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Gaining referrals from local real estate leads is a difficult task, but some ways to go about it are more effective than others. In this blog post, I’ll share 10 referral lead generation ideas that you can use in your business.
The “how to generate leads in real estate as a new agent” is a question that has been asked before. Here are 10 ideas for generating leads in real estate.
When someone directly suggests you as a real estate agent to someone who needs your services, this is known as a real estate referral. Real estate recommendations are the most cost-effective and effective method to expand your company, so knowing how to produce them is critical. These strategies will produce real estate referral leads so you can attract more customers, from holding events to community participation, networking, sustaining post-transaction connections, and referral partnerships.
Maintaining contact with prior customers allows you to ask for fresh real estate recommendations in the road, which will help you grow your firm. Use a real estate client relationship management (CRM) like LionDesk to maintain consistency. Through bulk email and text message drip marketing, LionDesk will manage and automate your client contact. It will also create multi-channel campaigns to increase your referral outreach and bring in additional real estate customers. For 30 days, you may try it for free.
Visit LionDesk for more information.
Here are some great suggestions for efficiently building your real estate referral business:
1. Organize client events
Hosting events for your sphere of influence (SOI), which includes friends, family, past coworkers, and current clients, is a great way to get client-to-agent or SOI-to-agent recommendations. After your customers close on their new property, offer to throw housewarming parties or client appreciation events such as cookouts or cocktail parties for them.
You’ll automatically position yourself as a real estate expert and emphasize your shared connections with new leads by creating events that your customers want to attend and bring friends to. A successful event is likely the most efficient means of immediately establishing “know, like, and trust” with new leads.
2. Participate in Your Community
An example of a sponsored real estate playbill advertisement (Source: Wylie Acting Group)
Be as active as possible in your target community, whether it’s through attending a sports event, a play, or a carnival. Support events as a donor or financial sponsor when you have the chance.
Your logo and contact information are shared and displayed throughout the event and printed materials when you sponsor events. If there is a school play, for example, inquire about purchasing ad space in the playbill to promote your real estate firm. This is a fantastic approach to meet new people in your neighborhood and position yourself as a local expert who gives back.
3. Volunteer & Participate With Charities
Volunteering at events and becoming a member of charitable groups that important to you is another fantastic way to become engaged in your community. A breast cancer walk, a puppy adoption event, a food drive, or a fair in favor of the local fire department are all possibilities.
For other charity volunteers and participants, having your name connected with the organization will foster a deep bond and attract like-minded individuals with whom you may form a network. You also get to donate to a cause that you care about.
4. Send Follow-up Messages to Past Clients on a Regular Basis
As previously said, remaining top-of-mind with prior clients and your SOI is an important aspect of producing real estate referrals. There are undoubtedly many individuals in your SOI who would gladly recommend you to their friends, but they must remember your name, contact information, and where to locate you. A client relationship manager, commonly known as CRM software or customer relationship management software, may drastically improve the efficiency with which you engage with prospects, existing customers, and previous clients.
CRMs keep track of all of your contacts’ data and contact information. To stay in touch with your contacts, you may send individual or automated phone calls, emails, and messages from there. CRMs may also monitor behavior to see who reacts (opens, clicks, replies, and so on) and remind you if you haven’t contacted out in a while. You can strengthen your brand and build long-term connections by sending email marketing with holiday greetings, newsletters, market reports, new listings, or simply a hey note.
Pipedrive interface for managing lead pipelines
It will become more tough to maintain track of all of your contacts on your own as your company expands. That’s why you need a customer relationship management system (CRM) like LionDesk or Pipedrive to monitor and manage your interactions and messages. Because of its real estate-friendly features, easy-to-use design, and low pricing, Pipedrive was named the best overall real estate CRM. It is ideal for both novice agents and high-volume brokerages.
Go to Pipedrive.com.
5. Use social media to encourage real estate referrals
If you don’t have a well-established company in the neighborhood, getting recommendations might be tough. Posting on social media and encouraging your friends and customers to write about your real estate services on social media is one approach to enhance local brand awareness. Any popular platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter, may be used to make a post.
You’ve probably seen real estate recommendations in action on social media without even realizing it. When an agent tags their pleased customers in a picture of them on move-in day in front of their new house, it’s a de facto social media recommendation since the post is viewed not just by the agent’s network, but also by the client’s social connections.
You may use a variety of strategies to increase your social media outreach for real estate referrals. When you make a post, emphasize your expertise in the sector by include information, facts, and figures that only real estate experts are aware of.
You may include a link to your website or landing page in your article to capture new leads who are interested in the topic. When you post about a completed transaction or an active listing, tag your clients so that their friends and family can know who you are and how valuable you are as a real estate expert.
