effective selection of search keywords and focused selection of target on the basis of geography, demographics, or budgets.

A lot of people are looking to sell and buy their homes online. You should try to target these motivated sellers. The offline alternatives are to run billboard ads and advertise in the local newspapers. You could also get flyers printed and distributed around the different neighborhoods.

The Lesser-Known Strategies To Generate Seller Leads

Now in the final part, we are going to look over some of the strategies which are lesser-known that real state agents can implement to boost their seller leads in a strong way.

Optimize Lead Pages

As important as it is to have your real estate website, it is equally important to use lead pages as well. Lead pages are basically designed to help you create a strong landing page for your website. It does not require any knowledge of coding. Lead pages offer simple and intuitive drag and drop features with which you will be able to custom design your landing page.

Ensure that your landing page has been enabled to collect the information the site visitors and also there are various other features you can custom design, such as sign-up pages for any event, pop-up boxes for opt-ins, and pages to sign up for services.

Utilize Facebook

One cannot forget the power of social media when it comes to generating real estate seller leads. According to the data published by The National Association of Realtors (NAR), close to 51% of homeowners found their new home online; whereas, roughly 89% of home sellers had the assistance of a real estate agent.

Now how does Facebook tie in with this data? It was also reported in the same annual figures that close to 74% of realtors use Facebook for reaching this large pool of potential buyers and sellers. With Facebook's enhanced search term functionality, you can specify which kind of seller leads are you looking for, from neighborhood to age, to family size, and even budgets.

This lets you target the right customer for offering your services as a real estate expert.

Offer CMAs

A Comparative Market Analysis is a tool that basically helps real estate agents estimate the accurate price of a home. A CMA basically involves comparing the sale prices of similar houses in that neighborhood. Now although this is something a real estate agent might offer to clients once he has been hired, a lot of agents are offering this as a free service. These agents are running a basic CMA over houses in their target neighborhood and offering this report along with their expert realtor advice as part of their marketing campaign. This gets the attention of the homeowners.

Every homeowner is curious about the value of their property. Many times they even start considering the sale of their house because of the current value. These customers are impressed with the diligence shown by the real estate agent and the research he has carried out. These tactics improve the chances of the homeowner to consider listing the property with the agent.

Consider Real Estate Farming

A strategy that many real estate agents are not particularly adept at following is the concept of real estate leads farming. In simple terms, in real estate farming, a particulate geographical area is selected and efforts are put in to build relationships with property owners within that specific area. It is done to generate future business from that area.

For real estate farming, you need to start with identifying your target location, carry out thorough research, focus on extensive networking so anytime a house owner decides to sell their property then you are the first real estate agent they call.

Build Partnerships

We have always maintained that a real estate agent does not operate in a professional bubble. You need to build local relationships in order to be more effective in implementing your marketing strategy. These local alliances should always be mutually beneficial.

Try to build actual relationships with those who are also engaged in the real estate business like you. These could be landscapers, personnel from the local insurance companies, bankers, or people who help stage homes.

These are the people who can point you towards motivated home sellers. They generally get to hear about these sellers first due to their professional responsibilities. So it is worth your while to merge your social and professional circles with these professionals.

Summary

In this article, we have endeavored to bring to the notice of real estate agents all the key strategies, which can be successfully implemented to generate seller leads. Although many find it challenging when faced with the fact of real estate lead generation, with our tips and strategies you can maximize your marketing and your reach.

More importantly, you would be tapping into all the sources that are proven to provide a steady supply of quality seller leads. By using a judicious mix of these outlined strategies you would be able to reach more prospects, target a wider pool of sellers, and enhance your success in the real estate business.