Every real estate agent wants the same thing. They want high-quality leads that lead to trustworthy buyers. Real estate agents love nothing more than finding buyers who are easy to work with, and who know what they want and what they don’t.
When it comes to real estate buyers, few things are better than a smooth transaction. There is nothing like closing a big deal, getting the commission, and having a client for life. With the right approach, clients, and transactions, a real estate agent can enjoy buyers who come back again and again.
But what if this doesn’t work so easily?
Truth be told, there are many obstacles and challenges that inhibit lead generation. Buyer leads are sometimes irrelevant or inappropriate. It can become increasingly difficult to find buyers who are a good fit and who can meet certain criteria.
To convert a lead, real estate agents must consider a potential buyer’s credit history, financing, temperament, goals, needs, and more.
Fortunately, finding buyers doesn’t have to be so frustrating. With 15 years of real estate experience, leading expertise, and unwavering commitment, Elizabeth Riley knows what it takes to attract buyers and keep buyers coming back for more.
Let’s cover some of the biggest industry secrets, practices, and strategies every top buyers’ agent knows and applies. Your future real estate leads begin today.
Where Real Estate Agents Go Wrong
Too often, many real estate agents become overwhelmed by the industry. They’re thrown into a colossal world of countless people, parties, businesses, and entities. At every turn, there are brokers, mortgage lenders, bankers, agents, inspectors, contractors, lawyers, and more.
It becomes easy to get lost or discouraged, not knowing where to start or how to effectively find a niche. If you spread yourself too thin, you might become overloaded. However, if you get too specific, real estate buyer leads may be scarce.
As in life, real estate success is about balance.
If you’re trying to generate more real estate buyer leads, you need to first identify your goals. Are you a residential, commercial, or industrial agent? What is your focus, your field of expertise? Do you help clients with apartments or other multi-family properties? Do you focus more on single-family homes?
Are you trying to generate leads for a very niche market? Such as historical townhomes, large rural estates, or affordable suburban housing? Do you seek potential buyers of investment property?
The type of real estate buyer you target is entirely dependent on you. This is why you must identify your specific goals, objectives, and targets before you begin pursuing qualified leads.
Identifying the Buyers Agent Within
Before you can understand your target client, you need to understand the type of real estate professional you are, are becoming, and can be.
What’s your trajectory? What kind of real estate transactions do you want to optimize? Where do you see your real estate agent career in a year? In 5 years?
Is this a long-term or short-term commitment?
Understand Your Space in the Industry
What are your strengths and weaknesses as a real estate agent? What is your knowledge base, your experience, and your skill set? Are you better at negotiating and smoothly communicating property features in a way to capture leads and entice past clients?
Are you better at the numerical minutiae, the act of drawing up and dissecting data on behalf of clients? Do you enjoy conducting comparative analyses, determining finance structures, and planning mortgage schedules?
Are you a master of open houses, selling cash buyers through your incisive knowledge and property presentation?
A buyers’ agent can take many forms.
Before you generate buyer leads, interact with prospective clients, or do anything with real estate buyers, you need to know yourself. With the help of other agents and real estate professionals, you can carve your niche, maximize your abilities, and enjoy a sustainable, profitable career.
Buyer Strategies That Work for Any Real Estate Agent
Your identity as a buyers’ agent may change as you gain experience with different clients, markets, and industry professionals. This is good and natural. You may choose to change your trajectory formally or it may organically change. A combination of factors will affect your career, and as you expand your expertise and real estate business, you will be able to enjoy many strategies.
You may go from being a guru in one particular real estate sub-type to helping numerous buyers across numerous properties and markets. Regardless of where your real estate business stands, there are certain strategies you can employ to optimize further.
The following strategies are time-tested methods to attract buyers, remove unqualified leads, and outperform other agents.
Social Media Real Estate Marketing
Today’s real estate agent needs to be active online. With an incredibly saturated online marketplace, you must stand out. Be distinct. Be honest. Be human.
If you’re going to capture leads, you need to be more than merely a flat, boring professional. You want both buyer clients and seller clients to trust you.
It’s much easier to build a rapport with the right buyers if they genuinely like you. So use social media! Establish relationships with prospective buyers. Share and like relevant material.
Be engaging, showcasing both your professional aptitudes and your personal style and charisma.
How Social Media Can Convert Leads
One good way to leverage social media for real estate marketing is through photos and videos. Facebook and Instagram are especially useful for this strategy. For instance, a real estate buyer might come across a photo of an open house and reach out to you for more information.
You can even upload videos of virtual tours or investment property tutorials. By being unique, engaging, and consistent on social media platforms, you can target your messages to a variety of potential clients. These may include first-time homebuyers, home sellers, and even other agents.
If you want more buyers and qualified leads, social media is the way to go. Research indicates that almost half of real estate agents find leads through social media that are more qualified than other buyer leads.
With the personal feel of social media, you’re doing more than lead generation. You’re creating a client relationship that could last for your entire career.