(Image credit: Instagram)
Use hashtags in your social media postings to raise brand recognition and reach out to a specific demographic. For example, a real estate agent specializing in Manhattan’s Midtown East could use hashtags like #midtowneast, #mte, #midtowneasthighrise, #midtowneastapartments, #livebygrandcentral, #openhousemidtowneast, or others that are specific to the clients you’re targeting and the area where you’re looking for referrals.
To advertise your real estate firm to others, ask your SOI to post about you on their social media. In fact, 43% of people are more inclined to purchase a new product after hearing about it from friends on social media. Consider your company as a product that can be purchased, and broaden your network beyond your SOI to include the spheres of people who can help you produce reference customers.
Companies like Artur’in can help you come up with social media post ideas if you’re stuck. Choose from a variety of themes or customize your own articles to captivate your target audience with innovative writing and amazing graphics. You can also utilize the Artur’in scheduling function to ensure that you’re active on all of your social media accounts.
Pay a visit to Artur’in.
6. Host Workshops & Seminars
Organizing a workshop is an excellent way to meet prospective customers and display your skills. You may host seminars on popular topics, such as a first-time homebuyer’s seminar or financial suggestions for house buyers.
You may even conduct virtual events or seminars that cover more specialised subjects, such as what to do once your listing expires or the best house upgrades to make (ROI). Don’t forget to invite your circle of influence to share the seminar through email or social media, allowing them to recommend their contacts to you directly.
Use PostcardMania to market your seminar or workshop to get the word out to your target audience if you need to send mailers. PostcardMania can leverage the information from your direct mailers to design and execute advertising on Google, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as email campaigns, to increase your reach.
Go to PostcardMania.com.
7. Become a member of an agent referral network
Joining an agent referral network is a straightforward approach to establish professional agent-to-agent recommendations. Referral Exchange, for example, introduces your customer to three top agents in their target location and allows them to pick the one who best suits their requirements.
Referral Exchange will also follow the transaction’s progress, making the process simple and reassuring other agents that you are a trustworthy agent for their customers. To connect with possible referral sources, check for state-specific referral networks or join Facebook groups.
Collecting real estate referral fees for just giving a client’s name and contact information might produce passive revenue. Clients who are gained via recommendations have a 37 percent greater retention rate and are four times more likely to make a purchase than those who are not acquired through referrals, according to statistics. Building an agent referral network can be advantageous as active and passive revenue from your real estate firm since not all customers and agents are a great fit geographically, fiscally, or personality-wise.
8. Recognize and reward real estate referrals
Your customers and business contacts should be so confident in your services that they will gladly and routinely recommend you to all of their friends and family. Giving them incentives to provide you real estate recommendations, on the other hand, isn’t a bad idea.
Gifts are one of the most effective methods to show prior clients and referral partners that you care, but they may be time-consuming to purchase for, wrap, and send. That’s why EvaBot is so useful: you can set up an automatic giving system to motivate real estate referral prospects and encourage them to spread the word about you.
EvaBot uses Zapier to connect to your CRM and deliver a gift link to closed customers. They may choose their present choices from the website, and EvaBot will send a one-of-a-kind item to their door. See how this service may help you grow your company and get more customer recommendations.
The preferences gathering function provided by EvaBot
EvaBot may be found on the internet.
9. Collaborate with real estate professionals.
Flyer with a same theme (Source: Pinterest)
It may be a win-win scenario for both of you when you create collaborative partnerships with other industry specialists. Sending combined direct mail advertisements as a real estate agent and mortgage broker team, for example, gives the impression of a one-stop shop for prospects. Co-hosting events, too, expands your potential reach to numerous audiences, and your cooperation, in effect, transmits an endorsement of one another’s services, further instilling trust in prospective consumers.
Clients may join a team that already works well together for their advantage, rather of having to seek for and discover many real estate specialists. Real estate lawyers, divorce attorneys, title firms, contractors, inspectors, and appraisers are examples of these sorts of partnerships.
Hold a workshop or training expressly for the leads they refer to you if you have a good business connection. If you often get leads from a divorce attorney, for example, host an event that addresses all of the housing inquiries and concerns that divorcees commonly have. You may substantially enhance your conversions by becoming a resource with the information customers need.
Because each of you has your own marketing tools and connections, co-marketing partnerships may quickly expand your area of influence and speed up your marketing activities. In other words, you help other firms, and they help you. Just double-check with your state to see whether co-branding in marketing materials or events is legal.
Produce excellent marketing materials on a regular basis.
It’s critical to be top-of-mind in order to optimize your referral chances. The more prior customers and connections see or engage with you, the more likely they are to remember you when a friend or family member need a reference. Emails, social media, events, and mailers are just a few of the many methods to keep your real estate services and brand in front of prospects on a regular basis. Your website, on the other hand, is the bedrock of all of these real estate marketing strategies.
