Every agent needs new leads to continue to grow in their business.
As a new agent, how you get your first client and close your first deal can seem like it takes forever. However, even for the experienced agent, having enough clients in the pipeline for future sales can be challenging.
Finding leads in real estate is crucial, just like any sales position.
It’s simple; leads are the lifeblood of your business, and you need to know how to generate leads in real estate effectively.
There are various ways, from traditional advertising to asking friends and family to find people you’ve never met who need your services.
The key, then, is to develop a strategy that puts your services in front of people that need them, and this process is known as lead generation.
But before we discuss how to generate leads, you first need to understand the type of lead and what each of these leads needs.
The Three Basic Leads And How To Market To Them
There are three basic types of leads.
The first is a cold lead, that is, someone that is unfamiliar with you or your services.
The next type of lead and most people fall into this category, is the warm lead. A warm lead is a person familiar with what you do but is not fully committed to jumping into utilizing your services just yet.
Finally, there is the hot lead. A hot lead is someone aware of your services and ready to act on their purchasing decisions.
How you devise a marketing strategy for each lead type is essential. First, consider the steps you want these leads to take. For example, a cold lead becomes aware of your brand and services–making them a warm lead for future efforts.
Cold Leads: Cold leads are people that don’t know about you or your services. Your marketing efforts should expose these people to your brand and your services. Your message should be about positioning yourself as a go-to expert and resource for all things real estate.
Cold leads are the ones furthest from making a purchasing decision, although not always. In general, however, you should approach your messaging with a long-view goal in mind. If you come across a cold lead that quickly warms and is ready to act, even better, but this group is about being patient with and building your reputation.
Warm Leads: Warm leads are the bulk of people you may come into contact with and are familiar with your role as a real estate agent. You want to spend your time with messages about the benefits of your skills and services provided to others.
Your messaging should take an educational approach, present common problems that homeowners are experiencing and potential buyers are dealing with, and provide answers and solutions to those issues. In addition, your message is to present your expertise and services as solutions to people in the real estate market.
Hot Leads: A hot lead is someone ready to buy or sell a home and looking at you as a potential agent to assist them. This is the conversion stage–the closing of the lead from potential to client.
Your messaging should focus on the importance of acting NOW, in a timely manner, and how you and only you can provide them with the quality, attention, and service they need.
For example, a hot lead may be someone that reaches out to you, and if you’ve done everything correctly ahead of time, you will win the listing before you set an appointment.
Understanding your lead type will help you devise a strategy for how to message each one. For example, the messaging you create for a cold lead will be vastly different than a lead type chomping at the bit to buy a home.
Now that you can identify the different lead types let’s look at some lead generation strategies you can use to get some sales under your belt.
1. Engage Your Community
Taking time to be “human” and interacting with friends, colleagues, and other parents (if you have kids) or as a member of an organization and not just as a real estate agent is essential to increasing your brand recognition.
Before you join an organization just to market your services, think about the type of organization that most aligns with your interests and ethics.
Marketing your services appropriately within your sphere of influence is a great way to generate leads with people that are familiar with you and like you.
Engaging with your community doesn’t mean that you mention your services in every conversation. On the contrary, you want to be involved, and only when the conversation comes up do you remind people of your business. The goal here is to create relationships with people, to be seen as someone friendly and trustworthy.
2. Sphere of Influence
Your sphere of influence is a great place to start. Your sphere comprises all the people you have come across in your life who may know you and have liked you.
As you build upon your lead generation strategy, start with people you know, these can be people in your family, your community, your kid's class or sports teams, or even past associates.
Like your community, you must approach your sphere of influence in a friendly, social way. Provide fun, engaging comments and engagement on social media, and offer tips and value to conversations about real estate when they come up. As a best practice, the rule of engagement, especially on social media, is to post 80% of things being personal and fun and only 20% of items about real estate.
3. Referrals
Now that you’ve established your reputation within your sphere of influence, reach out to others outside your sphere. Asking for a referral is a passive, one-time thing. You need to stay on top of your mind with your sphere to get them to vouch for your services.
Posting success stories on social media, having a monthly email update highlighting your client’s successes and reviews, and providing valuable market insights are good ways to show your expertise.
