Real Estate Leads Strategies For New Real Estate Agents

As a new real estate agent, one of the most challenging aspects of your new business is the aspect of real estate lead generation. Sure, you have joined a reputed brokerage, informed your family and friends, and maybe even distributed flyers in the neighborhood. However, this may not be enough to fetch you real estate leads to sustain your business.

There is a reason why real estate professionals spend time and effort cultivating new leads and why they keep on trying and improving their lead generation channels. For an agent who is starting their career in this field, it is even more necessary to strengthen this core aspect of the real estate business.

For this article, we asked our real estate experts to suggest ways for generating real estate leads that would be feasible for a newly licensed real estate agent.

A. Lead Generation Strategies A Real Estate Agent Must Follow

1. Approach Your Sphere Of Influence

As a new agent, one of your major sources of leads is the people you already know. Your social and professional circle are your sphere of influence. These are the people who are aware of your capabilities and are ready to provide you with referrals of potential buyers and sellers who they know.

However, to generate more leads and referrals from your family and friends circle, you must have a clear plan of action. You could start by offering free real estate advice to the people you know and ask them to suggest your agent services to others. You could even offer a small gift to get more referrals.

Create informative and attractive text messages and send them to people in your sphere of influence at frequent intervals. Ask them to forward these text messages to those looking for real estate advice. There is a need to keep sending these texts to generate referrals and gain more clients.

2. Generate Leads Through Online Platforms

An effective real estate lead generation strategy that a new agent must include in their mix of tactics is to work with an online lead generation platform. These platforms make generating leads easier for the realtors by providing them exclusive leads.

For instance, Dorrmat, one of the fastest-growing platforms in this sector, provides seller leads to all the registered agents on its platform. Dorrmat's approach is pretty straightforward when it comes to providing a qualified lead and help to its agents. All an agent needs to do is register on the platform, and once the account is active, Dorrmat will start providing quality leads of motivated home sellers to the agent.

Dorrmat, with its years of experience in the real estate business and the robust technology, that it has created, ensures that an agent is presented as a qualified and knowledgeable real estate consultant to the potential leads. This aspect puts the agent at an advantage. They are being provided with qualified leads, and clients ready to move ahead with the home selling process.

3. Build Ties With Local Businesses

A great way to attract leads is by forming professional relationships with local businesses in your community. Try to shortlist all of those businesses related to the real estate industry and form bonds with them. For instance, get to know the local bankers and lenders, construction professionals, home improvement service providers, gardening/landscaping companies, home-stagers, and more.

Try to create vendor and referral partnerships with them. These are the services that a homeowner will be looking for when they need to buy or sell a home. Therefore, you can suggest these contacts to your clients, and in return, when any of these businesses or individuals get to know of a seller lead, they can refer them to you.

You could also ask the stores in the local market if they would be willing to put up your flyers in exchange for customer referrals that would be of benefit to them. It is crucial for an agent who is new to the industry to establish these ties as early as possible.

4. Try To Host Open House Events

For agents, open houses can be an excellent source to attract leads. At an open house, treat all visitors as incoming leads. It is necessary to both help your homeowner find a perfect buyer for their home and for you to gather organic leads.

The key is to host open houses with a proper plan. An open house needs more than a sign-in sheet at the entrance. Try to ensure that you get a bit of interaction and engagement with all the visitors. Make sure you have enough business cards, brochures, and other real estate information packets to be given to all visitors.

Make sure that after each open house, you contact the visitors right away and ask about their experience as well as plans to buy a home or sell their home. Not all visitors to these events are home buyers or sellers right away. However, you can add all the new contact information to your lead nurturing pool. This step would ensure that in the future when they are ready to sell, you would be the first agent who they call.

5. Leverage Your Social Media Presence

Among the fresh lead gathering tactics, the most popular one is to use your social media accounts to boost your real estate lead generation numbers. Websites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others can help you reach a wider circle of people in your city.

You can utilize these social networks to build a following and find quality leads. These networks can also help you create and establish your position as a market leader. According to the statistics published by the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), the majority of the new-age gen z home buyers or sellers opt for social networks to find resources, assistance, and advice when it comes to their real estate decisions.

By frequently updating the information on these social network profiles, you can boost your real lead numbers. This boost happens by staying in contact with existing clients and also getting an opportunity to meet new ones. It can be done by sharing useful and timely updates about the market in general, updates about the homes you have sold, or the ones that you have listed recently.

