17 Real Estate Prospecting Ideas to Boost Your Sales
17 Real Estate Prospecting Ideas to Boost Your Sales
Let’s look at a mix of tactics you should experiment with this year to gain a competitive edge and some classic real estate lead generation strategies that work.
1. Document Your Prospecting Plan
You want to stay organised with your prospecting. For that, you need a documented plan to follow consistently. Here are some questions you can explore to get your juices flowing:
Which channels do you want to focus on for prospecting?
How often can you prospect while being consistent?
What specific steps do you want to include in your prospective clients’ experience?
Once you have a plan, you should block time on your calendar for prospecting-related tasks—ideally, you want to incorporate it into your daily routine. Whenever the clock strikes for your scheduled prospecting sessions, avoid distractions and stick with your prospecting tasks.
2. Educate Yourself about the Current State of the Industry
"If anyone thinks they are going to sell real estate in ’23 like they did in ’20, ’21 or early ’22, they aren’t going to make it," hard hitting truth about the real estate market in 2023.
If you’re a relatively new real estate agent, the rapidly changing landscape may make you feel like you’re starting from scratch. It's okay to feel uncertain about which real estate marketing channels will work for you and how to navigate the market.
You need to invest in education and stay relevant to the needs of the marketplace. The top marketing and technical skills real estate professionals want to learn in 2023: SEO, social media, and paid search advertising.
3. Nurture Your Past Customers and Build a Referral Engine
Before experimenting with TikTok or any other shiny new prospecting tactics, remember the timeless art of building relationships. While it’s cliché, your past clients can scale your lead gen unlike other sources. Referrals by a friend, neighbor, or relative are still the top method by which sellers found real estate agents.
The home selling side of the equation also presents a strong picture for continuing relationships with your real estate clients. Sixty-three percent of the recent home sellers used a referral or a real estate agent they had worked with.
To start nurturing past customers, make a list of those that know you well and that you know would help your business grow. I also suggest staying in front of them with monthly phone calls, cards, pop-bys, or an annual event.
“In return for your interest and great service, they refer you to others, who refer you to yet more people, and on and on.”
Consider adding important client life events like birthdays and anniversaries to your client profiles in your CRM. Close lets you set up calendar reminders for tasks. On their special day, you can drop them a quick note or send small gifts.
4. Craft Compelling Listing Copy
Most of your prospecting efforts will involve promoting your listing advertisements. You need a persuasive real estate copy that paints a visual image of your property. All list copy should follow this structure for your ads:
Header
Short description
Body
Price/terms
Contact information
Now you can use the glorious ChatGPT, a free AI chatbot, to assist with some copywriting. But be aware that some of ChatGPT’s copy can come out cringy and cliched. So, edit your ChatGPT draft to ensure your copy doesn’t read like a million other property ads using worn-out adjectives.
Try to get started with ChatGPT. Just change up the property’s details with yours: “Act as an expert real estate copywriter that has written tens of thousands of persuasive listings. Now write copy for a property with three bedrooms and two bathrooms in Manly, Sydney. It also has a pool and access to daily conveniences in close proximity.”
5. Learn How to Market Your Listings
Real estate agents are expected to fulfill a crucial role in meeting sellers' expectations: effectively marketing their homes to captivate and engage prospective buyers. But a compelling real estate ad copy isn’t enough. To market your listing, you must also learn real estate photography, as it’s the most useful website feature for buyers.
You can also consider integrating other ways to improve your client’s experiences. In 2023, real estate professionals are leveraging 3D tours, virtual staging, and floor plans to stand out. Video content will soon be table stakes because of the availability of easy access to video creation tools.
If you specialise in creating videos or another marketing strategy, you can offer specialised service packages.
6. Build a Stellar Online Presence Starting with Social Media
Most first-time home buyers today start their buying journey online. No wonder, then, that you need a sound digital marketing strategy to get in front of prospective clients. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok are found to be the main social platforms of interest for real estate professionals.
Join active local groups online and market-specific communities and add value to conversations already happening there.
If you’re keen on gaining some TikTok traction, try this 5-step formula, and see how this exact strategy has results with some posts reaching over 400k views —with just a smart phone camera:
1. Go to one of your nicest listings, or if you don’t have one—request to create a video of a fancy listing by another agent
2. Use your selfie camera to film an engaging introduction of 3-5 seconds
3. Get some videos of the listing to show off the property
4. Import your videos to TikTok and add text, music, and use the app’s auto-sync feature
5. Post with relevant hashtags and a caption
7. Build Your Website and Start Blogging
You may feel that promoting yourself online is sufficient. However, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, whatever could all be gone tomorrow, or your account can get hacked/banned/removed! so this bring the importance of your own real estate website. Your real estate website should be “your online home base for all of your content so that over time you can build up your SEO and be discovered by possible leads.”
As a real estate agent, a professional website can be used to:
1. Demonstrate your real estate expertise and establish your personal brand
2. Market your listings
3. Generate leads (many buyers and sellers find agents through their website!)
A good agent website can contain the following pages:
- A convincing home page
- An about page with some background and personal info about you
- Services page detailing how you work with homeowners and buyers
- A testimonials page with reviews from past clients
- A contact page providing a form and your phone number
Once you’ve built your website, you can publish blog posts on “hyper-local” subjects. That’s how you can build some authority in the eyes of search engines like Google and get relevant traffic to your website and blog posts.
8. Start an Email Newsletter
As an agent the most valuble assett is your database.
