Double Your Real Estate Business: Step 3 – Use Your Listings
You know what your best tool is as a real estate agent? It’s the listings you already have. Your existing listings are your billboard of success, telling everyone that you are an expert and that you know what you’re doing. Don’t believe it? What’s in front of every single listing?
I’ll give you a hint: It’s three feet wide, four feet tall and has YOUR name on it advertising your real estate selling skills. It’s your SIGN.
But how can you leverage this to work in your favor.
From every single active listing, you should be able to generate three or more new pieces of business. But your sign alone isn’t going to do it for you. You need to be leveraging this property for a face-to-face to at least get the conversation going.
Now let’s go over some simple ways you need to be using to help drive face-to-face meetings to your listings.
Send Out Postcards
Target move-up buyers or the neighbors to invite them to the open house an hour before. This sounds harder than it is. I know, most of us are NOT graphic designers and don’t know a thing about photoshop, G.I.M.P., layers, drop shadows or typefaces. But this is where things get simple. Use a TOTALLY FREE service like Canva to design the cards. You know already what the card needs to have:
- Pictures of the house
- YOUR picture
- Open House times and
- Text that makes people interested
With Canva you can get ideas, samples, templates and a simple “drag and drop” interface.
Not sure what to write? Try different things to see what works.
You could play on their FOMO (fear of missing out) and use a line like, “Come find out what you can get for your house.”
You could use a bit of “keeping up with the Jones’” and use a line like, “See what makes their house worth the asking price.”
You could use anything. The point is that different people will respond to different stimuli. So cast a wide net and catch the most potential listings.
Call Your Sphere
Calling and notifying people in your sphere about the new listing or open house. They want to know what’s going on. Even better if it’s an active (or interested) buyer and the house fits their need. This becomes a no-brainer.
Again, your goal is to entice them to stop in, not buy. If you can get them through the door then you can have them face to face and see what works best.
If your sphere is associates, other realtors, then they can bring you potential sales. But you can’t expect them to find you on their own.
Listen, you can either WAIT for people to FIND your listings….
Or you can light a giant beacon and say, “It’s here, come and get it,”
Call Their Neighbors
Calling the neighbors before the sign goes up can create showings. They got your postcard in the mail. They know who you are. You are literally in their neighborhood. They drive past your name and phone number. Remind them. Let them know you’ll be in the neighborhood and would love to see how much THEY can make selling THEIR house.
It’s very rare that a neighbor moves down the street into a new house. Yes it does happen, I’m sure many of us have stories of it. It is not the norm.
But selling is contagious. Making money is contagious. Excitement is contagious. Spread that pathogen. Figuratively. Not literally. Don’t spread actual diseases.
Now your goal when calling neighbors is, again, NOT to make the sale. It’s to get them through the door of the listing so that you can have a one-on-one with them for a few minutes, get their contact information, and list THEIR house.
Consider rephrasing the line used in the postcard.
Bare minimum, don’t go in blind. Use a script. Stick to the script. Believe in the script. And have some fun.
Targeted Facebook Ads
Did you know you can geofence? Do you know what geofencing is? Here’s a quick breakdown.
Let’s say you have a house. Let’s say you want to be able to drop a pin on that house and target everyone within fifteen or twenty miles. You can do that with Geofencing.
When you set up a facebook ad, you can literally say, “Target an X mile radius of this address,” and facebook will do the rest.
Keep the costs low. Spend maybe $20-$30 dollars MAX (realistically less than $10) but this can help you drive people to the property. Direct people to the listing page on your website (or brokerage’s website) so that people can contact you.
The only thing to know is the order that people will engage with an ad.
The ad is broken into three parts. Image, Title, Description.
People see an ad and look at in in the following order: Image, Title, Description.
Your image is the fist thing they see. Make it the listing. Keep text in the image BELOW 25%. Better yet, don’t have ANY text in the image.
Quick Tip: If you can use video instead of an image, you will see better results.
You title is what they look at if they like the image. Short, punchy, actionable. That’s how your title should be.
Your description should list details about the house itself.
SOME people are even lucky enough to have a listing that meets a special category of “old houses”. There are entire facebook groups DEDICATED to showing old houses.
Groups like For the Love of Old Houses specialize in the promotion distribution of older homes that have been cleaned up and modernized in amazing ways.
They are also a PERFECT example of how to use Facebook BRILLIANTLY to showcase homes.
Remember – your listing is your key to other people’s homes. Using it smartly and with purpose can allow you to unlock those doors and grow your real estate listings.