Only after you showcase your expertise and knowledge do you put in a small ask for referrals. Getting customer reviews is part of the “ask” with clients. For every client you work with, afterward, you must ask for a review of your services that you can post on social media and your website. You must provide superior service for your client and ask for a review.
Again, the point is to be on the top of mind for your sphere so that when they have a conversation where people are looking for an agent, you’re their recommendation.
4. Networking Events
Consider attending or hosting a networking event that showcases your services. One idea is to host a Q&A happy hour for sellers at a local restaurant or brewery and offer free food or some other incentive to attend.
If you market the event well, you should be able to collect personal contact information prior to the event, allowing you to add those individuals to your email marketing and text marketing programs.
Networking events are the place where you can offer your services a little more often than with your sphere and not come off as pushy. However, there is a balance between self-promotion and being social, so keep that in mind.
5. Social Organizations
Whether joining the Chamber of Commerce, your religious organization, a parent organization, or some other social club, don’t come in and immediately try to market yourself as a real estate agent.
Work your job subtly into conversations, be seen as a valuable member, and build relationships with people over time. Don’t worry; there will be a time when a conversation will include the opportunity to drop the fact that you’re in real estate.
Social organizations are excellent places to establish your reputation, but the point is to be social. It’s the purpose of people getting together.
6. Nurture Your Relationships
Real estate is a business built on relationships. As an agent, getting leads is about leveraging your existing relationships and creating new ones.
As you build your reputation and get more contact information, you need to begin to nurture these relationships. Don’t turn every conversation into a real estate one, but be able and willing to answer any questions that may come up.
7. Service Sells: Go Above And Beyond For Your Clients
Providing exceptional service that goes above and beyond what you’re required to do is part of building your reputation and generating future leads from referrals. When you’re working with a client in a difficult situation, put yourself in their shoes and try to understand their issues regarding the real estate transaction.
For example, if they’re forced to sell due to an economic downturn or death in the family, discussing alternatives to selling and providing educational materials to help them navigate the sale is a surefire way to create loyal fans of your services.
Make yourself available for your clients on the first call. Don’t be a pushover, but make yourself available reasonably. Be sure to set boundaries, so you have a work-life balance, but explain that ahead of time, and they should respect those boundaries.
Another way to provide outstanding service is to help guide and educate your clients about every detail of their real estate journey.
For new-time buyers worried about saving enough money for a down payment, provide resources and contact financial professionals to help them secure a loan that doesn’t require 20% down, or even find the client down payment assistance, if possible.
The key is providing answers for every hurdle your client may encounter.
8. Keep Growing In Your Knowledge
In order to best assist your clients, you need to have answers to the most common, pressing issues facing clients today.
Continuing your professional education, having a broader network list of professionals that work with real estate, and being up to speed on the most current trends in the market will enhance your reputation as the go-to expert.
As you learn more about strategies that are working for agents right now, you can implement those into your marketing and lead generation strategies. Rather than throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, borrowing proven effective ideas will save you an incredible amount of time and money.
9. Set Goals And Creating An Action Plan
As you really focus on your lead generation strategies, you must create a detailed roadmap of what you’re trying to achieve with each marketing strategy.
Marketing is about attraction. It is about setting up a process to create a flow of inbound calls, texts, and emails through your marketing efforts.
To create a marketing strategy, consider your ideal client avatar.
An avatar embodies all the things that make up your ideal client. For example, if you’re primarily interested in working with military families, you’d create an avatar for the perfect military family. What are the person’s interests and hobbies, what do they like to do in their free time, and how can you help them during their time in the military?
Being as specific as possible with your avatar creates a persona you are now directing your marketing efforts toward.
Once you have established your avatar, you can begin to plan where, how often, and the types of content to publish for your client avatar.
A mentor or coach is the best source of guidance for your marketing strategies.
Mentor Vs. Coach
A mentor is a person who is working in real estate, has a proven track record, and is willing to work with a less experienced agent and help guide them.
A mentor will show you what they do that is successful for them, but remember, their strategies are what is aligned with their goals and their personalities. Therefore, what works for your mentor may or may not work for you.
Also, mentorship should be looked at as an apprenticeship. In order to get a mentor to work with you, you may need to be willing to do some of the grunt work for your mentor.
A coach, on the other hand, is a person you hire to help establish your goals, systems, and procedures to be more efficient and effective. Your coach will assist you with goal-setting and show you the steps necessary for them to succeed.