Managed Social Media Sales Funnel
A managed social media sales funnel is a sales funnel that is essentially operated by an internet marketing or real estate professional on your behalf. Like traditional sales funnels, which promote lead generation and client conversion, managed sales funnels have the benefit of being optimized for the internet by seasoned specialists.
Let’s face it, you’re busy enough as it is. There are countless social media platforms with billions of users and posts happening all the time. If you tried to be active through all of these platforms, it would be a full-time job!
This is where finding buyer leads can become easier with marketing professionals.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing Management
With professionals, you can offload the responsibilities to internet advertising and marketing companies, freelancers like professionals on Fiverr, or other specialized services such as search engine optimization (SEO) firms.
If you’d like to have a more hands-on approach, you can always do paid ads on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms.
On Facebook alone, there are over 1.4 billion active monthly users. With targeted ad campaigns, you can cater to all kinds of demographics through an array of client-centered messages, relevant high-resolution photos, informative and inspirational videos, and other quality visual and written content.
These social media advertising campaigns allow any agent to promote listings by engaging with all applicable sectors and cross-sections of the community. More importantly, you can use data analytics to track engagement, impressions, click-through rates, and other metrics.
If leads are not going to your liking, you can always tweak the campaigns, suspend them or start new ones.
Facebook in particular is useful for connecting with buyers because of the tremendous filtering options. You can specifically engage potential clients based on their job type, interests, locations, education level, and more.
With targeted, engaging ads managed by social media professionals, you can quickly grow the reach of your real estate business.
Real Estate Buyer Leads Through Google
Google is the almighty algorithm of the internet. Every day billions of searches are conducted as people in all corners of the globe explore an infinite variety of topics and queries.
Whether using local business listings, paying for promotional ads, or optimizing through SEO, Google offers the savvy realtor countless growth opportunities.
Real estate agents interested in reaching new buyers have various options they can explore.
Google SEO for Real Estate Agents
SEO is one of the main advantages of using Google. As the world’s number one search engine, Google is constantly presenting people with what they want to find based on their search entries. The complex algorithm factors in relevancy and competition for keywords and phrases to best serve every search query.
Through SEO professionals, agents can capitalize on the power of Google and ensure that their websites, profiles, and more appear under relevant searches. This has the impact of substantially increasing buyer leads.
Your real estate website might never be found without strong SEO.
However, if the content is exactly what the user is searching for, potential buyers can be converted into actual buyers. The best SEO practices draw on all kinds of informational metrics to put the right websites and web pages before the right visitors.
The content, words, images, videos, headings, links, and more of a given webpage may trigger higher search results rankings. For real estate agents targeting specific markets and niches, ranking higher is key.
It’s one of the best ways to increase lead generation because it means that you’re getting visibility among the right people for the right real estate leads.
Google My Business for Real Estate Agents
For any listing agent, you want to be seen as a professional. This is where Google My Business (GMB) comes into play. This free internet-based service allows local businesses to promote their products and services in an easy, productive way.
GMB is an invaluable resource for those businesses that may be lacking an online presence elsewhere. It is especially fruitful for real estate professionals who want to immediately connect with buyer leads.
GMB allows anyone, whether past clients, new clients or prospective clients, to engage with your business right away. They can find you on a map, see your phone number, learn hours of operation, and leave and read reviews.
GMB also allows businesses to understand what audiences are targeted, who is clicking on links, how engagement is progressing, and more. As a free and easy-to-use service, it is a must-have for any buyer’s agent.
Targeting Real Estate Buyers with Google Ads
It doesn’t matter what you want to do to promote your business and reach qualified buyers. If you are on the internet, Google Ads can provide the much-needed visibility you need.
Whether you want to attract a certain type of buyer to your landing page, reconnect with previous clients, or share knowledge of networking events, Google’s ads provide the freedom to do so.
Through this paid advertising, you can increase your incoming traffic of qualified buyers. It’s done quite simply. Firstly, you choose a list of keywords that are relevant and competitive.
Then you have to agree to a bid price for these keywords. This price represents how much you will pay if a potential buyer clicks on your ad. Combined with your Quality Score, your ad may appear higher or lower in Google search results.
If any of this sounds too technical, you can always consult an SEO specialist for paid advertising help.
Just remember to be relevant when choosing your keywords. If you’re seeking a real estate buyer interested in apartment complexes, you should use keywords such as “apartment rentals” or “apartment real estate investing.”
If you’re targeting home buyers, you should use keywords such as “first-time homebuyers,” “home buyer” or “house hunting.” These specific and relevant keywords may then generate the real estate leads that you want.
Overall, Google’s paid ad programs can be used to target many buyers with various real estate needs. Through effective advertising, you can drive traffic to your landing page or landing pages, and stand out from other real estate agents.
Capitalizing on an IDX Website
The Internet Data Exchange (IDX) is one of the best ways to find buyer leads, improve real estate leads, and finally convert those leads. If you want to turn a real estate buyer lead into a real estate buyer, you can use IDX.
Through an IDX lead-generating website, you are more likely to convert visitors to your landing page. Why? Because the IDX software will automatically add Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listings to your website.
