With the New Year, there come new opportunities to grow your real estate business and realize your full potential as an agent. To become a top-performing agent in your area, it is crucially important to find out how to get more real estate leads. Here are the 26 best ways to generate leads in real estate which you might not have considered in 2019.
#1. Have a Daily Routine
Getting more clients is not only about what you do in your office hours but also what you do in your free time. The most successful business people – both inside and outside the real estate industry – have a strict daily routine that they follow no matter what. This helps them stay organized and on top of their game. Try to get up early in the morning and start your day with an activity that charges you with positive energy such as yoga or a walk in the park. Don’t stay up too late and make sure you get enough sleep. Set up some time during the day in which you simply relax and do not even think about work.
#2. Hire a Life Coach
Another lifestyle change that can help you in getting more real estate leads is employing a life coach. Just because you’ve been closing real estate deals for a few years now doesn’t mean that you are an expert on everything there is to know about life. Learn from those who have succeeded in business in general and hire a coach, just as they do. This professional might help you change your whole perspective on life and make you more positive, productive, and excited about your career.
#3. Be Charitable
The beginning of the year is a good moment to implement another important adjustment in your life which will help boost your real estate career: start volunteering in the local community. Find a cause that matters to you and get on board. First of all, this will make you feel better about yourself and make your entire life more rewarding, and it is a fact that happier people perform better at work. Second, this will give you and your real estate business more exposure in the local community where you are buying and selling properties. Last but not least, showing your charitable side to property buyers and sellers will make them choose you over other real estate agents and brokers who seem to have less of a humane nature.
#4. Join Local Clubs
As mentioned above, becoming an active part of the community is key for real estate lead generation. Another way to do that – in addition to voluntary work – is to join different clubs and organizations. They could have a charitable cause or just be ways to get together to do fun things. Depending on your interests and hobbies, search for book clubs, sports clubs, and even dance classes. Once again, this will serve a dual purpose. In addition to doing something which you enjoy and/or developing new skills, you will get to meet more people in your housing market. And from the perspective of a real estate agent, every new contact is a potential buyer lead or seller lead.
#5. Attend Local Events
Another idea of how to get more leads as a real estate agent by engaging with the local community is to start attending different types of events. You don’t have to be limited to the club/s to which you decide to devote time to on a regular basis. You should also look for one-time events where you can show up and meet even more people. These could include fundraisers, farmers’ markets, book exhibitions, arts festivals, music fests, Halloween parties, Christmas bazaars, and anything else which is of interest to people in your real estate market. Wearing a name badge is a good marketing strategy to introduce yourself without having to talk about your real estate career explicitly. Who knows how many buyer leads and seller leads attend these events too?!
#6. Connect with Businesses in Your Real Estate Market
Find more real estate clients by establishing long-term relationships with businesses in the area. Visit local coffee shops, restaurants, stores, dry cleans, and other places that people frequent and talk to them about your real estate business. Ask if you can leave some flyers, brochures, business cards, property listings, and other real estate marketing materials with them. Don’t forget to offer something for them in exchange. It should be a two-way, mutually beneficial relationship. For example, you can post photos of yourself with your favorite cup of coffee in a branded mug from the local coffee shop and tag them on social media. You can also check in when eating your favorite lunch at the local deli. It can be as simple as that.
#7. Partner Up with Insurers
While we are on real estate lead generation ideas through partnerships, you should also partner with local insurers. Expanding his/her real estate network as much as possible is crucial for any successful real estate agent, and insurers should definitely be on this list. After all, any buyer lead is bound to get home insurance, and any buyer lead got home insurance at some point. Once again, this should be a mutually beneficial partnership and could even grow into a formal referral program. While you get real estate leads from insurance companies, you can definitely send them property buyers from your clients with whom you close deals.
#8. Work with Financiers
Most people buy real estate properties with a mortgage or another form of financing. This means that partnering up with bankers is an excellent way to generate real estate leads. Search for local financiers who would be interested in joining your referral program, whether you pay them per lead or send them leads in exchange.