Your real estate website serves as the hub for all of your marketing activities, serving as a conduit for leads to come in from all of these different marketing sources. As a result, having a professional, appealing, and effective website intended to acquire leads and turn them into customers is critical. Placester is a website builder for real estate professionals who don’t want to invest time figuring out how to use technology but don’t want to compromise on quality. Use the free trial to experience how simple Placester is to use.
Pay a visit to Placester.
Taking a Closer Look at the Different Types of Real Estate Referral Sources
Because referrals are the leads most likely to convert to customers, they are one of the most essential forms of real estate lead creation. In fact, 41% of property sellers got their agent via a recommendation.
The beauty of real estate recommendations is that there are several sorts and methods for increasing your referral pool. In fact, obtaining recommendations from a variety of sources will enable you to interact with a variety of homebuyers and sellers who will continue to refer you to your ideal clientele.
The three most popular forms of real estate referrals are as follows:
Client-to-Agent Recommendations
Client-to-Agent Recommendations are the most common and well-known type of real estate referral. It occurs when a current or former client tells other homebuyers or sellers about your services. You should always aim to provide such valuable service that your clients develop a strong sense of loyalty and desire to tell others about you. Agents who are successful in real estate generate referrals frequently for this very reason.
Even if you consistently deliver excellent service, you shouldn’t leave recommendations to chance. Make it a point to ask your customers for fresh recommendations on a regular basis, preferably around or shortly after their closing date. It may be as easy as saying, “If you know someone who is looking for a home, I would be delighted to help them!” Simply asking for references from one customer might result in months or years of new leads and business.
Agent-to-Agent Recommendations
Most real estate brokers have a marketing farm where they concentrate their efforts. It might be a specific area, city, town, or county, or even a certain customer type. Agent-to-agent real estate referrals are an excellent choice when one of those customers moves to an area outside of your own area or specialization. They offer a trusted and informed link for your clients while also allowing agents to collaborate to produce leads and profits.
The agent-to-agent referral method, in particular, differs from others. In this case, the agent who refers a prospective customer to another agent gets compensated for their efforts with a real estate referral fee. As a result, agent referral connections need a formal referral agreement that specifies who the contact is, their contact information, whether they are buying or selling, and the amount of the referral fee. It is normally forwarded to the broker or office manager of the receiving agency for signature.
The agreement should also include a financial structure, such as a referral fee, that both agents have agreed to and explain how it is computed. A referral fee is typically set at 25% of the commission earned. You may also use the following formula to compute the referral fee:
Commission Paid = Real Estate Transaction Sales Price x Commission Percentage
Referral Fee = Commission Paid x a quarter of a percent
Client referrals to other agents might turn into a source of passive revenue. There are a lot of businesses that may help you generate a solid reputation if you’re trying to make more agent-to-agent referral relationships.
MarketLeader, for example, enables you to completely design your real estate website with photographs, layouts, and widgets to display your professionalism and value, which may assist a potential partner gain confidence in your capacity to service their customers’ requirements. You can also use the MarketLeader CRM to send targeted email and text messages to other agents in order to expand your agent referral network.
Go to MarketLeader.com.
What if I told you that There is an expiry date when submitting a recommendation to another agency. Follow up and check in on the customers you suggested and their progress after signing a referral agreement. If the process is taking longer than expected, you may need to extend your referral agreement to ensure it doesn’t expire before the transaction is completed. You don’t want to miss out on a lucrative chance because the contract has ended.
Business-to-Agent Recommendations
Another excellent source of real estate recommendations is local companies. This is particularly true if you have referral alliances with other real estate-related firms such as mortgage brokers, banks, lawyers, house inspectors, and appraisers. Because they are mutually advantageous, partnerships in similar professions might be simpler to form.
You may establish business partnerships with or without a formal pay agreement in place. Even if you don’t have a reference agreement, it’s always beneficial to cultivate connections with company owners in all fields, from restaurants and coffee shops to professional services such as attorneys, physicians, dentists, and financial advisors. When a new lead or customer tells you that they were recommended to you by someone, always send a personal message and a modest pop-by gift to keep the connection going and promote future referrals from that company.
Conclusion
Real estate referrals are still the most efficient and cost-effective method of generating leads and acquiring new customers, making them an excellent investment for anybody looking to expand their real estate firm. Even if former customers are the most prevalent sort of real estate recommendation, don’t overlook the opportunity to receive leads from other firms and agents. You can develop an efficient and productive real estate referral system with little time and effort.
The “how to generate real estate leads online” is a blog post about 10 ways that you can get referrals for your real estate business.
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