Because these listings are automatically and regularly updated, your IDX website will provide visitors access to the latest, most accurate information. In many respects, IDX data is more accurate, relevant, and up-to-date than information found on Zillow.
Zillow and other realty websites don’t use IDX, which means visitors to those websites may be searching through listings that aren’t even active anymore – but don’t tell a Zillow premier agent this!
This is why it’s of utmost importance that you sync your website with IDX. As the main software for realty protocols, standards, and properties, IDX is a must-have for any savvy real estate agent.
Before real estate leads can become clients, they have to trust you. If they see that your website is professionally integrated, they are more likely to contact you, open your emails, and click through to your landing pages.
This, in turn, may motivate a prospective buyer to attend open houses and explore the viability of a real estate transaction.
Building a Top-Notch Real Estate Team
Finding real estate buyer leads is about having the right connections and the proper resources. Let’s face it, the real estate industry is fiercely competitive. Numerous professionals are vying for certain properties, clients, markets, and profits.
The playing field is not always level. Some agents have inherent advantages due to connections and networking. One agent may have insider information on extensive capital and financing, whereas another agent is struggling just to find a few leads.
The industry is filled with predatory parties. They may take many forms, but their goal is usually the same: to profit no matter what. Immoral and unfair practices abound, and sometimes it’s difficult to know who to trust and where to turn.
The networks are vast and nuanced. Brokers, lawyers, lenders, banks, agents, investors, and more are everywhere. Somebody somewhere is always looking for a piece of the action. If you don’t look over your shoulder from time to time, you may get caught by surprise.
This is why having a good team around you can be critical to your success.
Benefits of a Buyer’s Agent Team
A sound professional realty team will allow you the freedom to take part in various projects while enjoying your share and commission cut. You can leverage other professionals’ contacts and connections. You can make the most of others’ specialized expertise and experience.
When you are part of a team, you may find and secure buyers you never would have otherwise. Team members are also great for referrals. By paying it forward, you may receive seller or buyer referrals down the road.
With referral agents, you can receive high-quality, pre-screened real estate buyer leads quickly and efficiently.
By taking advantage of shared resources, clientele, experience, and expertise, a team of realtors is a great vehicle for industry success.
Even if you aren’t formally part of a firm or group, you can always cultivate an informal network. This may take the form of a Facebook group, email list, or direct mail recipients. You can share informative content through newsletters, documents, and other realty-related resources.
Just make sure that your team is functioning in a mutually beneficial way. Ask industry veterans and do your homework when considering working with certain professionals, businesses, and entities.
A lot of success in the industry is based on reputation and character. Don’t be shy. Attend social gatherings, networking seminars, and other interactive events. Learn the major players in your niche and study how they succeed. Ask them for guidance or advice.
What pressing questions or concerns do you have? Are you looking for potential cash buyers for a property? Are you dealing with a particular client who is a major cash buyer? Do you have doubt or hesitation about a certain potential client, partner, or firm?
Did you meet somebody particularly intriguing at an open house but are unsure how to proceed?
Be smart, be measured, and never rush into anything. Consult with top realty minds and learn how being a team player can bring your game (and profits) to the next level.
One great way to assemble a team, or at least reach multiple important parties, is through mail and email.
Mail and Email Marketing Campaigns
Mail and email are important methods for reaching potential clients and fellow professionals. You can send personalized letters, provide new and exciting market news, showcase attractive listings, and more with email and mail marketing.
The main reason to use direct mail marketing is that it has that personal touch. It is a tangible piece of paper or resource. If you’re targeting a local area, this is your chance to show your deep understanding of local properties, events, sentiments, and more.
Advantages of Mail and Email Marketing
You want to highlight not just your understanding of great properties, but your ability to connect to the community. Show that you care about where people live. When you send your mail, time it right during the peak months of real estate activity.
Work the holidays and special events. Cater your mail to certain potential buyers. Make the mail eye-catching, personal, and not gimmicky. Whatever you do, don’t over-send. Once a month is usually fine. It keeps your name and brand in people’s minds but doesn’t feel forced.
When sending out emails, you can use services such as Mailchimp for email marketing campaigns. You can also include links to your Facebook or Instagram account as part of an integrated social media marketing effort.
With email marketing services, you can send out thousands of emails at once, tailor them perfectly, track analytics, and ensure results are optimized.
Overall, email and mail are great ways to attract and secure clients.
Securing Clients
In the end, you want clients you can trust. You want clients who are easy to work with, most likely to close, and most likely to become customers for life. This, of course, is not always easy. Clients have countless demands, needs, and preferences. They can be fickle.
They may not meet certain standards or requirements.
This is where a top realty firm can assist. With the assistance of sterling real estate minds, an agent can secure high-quality, pre-screened leads likely to convert.
Elizabeth Riley of eXp Realty knows how it works. As part of a global, interconnected team of realty experts, she helps successful agents everywhere create the lasting income streams they want and deserve.
So don’t miss out on strategic partnerships, unmatched technology tools, and world-class education. Attract the best buyers for your business today. Contact Elizabeth and start building your legacy now.