Why? It's your connection to your home sellers and buyers via your newsletter.
But think about it. Whenever you send a new value-adding email, you become “a fresh thought in the minds of your list.” Email marketing helps you stay connected with your sphere of influence and nurture your relationships.
So how can you get started? Most decent CRMs will have a newsletter function, if not then change your CRM of choice and go better.
Here are some example topics to hero your newsletter:
Upcoming events in your area
Highlighting the local farmer's market
Upcoming kid-friendly activities
Best local hiking trails
Focus on keeping it local, remember that people connect with the places they love, so keep things centered on what is going on in your community.
Can you promote your real estate listings in your email newsletter?
While you can share them in your newsletter, It is a great idea to share a little bit of the story of how the listing came to be, or focus on what makes it special, to make them more fitting for your email audience.
9. Network and Strike Mutually Beneficial Partnerships
If you’re just starting out, share your real estate adventure details with your friends and family. Then, keep expanding your sphere of influence. You can attend networking events like meetups and conferences relevant to your target market. You can find networking opportunities by searching Facebook Groups.
But don’t limit your reach to the real estate industry. Consider collaborating with other relevant industry professionals.
Here’s is how this can all come together: A real estate agent may work closely with a financial advisor and a CPA to ensure a well-rounded approach. The financial advisor can guide investment strategies, retirement planning, and overall financial well-being. The CPA can offer insights on tax implications and financial documentation, and the insurance agent may advise on appropriate insurance coverage related to the property.
So be on the lookout to strike lucrative partnerships on social media, in your locality, and — even beyond the real estate industry.
10. Conduct an Open House
While they may seem old-fashioned, conducting an open house is still a great strategy to collect the prospects' contact info already in the market. Even in 2023, buyers continue to attend them as part of their home search.
Prioritise selling the houses that are in high-income neighborhoods and have a high demand.
While conducting them, ensure you have a simple sign-in sheet to collect the name, email, and phone numbers of the attendees.
Later, you can set up a follow-up email sequence for the leads that don’t make an offer for the house and still assist them in their home-buying search.
11. Participate in Neighborhood Events
When you’re starting out, getting face-to-face with your prospects is a fantastic way to build trust and generate new leads. You may think you need to conduct or attend only local real estate events to do the same.
However, attending community events or sponsoring one in your neighborhood can work well. You want to connect meaningfully with your target market and establish credibility as a knowledgeable local community member. Isn’t that the kind of agent your prospects would want representation from?
12. Try Cold Calling
While laden with rejection, cold calling works well in real estate. To get started, you need to identify a high-quality data source, get a targeted list of real estate leads with their phone numbers, and use effective cold-calling scripts—personalized to your prospects.
For example, you can start by calling homeowners with expired listings and motivating them to sell again. On the call, you’ll need to learn why their house didn’t get interest from buyers the first time around and propose unique sales strategies to sell it this time.
A proven way to get this strategy to work for you is simply following up with your leads religiously—unless they tell you to stop calling. Mixing cold calling with other marketing campaigns, such as SMS and email, is best.
13. Contact FSBO Listings
A recent report shows only 10 percent of home sellers relied on for-sale-by-owner (FSBO) listings. While FSBOs feel they don’t need a real estate agent like you or don’t want to pay you a commission, you’ve still got to contact these homeowners because they have an intention of selling.
Just use a personalised pitch and lead with open-ended questions. Highlight how FSBO houses sell for significantly lower prices than other homes. Also, share your expertise in attracting buyers, dealing with paperwork, and helping expedite the sale.
14. Use Direct Mail (Yes, It Still Exists!)
Direct mail may seem old-fashioned, but it can be effective if you’re especially targeting home buyers in an older age group. You can try creating your physical collateral, such as flyers, postcards, and newsletters, and send them to a targeted mailing list.
One agent who helps people with real estate investing, recommends finding “off-market” deals through direct mail. He claims one of his partners sends postcards to property owners with building code violations and gets as much as a “30 percent response rate!”
15. Drive for Dollars
Another old-school but intimidating tactic is driving around neighborhoods to find distressed homes. It’s a cool way to find lucrative off-market deals where you negotiate directly with the owners.
Here is a super simple strategy you can implement:
“Get in your car and drive around neighborhoods looking for homes that are distressed. They may have:
Boarded up windows
Tall Grass
Overstuffed mailboxes
“Once you have the address, you can then either:
Call the owner
Set up a postcard campaign
Knock on their door.”
If you want to adopt this strategy, I recommend skipping A-class areas as they are well-kept. Instead, consider “driving around B or C class neighborhoods because they have more homes with potential.”
16. Leverage Real Estate Prospecting Tools
A robust prospecting strategy involves a series of steps executed repeatedly. You may inevitably forget some of them or spend lots of time doing tedious and administrative tasks. That’s where prospecting tools come in.
For starters, you can use them to set up automated email follow-ups, record your outbound and inbound calls, help you qualify leads, etc.
17. Systematize Your Prospecting
Ultimately, you want automation to power much of your prospecting. It begins with defining the specific tasks you want to execute, standardizing the processes, and creating checklists around them. For example, you can create a “new home checklist” that documents the steps you take to market every new property you undertake.
EXPERT TIP: Document everything with more than three steps you do more than three times.
Summary
Whether you’re a new agent just starting in the real estate industry or a seasoned pro, you need to keep prospecting. Experiment with a few strategies from the article and find the ones that align with your personality and skill sets. Then stay persistent! That’s all it takes to become a successful real estate agent.
