Strategies to stay in touch with your seller leads
If you have been a regular reader of our articles, then you would by now know now the motto our real estate experts follow — Build relationships –Nurture relationships –Always stay in touch with your contacts.
You need to put effort into building a strong rapport with your clients. This relationship-building will ensure that your new real estate leads pipeline never runs dry. It is vital as a real estate agent for you to constantly stay in touch through different modes with all the people you come in contact with. As most experienced real estate agents would agree, a real estate agent needs a thriving community to sustain his real estate business.
Even a newly licensed real estate agent would confirm that lead generation is a vital aspect of the real estate business. However many new agents tend to make a crucial mistake, which is they devote all their time and effort towards acquiring new leads. Any experienced agent would quickly confirm that lead generation is only half of it, the real challenge is to be in touch with those new leads until you have obtained the listings. Moreover, even after you have closed the deal, it is important to be in touch with your entire client circle.
This is fundamental to real estate business success. In order to gain this success, you need to establish a clear cut strategy to maintain contact with all you prospect, whether they are new seller leads or whether they are old satisfied leads.
5 Strategies to Keep In Touch with Your Real Estate Leads
National Association of Realtors: 91% of buyers would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others. Five strategies to keep you in that percentage of recommended agents. Follow up with your real estate agent after a transaction is essential. Get your agent to be the lifelong trusted real estate advisor for your clients.
Brand Yourself Effectively for Seller Leads
Your strategy is based on building relationships and positioning yourself as a source of knowledge. Building a strong reputation takes repeated positive interaction through your geographic marketing. Make sure you have a solid grasp on hyper-local pricing trends, buyer demand, and can communicate these statistics effectively. Invest your time in relationship building. Attend neighborhood events, volunteer, and put yourself out there. The community will return the favor. It's time to build a solid and meaningful presence in your target neighborhood. Your prospects want compelling stats on the market in their area with happy endings with compelling stats. Keep your marketing consistent with your value proposition.
Communicate with Your Leads in Their Preferred Method and Frequency
When meeting with your new lead regarding a real estate transaction, you should set the terms for communication. This should include whether they prefer phone calls, texting, email and how frequently they would like to be updated on items. Setting this up in advance allows the relationship and communication to be mutual and all involved know what to expect from the beginning.
All-purpose, cold-calling script
Greg McDaniel uses daily calls to assess whether the homeowner is a potential seller in today's market. If the owner says yes, he also uses "FORD" to learn more about the person and build a connection. If you're under a strict lockdown where showings are prohibited, have the owners use FaceTime, Facebook Live to “walk” you through the property. This allows you to set a more accurate asking price. If you can still conduct in-person showings, the next step is to set the appointment using an alternative choice close: “I could meet with you at 4 p.m. this afternoon or tomorrow. Which time works best for you?”
Be Resourceful
Do the research in the area your lead is looking for regarding characteristics that are important to your lead, like school data, green resources, and walkability. If you met with a seller and you didn't get the listing, follow up with them and thank them for the opportunity. This type of communication will make you stand out and get more work in the long run, says HVN's Chris Chalkley. Follow up with a listing that you did not get, follow it up with, and say it is important to them to be working with you.
Key Real Estate Strategies To Be In Communication With New Seller Leads
It is necessary for each agent to ensure that they are on the number one thought in the minds of their new seller leads. Most people are going to meet and discuss their requirements with a few different real estate professionals. You need to make sure that a lead that you have found and built contact with does not end up in another agent's lead funnel only because of a lack of frequent communication from your end. So in the first part of the article, we are going to cover few key strategies to help you stay in touch with your leads.
Bring The Personal Touch To Communications
It is vital that in the initial meeting with prospective leads you politely enquire how they would like further information to be given to them and in what frequency would they like the updates. It is necessary to create a channel of communication so that you can endure that this prospective lead turns into an engaged lead. Remember a few important details about them as a person. Do they love their garden? Are their kids preparing for the SATs? Are they a Marvel or DC fan? Then the next time you meet them talk about these things. It is important to build a connection with your lead.
Now when it comes to communication one of our personal tips is to always offer two alternatives while giving your clients a choice. For example, never ask a question like 'How would you like me to contact you, most sellers are going to meet a few real estate agents before finalizing an agent for their seller listings.
However, a better alternative than most successful agents rely on is the 'Choose one from two' method. It is really simple, all you need to ask your prospective client is 'Would you like me to call you or send you regular emails with the updates' when given a choice like this, the odds are high that the client will pick one of the two modes of communication and as they chose this option when you start being in touch with them in that particular medium they would not consider it to be intrusive.
Create An Excellent Phone Call Script
Phone call scripts are always used for cold calling prospects, but we would suggest having an effective script ready when you are following up with your prospects. When talking to homeowners who is looking to sell their house, it is important to have the right phone pitch to convince them. Here are few pointers to get the perfect phone call script
- Start with something beneficial to them. Do not give details. This is to make them interested in what you have to convey.
- Sell yourself, highlight one of your recent sales. You want them to associate you as the expert with successful sales.
- Suggest one or two ideas about improving their home valuation or ways in which you think the listing marketing should be handled.
- Talk about the real estate opportunity and market condition as you end the conversation. You can modify the above for each prospective lead, but this script ensures that you stay at the top of the mind of your prospective seller leads.