10. Create Your Marketing Action Plan
Your first step is to decide on an advisor to help guide you once you have an advisor, whether a mentor or coach, you need to create a marketing plan.
Your marketing plan should include a three-pronged strategy.
- Expose your brand and heighten brand awareness
- Position your services as the go-to resource
- Generate leads and conversions
How you accomplish these strategies depends on your business philosophy, your personality, and what works best for your ideal client avatar.
11. Social Media
Social media allows you to cast a wide net to reach potential leads.
For ad buys, social media provides a significant return on your investment.
To leverage the advantages of social media, educate yourself on the most recent social media platforms that yield results.
For example, posting listings on Instagram is a big turnoff. However, posting before and after pictures of a remodel or new home build, posting polls about different types of upgrades, and showing pictures of happy clients receiving their keys all receive better reception on the platform.
Also, Tik Tok is an excellent way to inform and entertain your audience with a brief video.
Educating yourself on what other agents have done that yields the desired results will help you with your leadership development strategies.
12. Video Texts
Speaking of video, one marketing strategy that I’ve used with tremendous success is to create video text messages for people in my sphere, generating hundreds of leads to the tune of over $1 million in gross commission income, or GCI.
Here’s how it works.
Every day I send out a quick video text to 10 people. Nothing real estate or business-related; these messages are 100% personal messages. This strategy is about investing in relationships with people.
As you market yourself in other areas, combined with the personal touch, text messages create a top-of-mind approach that positions you as the real estate expert that clients want.
13. Create Partnerships
One lead generation opportunity is to create strategic partnerships with other industry experts. For example, people get divorced, family members die or lose a job, or perhaps people are about to start a family or are looking to downsize for retirement.
So reach out to divorce attorneys, wedding planners, probate lawyers, and the like.
Consider all the things your potential client may need and reach out to professionals in various industries to see if you can be a recommended resource.
Be sure to make the partnership a two-way street, meaning if you get access to a potential client that needs their services, those are the experts you’ll recommend.
These partnerships are based on the principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity is the effect that I do something nice for you, and you return the favor. It’s a boomerang effect for helping others out, and what’s more, you’ll add to the value you provide your clients, further enhancing your reputation as the top expert.
14. Become A Quotable Expert
Another way to create passive leads is by becoming a “quotable’ expert. What do I mean when I say this?
Becoming a quotable expert is someone that news organizations and outlets will reach out to when they have industry-specific questions.
I know it seems impossible to be a quotable expert until you’re the top real estate agent in your area, but it’s much simpler than you think.
All you need to do is to reach out to publishers and other media and have answers ready for them about the industry. One way to get in touch with reporters is through HARO.
If you’ve never heard of HARO before, it stands for Help A Reporter Out and is a service that reporters use to contact anybody with credible information on a slew of topics.
Simply sign-up with HARO, look for any topics related to real estate, marketing, or any other area that ties nicely to your business, and answer their questions.
In return, you’ll get a quote for publication. Sometimes even major publications like the New York Times or The Washington Post will quote you, and voila! You’re now the industry expert.
Another way to create the reputation of being a quotable expert is to write a book about a specific topic or niche in the real estate industry.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to stress over every word. You can outsource the writing to professionals. For example, my students have the opportunity to become a co-author with me, using the same writer that I paid thousands to write my four best-selling books.
15. More Traditional Lead Generation Ideas
After looking at some of the more creative ways to grow your brand and reputation, some traditional lead generation strategies you can also consider:
- Optimize your website for SEO
- Create compelling and engaging blog posts
- Paid online ads
- Mailers and door hangers
- Business cards
- Sponsorship for youth activities
One of the primary purposes of your lead generation strategy is establishing your reputation as the go-to real estate expert. You can be as creative as you want, or you can choose to go a more traditional route of lead generation, whatever best suits your needs and potential clients.
Lead generation is a process of understanding what type of client you may have and their needs.
You want to position yourself as having the solutions to their problems, whether for first-time buyers or selling a home to relocate.
Choosing a lead generation strategy that aligns with your goals and values and makes sense for each lead type is an individual choice. There is no one-size-fits-all lead generation strategy, and any lead generation you have should be designed to fit your market, your clients, and your needs.
