For most real estate agents, working with homebuyers is essential to their career success and increasing their commissions. The best way to boost your company’s profits, differentiate yourself from other agents, and do it without spending a fortune is to consistently generate real estate buyer leads. There are numerous ways to do this, including hosting events, using paid lead generation services, and attracting real estate leads organically.
Here are more than a dozen of the most successful strategies used by successful real estate agents to generate leads among active homebuyers.
Table of Contents
How Do Homebuyers Pick A Buyers Agent
Calling a spade a spade, and choosing a buyer’s agent can be an arbitrary process. They may locate you in one of the following ways:
- Picking the agent sitting at an open house
- From a sign call
- Walking into office hours
- Referral from a friend
- Doing a home search on a website and calling the agent with the listing
There’s an old saying that goes, “Buyers buy houses, sellers buy marketing,” and it couldn’t be more accurate. Making sure you have access to a lot of listings is essential if you want to work with homebuyers. And NO, this doesn’t require you to be a listing agent to succeed.
1. Work The Rent Vs Buy Angle
Targeting renters—individuals who don’t currently own a home and might be waiting for the ideal opportunity to buy—is an effective way to reach potential buyers. Additionally, if your place of employment is in or close to a big city, rentals are typically very common.
Targeting residents of apartment buildings or condominiums with direct mail campaigns makes it simple to draw in renters who are interested in purchasing a home. Your campaign should address the common complaints of renters, such as the inability to renovate or customize their home, a lack of privacy, a lack of outdoor space, problems with parking, and storage.
To demonstrate to renters the financial advantages of ownership over renting, you can also use a rent vs. buy calculator. It could be shared on your social media pages or sent in an email campaign to pre-selected leads and past renters.
2. Targeted Ads
You can expand your reach while zeroing in on a specific target audience by using targeted online real estate ads. Your ad should use keywords like “how to buy a home” or “first-time buyer tips” and display ads that address the queries that potential homebuyers are likely to be looking for.
Additionally, you have the option to use geotargeting, also known as targeting by location, to concentrate on your area of expertise and draw customers who are looking to buy or sell in that specific region. For instance, Google ads will let you target a particular nation, several locations, or a particular radius for your campaigns to reach your ideal audience.
You can find highly qualified buyers in other ways, both online and offline, even though Facebook and Google are the most popular platforms for online real estate advertising. To attract potential buyers for your real estate, you could, for example, promote your services on nearby billboards and other signs, participate actively in Nextdoor and neighborhood Facebook groups, or place ads on Craigslist.
3. Become A Zillow Premier Agent
You can advertise on the biggest real estate listing platform, which is also the one that active and interested homebuyers most frequently visit, by becoming a Zillow Premier Agent (ZPA). As a ZPA, you are the only agent listed on your listings, and prospective buyers will get in touch with you directly for more details. Additionally, non-Premier Agent listings in your area will feature your profile, giving you more exposure to potential clients.
4. Stay Top Of Mind In Your Sphere Of Influence
Nothing will be more efficient than referrals from people in your sphere of influence (SOI) for generating real estate buyer leads. Your SOI is made up of everyone who already knows you, including friends, family members, and both close and distant acquaintances. Even if you haven’t personally assisted them with a real estate transaction, people who already know you and regard your knowledge of the local housing market are very likely to send you real estate referrals.
Reach out to people in your circle on a regular basis to make sure you remain prominent. Never approach someone with a hard sales pitch. Instead, maintain genuine connections with everyone in your SOI, offer referrals yourself, and occasionally remind them that you would be happy to help if they have any recommendations.
5. Create An Idx Website
Instead of using a larger platform where there is a high likelihood that they will be contacted by another agent, users can search for properties on your website with the help of an internet data exchange (IDX) website. With the right real estate website builder, having an IDX website is an excellent way to draw real estate buyer leads.
As an alternative, you can build an IDX website, create real estate leads, keep track of contacts, and send drip email marketing campaigns using an all-in-one tool like Real Geeks. You can also build landing pages, make Facebook ads, and write blogs with Real Geeks to increase organic website traffic.
6. Capture Leads With A Landing Page
Even if you don’t have a website, you can still create landing pages to generate real estate buyer leads or add landing pages to your current website. Landing pages can be used in conjunction with advertisements or to draw real estate leads from organic search results, email newsletters, or social media advertising. You can even make multiple landing pages to cater to various buyer types, such as renters, leads from new neighborhoods, home sellers, or first-time buyers.
Com is a fantastic option whether you want to start with a landing page or want to build a full website. Simply complete a form describing the elements you want to appear on your landing page, and their team of skilled marketers will do the rest. By doing this, you can personalize your landing page for real estate while maximizing conversions without investing additional time, energy, or money.