Benefit from Automated Message Sending Services
By now you would have understood the importance of balancing lead generation with managing to stay in touch with your clients, you are probably considering scheduling a few hours a day or a week for communicating and being in touch with your seller leads, especially the engaged leads.
However, as a real estate agent, you must always be cautious about how you divide your time on various leads. Our experts would advise that you sign up for an automated service for sending emails or messages to all your prospects. You could have each message customized according to the category of your leads — new, interested, or engaged. In this manner, you need to focus mainly on those prospects, where the chances of getting the listings are high.
This kind of drip marketing would ensure that you do not end up losing any of your leads to the competition. You can be in touch with your leads for months. As sometimes your prospective buyers and sellers may need more time to decide their next step. Sending messages to them automatically ensure that your valuable time is used in the right place and at the same time you are able to maintain contacts and remind them that you have the expertise for selling their home.
Maintain A Website/ Blog
One of the best vehicles for marketing your personal brand and your expertise as a real estate agent is by creating an informative website or blog. It is not only a great way to acquire new seller leads but also an excellent platform to keep your new leads engaged. The real estate business seems confusing and filled with a lot of jargon, rules, and regulations to an outsider. As an expert, your helpful blog could offer them information, tips, and market strategies.
Try to position your website as a free resource for both buyers and sellers. this is the key to effectively get your clients to interact with your site and to gain more seller leads. Always highlight your success stories. Most seller leads are looking for a convincing track record of the real estate professionals, so rather than saying you are an expert, you can let your stories communicate that to the buyers and sellers visiting your site.
You can also incorporate a Call To Action (CTA) button so that any visitor can leave their contact information for you and they could turn into prospective seller leads.
Strategies Real Estate Agents Should Follow To Maintain Contact With Past Clients
Most real estate agents are only thinking about the day they will close the deal. However, all successful agents are already thinking about their next step to be in touch with these clients who will now become categorized as past clients. It is important to keep your seller leads pipeline supply constant and one of the easiest ways to do that is by maintaining communication and connection with all your past clients. You stand a high chance of getting referrals for quality seller leads from these past clients.
Utilize Social Media To Your Advantage
The primary strategy that you should employ for internet marketing your service is social media platforms, wherein you focus on ways to generate leads and target the residents of your neighborhood with ads regarding the real estate market. However, a food agent always knows that social media can also be very helpful to create and maintain a relationship with those homeowners who have helped close deals successfully.
By becoming part of their Facebook or any other online social circle you can be in touch with them in a non-intrusive way. In this way, you will be staying in touch with them over the long course of time and can expect to get repeat listings or new referrals. You can also send them monthly newsletters with home improvement ideas, tips about the real estate market conditions, or even the current property value of their home. If you are tech-savvy, you can even create a short video to talk about the local property market. Be creative and provide content that they would remember. This is effective of staying in touch with all those for whom you have managed to close profitable deals.
Run Customer Focused Greetings Campaigns
A good way to maintain the communication channels and the relationship with your past sellers and buyers is by sending them thoughtful and curated wishes for different occasions. Do not just limit yourself to the seasonal greetings campaigns. Utilize the information that they post on their social media accounts and try to build your greetings around it.
Have they recently got a promotion? Have they announced the birth of a baby in their family? A client will always appreciate the efforts put in by an agent to wish them on achievements and milestones in the family.
Send A Survey To Past Clients
One of the best ways to foster a relationship with a client after you managed to profitably close a deal for them is to send in a survey. As an agent, you have two goals by asking them to respond to the survey. First, you do want their genuine feedback about their experience with you. Second, you want to remind them about the value you added in helping them sell or buy their property. What they liked about the process, which of your ideas did they find most effective.
You should also include questions about their thoughts on recommending you in their neighborhood. And you can always end the survey with a request for a referral from their side. It is easy to create such surveys online and email them to them. It effectively helps you market yourself and also be top of mind for them anytime they think about an agent.
Have A Strong Customer Relationship Management Tool
All agents are aware that they need different kinds of tools for accounting, budgeting, marketing their listings, and generating new leads. But among all these tech tools one that is absolutely vital is strong Customer Relationship Management (CRM). You can invest in paid software, which will help you effectively manage all the leads in a single place with all relevant information and reminders built-in.
We would also suggest that those of you who are just about to start as an agent and may not have the budget to invest in tech tools or a CRM consider registering on an online real estate platform. Real estate platforms for lead generation like Dorrmat, also offer a robust customer relationship management system. Not only can an agent acquire local seller leads but can also directly add them to his CRM along with all the key information about each of the leads.
Summary
It is a must for any real estate agent to have a proper strategy in place for attracting seller leads, but it is equally vital to have a strategy for being in touch with those who can be categorized as potential leads and those who were your client in the past.
The real estate business is one of those professions where each client is not just an opportunity for new listings but also a chance for obtaining a referral in the future. Therefore it is crucial that an agent must always employ a range of strategies to be in touch and for building long-term relationships with all the homeowners. Always rely on a good mix of targeted ads, personal communications, tech tools, the internet, content generation, and the other tips covered in the article.
It might seem initially challenging, but once you have created a process and have learned to effectively manage to communicate with all the sellers, buyers, and other homeowners you would have a good system to nurture each individual agent and homeowner relationship.
Comments