#9. Talk to Divorce Attorneys
In the real estate industry, one person’s misfortune is another person’s fortune. People who are going through a divorce make for excellent seller leads as they are trying to sell their home quickly to get on with their new lives. That’s why connecting with lawyers who specialize in divorce cases is another one of the best ways to generate leads in real estate. Moreover, if either or both parties of the divorce are happy with how you handle the sale of their home, they might continue working with you to buy a new home, turning into buyer leads.
#10. Build a Referral System with Other Agents
Other real estate agents and brokers don’t have to necessarily be your rivalries, they can also be your partners, given the right circumstances. You should actively seek to build partnerships with other agents in the local US housing market and beyond. Look for agents who specialize in different niches or neighborhoods you are not familiar with. Together, you can figure out a referral system where you send real estate leads to one another.
#11. Build a Real Estate Website
Let’s start moving to how to get more real estate leads online. After all, the year will be all about technology and online presence. A must-have real estate lead generation idea in the coming year is to have your own website, different from your broker’s website. Have multiple pages where you tell real estate prospects about yourself, your experience and expertise as a successful real estate agent in the area, your current property listings, and your past sales. Ask past clients for testimonies.
#12. Focus on SEO
More and more searches in the real estate business will be happening online, which means that you should optimize your real estate agent website for search engines. The first step is to hire a professional web developer with specific knowledge of SEO so that he/she can take care of all technical issues. Then, use an SEO tool for finding the most important keywords for real estate agents in your local market. You will be familiar with most of them, but it is important to have some formal way of confirming what you already know. Then, start creating high-quality content with these keywords.
#13. Start a Real Estate Blog
You don’t have to be a professional content writer or blogger to write a real estate blog. Capitalize on the fact that you are one of the best experts on the real estate business in your local market and share your experience and knowledge with the community. You will not only capture potential leads who are searching online for the best agent to buy or sell their home, but you will also start building trust if they see how knowledgeable you are. Selling and buying a home are some of the most expensive transactions in regular people’s lives, so they want to work with someone whom they can trust.
#14. Use Visuals
Don’t just write content, but use other types of visual content as well. A picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to getting more leads in real estate. Post professional photos of all your current and past listings. Provide virtual tours of your properties for sale. Create real estate infographics with information which is useful for home buyers and homeowners.
#15. Make Real Estate Videos
One particularly important type of visuals which you should focus on is videos. Digital marketing trends and research are showing that the majority of online marketing in the coming years will be through videos. That’s why it is crucially important for you to get on this trend as soon as possible. Hire a part-time professional to create a few videos which talk about your brokerage and your experience as an agent. Upload videos of your real estate listings right away. You can even turn some of your blogs into real estate videos.
#16. Get on Social Media
You will never figure out how to get more real estate leads efficiently before you become active on social media. If you haven’t done so yet, create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and anything else which comes your way. Basically, the more the better. Each social media channel attracts different users, so it’s important for a successful real estate agent to be on all of them. Share your listings, your past successes, your written content, and your visuals. Use the best real estate hashtags to get as much exposure as possible.
Related: 22 Real Estate Social Media Marketing Ideas for Agents
#17. Have a Real Estate Podcast
Another thing that everyone in the digital real estate marketing world seems to be doing is having a podcast. So, you should not be left behind. Start a real estate podcast on your website where you talk about news and current issues in your local housing market. It is a good idea to invite guests so that you diversify the topics and get more exposure. Starting with an episode a week should do the trick.
#18. Claim Real Estate Profiles
Many real estate websites have free agent profiles, and that’s one more way of how to generate real estate leads for your business. Claim your profile and fill it in on as many websites as you can find. Each one of them helps boost your online presence. Furthermore, ask your satisfied clients to rate you and write comments on their experience with you. Potential buyer leads and seller leads are likely to try to find you on different online sources before they hire you to establish your credibility.
To claim your free real estate agent profile on Mashvisor, click here.