7. Farm A Specific Neighborhood
A lot of rookie agents search far and wide for leads from real estate buyers. A city, county, or even a neighborhood can be chosen as the focus, and becoming the go-to authority there is one of the best ways to succeed in real estate.
Real estate farming is the practice of concentrating all of your prospecting and lead generation efforts in a single geographic area. Making the most of your valuable time and money is possible through farming. You can provide buyers in your farm area with an unmatched level of expertise because it keeps you laser-focused on establishing trust and authority in a single area.
Try MarketLeader if you want to concentrate on a farm area. It’s one of the few lead sources that offer a set quantity of exclusive leads, increasing your chances of attracting new customers on autopilot. You can establish yourself as the local real estate expert in your preferred ZIP code with the aid of a market leader.
8. Host An Open House
For decades, generating buyer leads for real estate has been successfully accomplished with the help of open houses. You usually get to meet a lot of prospective buyers when you host an open house. Offer to host open houses for other agents’ listings or to help, even if you don’t have a listing of your own.
9. Become Active On Social Media
You can connect with prospects directly through social media and position yourself as the area’s top real estate expert. It’s not complicated to use social media to generate real estate buyer leads, but to be successful, you still need to understand and use effective real estate social media marketing strategies.
Social media offers an undeniable opportunity for agents to connect with active homebuyers without having to spend money on advertising or direct mail campaigns, despite the fact that some agents feel overwhelmed by the idea of using it. It is likely for this reason that 47% of real estate agents claimed that leads they received through social media were more qualified than leads from other sources.
You can hire a social media marketing company or work with a freelancer if you don’t want to put in the time to learn how to use social media but recognize its value for marketing. For example, Fiverr.com gives you access to tens of thousands of skilled social media freelancers. You can interview as many as you need to find the best fit, and their services are typically less expensive than those of traditional marketing agencies.
10. Invest In Lead Generation Software
You can generate buyer leads consistently in a number of ways, but you might prefer to scale your company and deal with more customers. Purchasing leads through real estate lead generation software is one way to achieve this. The hard work is taken care of by lead buying services. They provide contact lists of buyers actively looking for real estate or a local agent, using sizable data pools and automation.
The methods used by various lead generation firms for the real estate industry vary, but they all aim to give you a variety of leads and special tools for converting them. BoldLeads, which offers exclusive buyer leads starting at $299 per month, is our number one source for paid leads. You will receive qualified leads from BoldLeads using targeted Facebook advertising, and because of exclusivity, you won’t face competition from other agents.
Visit our article on where to buy real estate leads to find out more about BoldLeads and other services that might be useful to you.
11. Send Gifts To Past Clients To Get Referrals
Don’t forget to keep in touch with your previous clients. Setting up a gift-giving system with presents for special occasions, closing date anniversaries, or sporadic real estate client pop-by gifts is one of the most efficient ways to accomplish this. The objective is to demonstrate your gratitude for their business, remind them of your services in case they decide to buy or sell again in the future, and promote new referrals.
Consider using a client gift service like EvaBot to reduce the time and effort required for gift-giving. Evabot creates gifts that are customized to your client’s preferences using artificial intelligence (AI). Since EvaBot can place a handwritten note inside a gift box that is imprinted with your logo, you can even take personalization a step further.
12. Write A Blog
You must find ways to demonstrate your expertise if you want to be taken seriously as a real estate expert. By setting up a WordPress blog—or including a blog on your website—and regularly updating it with fresh content, you can accomplish that fairly quickly. You can write about events, make videos, talk about your real estate experiences, share client endorsements, and offer professional guidance and homebuyer advice.
How To Becoming The Best Buyer Agent
It all comes down to networking and leads, whether you want to be an exclusive buyer’s agent or want to find buyers for your current listings.
People want to buy homes, and there are homes available; you just need to establish connections.
Today’s realtors need the internet more than ever. Online real estate sales are sought after by buyers. The goal of sellers is to instantly sell their homes.
A real estate expert, on the other hand, can provide guidance, support, one-on-one assistance, and all the necessary paperwork. You’ll become the first person called when someone wants to buy if you cultivate your relationships.
Why Choose To Buy Rather Than Sell?
I believe there is a significant distinction between working with buyers and sellers. Buyers are frequently under a lot of stress due to the mortgage application process, down payment, inspections, etc. Additionally, they are more sensitive because they are purchasing their next house.
Sellers exhibit (slightly) less emotion. They may have lost interest in the house and are eagerly anticipating moving on to their new place because they are prepared to move.