Opt For Creating Videos/Putting Up Blog Posts

Valuable content addition has become a necessity to keep your social media followers engaged over a long period of time. You could create a YouTube channel and post videos that would be beneficial for sellers or buyers. In your videos, you could answer questions that many property owners have about selling their home or preparing it for sale.

Similarly, you can put up articles on various topics of real estate business in the blog section of your website. Each informative article can fetch more traffic to your website and boost your followers on social media channels.

B. Lead Generation IdeasReal Estate Agents Can Consider

1. Run Google Ads/Facebook Ads

Many agents prefer to go the route of paid leads or paid advertising options to gather interested leads. You can consider trying these out based on the real estate marketing budget that you have set aside. Some major ways in which advertising can help you get more leads are described below:

A. Adverts On Google

One of the lead gen sources to find the best leads is through running ads on Google. This step is mostly part of the search engine optimization activities that you would undertake for your website. You basically try to identify the target keywords that potential clients in your area normally search on Google. Then you take these keywords and incorporate them into your website. This move would make your website rank higher on the search engines rankings. Along with this, you can run paid adverts with the same keywords to attract business.

B. Adverts On Facebook

Similar to Google, Facebook also provides you an opportunity to reach your target audience. You can create Facebook groups to build an online real estate community. The members of this group would give you a fair idea about the customer base. Using this information, you can create adverts that can be modified on demographic aspects, such as age, income bracket, family type, home type, and more. With the granular options provided, your ads would be seen by those who have a high potential of becoming your client.

2. Sponsor Local Community Events

A major real estate lead generation method that you can include in your strategies is to become a more active member of your community. You stand to gain a potential lead through informal conversations at neighborhood events. It will cost money, but it will help you establish your personal brand in the community on a large scale.

Small community events like sponsoring a pet adoption event or the local high school sports team would bring you to the eyes of the entire community. These local events are attended by most people in your target neighborhood, and it is a great place to meet new clients.

3. Attend Your City's Networking Events

Many real estate agents build their base by forming a personal connection with other members of the local trade community and other agents in the city. From engaging with those into real estate investing to forming alliances with fellow agents and becoming a real estate collaboration specialist, agents can highly benefit by attending events.

These events could be the local chamber of commerce events, or if you are a realtor, it could be an event organized by NAR. Attending such events helps you gain more real estate expertise and also be able to provide better service. You also stand to get new lead gen ideas and leads by building and widening your professional network.

4. Pick Up The Phone And Start Cold Calling

A pro tip is to use the traditional method of making phone calls and walking around the neighborhood, knocking on doors. As a new agent, you would have more time to give a shot with these methods. Most agents are wary of cold calling because of the possible chances of rejection.

However, this is the time to build your communication skills. Create a cold calling script and stick to it when you make your phone calls. Also, have a fixed block of time in your day and a pre-decided number of calls to make each day or doors to knock. These will ensure that you build your confidence and ability to persuade your leads.

5. Generate Leads From Expired Listings And For Sale By Owner Homes (FSBOs)

An alternative to buying leads is to utilize the multiple listing service to work as your real estate lead generation tool. Try to find your new listings from those property listings that have failed to find a buyer on the market. There are two kinds of homes that come under this category. They are as follows:

A. Expired Listings Homes

These are homes for which the listings have expired as it failed to find a suitable buyer. You can convert such a listing into a potential client by identifying the reason(s) for the home failing to find buyers. Then try to figure out the corrective actions needed and approach the home seller. Your efforts could pay dividends easily as these are qualified leads and highly motivated sellers who would be ready to re-list with better guidance.

B. FSBO Homes

Another category of homes that could benefit from the expertise of an agent is the ones that have been listed independently. Due to a lack of information and awareness about procedures for selling a home, many of these properties also tend to remain unsold. However, with a little bit of persuasion and tact, it is possible to convince these homeowners to work with an agent and ensure that they get a good price for their home.

Summary

As new agents, the first year is extremely crucial for building a successful real estate business. The more business you are able to generate, the better your earning potential is and the better your chances of gaining more potential customers. With the methods and strategies discussed above, you can ensure that you get a good head start in this field.

A good foundation will enable you to widen your circle, meet more people, and help more homeowners to sell their homes for a good value. All of these are crucial components to set up and run a successful business.