#19. Automate Your Marketing Campaigns
The advancement of high-tech, AI, and predictive analytics in real estate allows agents to automate most of their real estate marketing tasks. Sending emails, sending phone messages, posting on your blog, and sharing on social media should all be added to your automation process. Remembering to send out an email to the people you met at the open house last night should not be your priority for the day when a real estate software tool can take care of that. Instead, you should be using your creative energy to think about how to get more real estate leads.
#20. Master a Niche
While you can’t be the best real estate agent for every single property type and in every single neighborhood in your market, you can be the absolute top agent in a niche. You just have to find one and learn all there is to know about it. You can be the best agent for single family homes. Or the top-performing one in the Downtown area. Or the go-to agent for teachers. It doesn’t matter what your niche is – as long as there is enough demand – what matters is that you own it.
#21. Target FSBOs
Many people assume that they can sell their home alone as long as they create a listing on a few real estate websites and upload a few nice photos of it. That’s wrong. After all, the entire real estate industry is built on the fact that most people cannot buy and sell real estate on their own. To generate more leads, start actively looking for For Sale by Owner (FSBO) listings in your real estate market. Don’t target those that have just been listed. Instead, focus on the ones that have been in the market for a few weeks, and the property sellers are starting to get desperate, realizing that selling real estate might not be as easy as it looks on the outside. Then contact them with a friendly call in which you explain how your services can help them sell their home faster. Emphasize the fact that homes sold by agents sell for significantly more than FSBOs.
#22. Hunt for Expired Listings
Similarly, another of the main real estate leads generation ideas is to look for expired property listings. The homeowners will be quite desperate that their property didn’t sell as quickly as they hoped, and they are likely to accept any help. Tell them what exactly you will do differently from what they did or what their past agent did in order to succeed.
#23. Pay for Real Estate Leads
If you are a new agent, you should consider the option of buying leads. The real estate business is extremely competitive, and it is usually hard – if not impossible – for newcomers to generate leads on their own. Enrolling in a paid real estate leads generation program might be just what you need to give your career a boost early. Once you have a few satisfied clients, it will be much easier to start getting more leads in other ways.
Related: How to Get Real Estate Leads as a New Agent
#24. Make Use of the Holidays
Seasonality is a strong factor in the US real estate market. Everyone in the business knows that the majority of real estate transactions happen in the summer, while the fall and winter are slow seasons. If you want to generate more leads, you have to turn this reality around. Up your marketing game and focus on the colder months and the holidays. Have dedicated Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year marketing campaigns. The few leads who are trying to buy or sell then will be happy to see you.
#25. Keep in Touch with Past Clients
Don’t forget about your clients as soon as you close the deal. Instead, make it a priority in your marketing strategy and lead generation plan to stay in touch with past leads. You never know when someone will decide to sell the home they bought last year because they are moving to a new city. Or when a recent homeowner will choose to buy a vacation home as well. Moreover, your past clients definitely know people who are interested in buying or selling real estate even if they themselves are happy with their current home.
#26. Specialize in Working with Investors
We’ve left the best real estate lead generation idea to the end. Namely, work with real estate investors. While a regular person buys a home and stays in it for a few decades, investors are looking for profitable rental properties to buy all the time. From the point of view of a savvy agent, this means repeat business. You don’t have to throw your efforts on getting new real estate leads if you can continue working with the same leads over and over again. Not to mention that real estate investors are less picky and demanding than homebuyers. All that they care about is buying positive cash flow properties with good cap rate and good cash on cash return. As long as you have the best real estate investment tools for conducting real estate market analysis and investment property analysis quickly and efficiently, you are good to go.
Related: Comparative Market Analysis: A Real Estate Agent’s Guide
Mastering how to get more real estate leads is all about deploying the right mix of traditional, in-person strategies and modern, online efforts. After all, you’ll need to try a few of our 26 top real estate lead generation ideas to figure out which works best for you
To figure out how to give your real estate career a boost, keep reading our agent blogs.