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Casual Articles - Real Estate Leads 101:A System For Success
In today’s climate of business, CEOs and executives are cautiously optimistic about the economy and their company’s future growth. They realize that they still need to market to drive profitable growth and increase the company’s value, but the financial strings are being tightened. However, there is a clear growing trend for companies, regardless of size and industry, to outsource (or a term used not to long ago sub-contracting) an element of their business. Why does this trend continue to grow, and how do executives assess their needs? Outsourcing is not a passing fad, but clearly a paradigm shift that can change a business model for the better.Outsourcing involves the use of resources outside of th
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How many times do you hear warnings about what you should and shouldn't do? After looking at warning labels and signs all day, we become desensitized to the warnings and they lose their importance.Walking in the airport we see signs saying "Hold handrail while going up escalator." At the ice skating rink we see signs that say "Slippery, use caution." On our medication bottles we read "Warning-may cause harm if not taken as directed." On our laptop computers, cell phones, and digital cameras we see signs on the batteries that say "Warning-do not dispose in open fire."What are these warnings supposed to do? Warn us of dangers to specific activity. Does it work? Maybe. Then again, maybe not
1. How are you getting real estate leads?
2. How are you following up with your real estate leads?
3. Are you using a system for effective follow up?
How to Get Real Estate Leads
For questions 2 and 3 to even be an issue, you first have to figure out a way to GET real estate leads. You can't follow up with something you don't have! There are several traditional ways for real estate agents to collect real estate leads in their pipeline. One way is the direct marketing approach – basically you send out a whole lot of newsletters, fliers, and postcards with your contact information to homes in the neighborhood you're farming for real estate leads. If you start getting calls and emails, you've started building your own pipeline.
A second way of getting real estate leads is to network and ask past clients for referrals. As a real estate agent, you should always be talking to be people in the outside world, letting them know what you do, handing off business cards. Whether you're at a sports event, a dinner party or you're child's school play, there are plenty of opportunities to build real estate leads. Never be afraid to call on old clients for referrals either – if you did your job right,t hey should be more than happy to send friends and family your way.
A third way to get real estate leads is through internet marketing. In this case, I mean building your own website with contact pages as well as subscribing to some kind of online lead generation service. By doing both, you can both harness your own real estate leads and also get plenty of leads from an outside source.
My advice? Go with all three. A good mix of direct mailings, networking, and internet marketing should have your pipeline a mile long with real estate leads. Keep in mind though that you will have to spend a little money to get all those leads!
Following up with Real Estate Leads
Without follow up, your real estate leads will be leads forever, never clients. Following up simply means to increase the effectiveness or success of something with further action. Following up with real estate leads can involve phone calls, emails, direct mailings, dropping by the property, etc. Basically, use any means necessary (within reason) to make contact with your real estate leads to determine what you can do for them. It may take 2 weeks of follow up to convert a lead, it may take 2 months, it may even take 3 years, but as long as you are consistent and persistent with follow up tactics, you can convert your real estate leads into clients.
One thing to keep in mind with follow up is that you should always have a reason to be contacting your real estate leads. Don't give them to much information in one mailing, or else you use up your reason for contacting them at a later date. Instead, send them pieces of useful information regularly over extended periods of time. It doesn't even necessarily have to be directly relating to home buying or selling – you can send them information about their community they may not know, the schools, job opportunities in an area you know they were thinking about moving to, the standings for the little league championship their son was in, etc. The information you're sending your real estate leads should be a individualized for each lead.
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There are many important factors in getting a website that really works for start-ups and over the next few weeks we are going to work through them and bring to bear experience from hundreds of sites and dozens of successful entrepreneurs who have worked with us and we have learned from.First in the countdown - if you are on a tight budget go for a fixed price contract. Don't write a blank cheque and encouraging slow, inefficient and overly complex work. Insist on seeing what you are going to get right from the beginning. If you have a larger budget you might be willing to experiment.Work out what you need - a content managed website or an ecommerce shop are most likely. A static html site may
A second way of getting real estate leads is to network and ask past clients for referrals. As a real estate agent, you should always be talking to be people in the outside world, letting them know what you do, handing off business cards. Whether you're at a sports event, a dinner party or you're child's school play, there are plenty of opportunities to build real estate leads. Never be afraid to call on old clients for referrals either – if you did your job right,t hey should be more than happy to send friends and family your way.
A third way to get real estate leads is through internet marketing. In this case, I mean building your own website with contact pages as well as subscribing to some kind of online lead generation service. By doing both, you can both harness your own real estate leads and also get plenty of leads from an outside source.
My advice? Go with all three. A good mix of direct mailings, networking, and internet marketing should have your pipeline a mile long with real estate leads. Keep in mind though that you will have to spend a little money to get all those leads!
Following up with Real Estate Leads
Without follow up, your real estate leads will be leads forever, never clients. Following up simply means to increase the effectiveness or success of something with further action. Following up with real estate leads can involve phone calls, emails, direct mailings, dropping by the property, etc. Basically, use any means necessary (within reason) to make contact with your real estate leads to determine what you can do for them. It may take 2 weeks of follow up to convert a lead, it may take 2 months, it may even take 3 years, but as long as you are consistent and persistent with follow up tactics, you can convert your real estate leads into clients.
One thing to keep in mind with follow up is that you should always have a reason to be contacting your real estate leads. Don't give them to much information in one mailing, or else you use up your reason for contacting them at a later date. Instead, send them pieces of useful information regularly over extended periods of time. It doesn't even necessarily have to be directly relating to home buying or selling – you can send them information about their community they may not know, the schools, job opportunities in an area you know they were thinking about moving to, the standings for the little league championship their son was in, etc. The information you're sending your real estate leads should be a individualized for each lead.
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Imagine sitting in an HR Managers office, a Director of Human Resources discussing a change project gone bad and he tells you, “I’m glad I travel, I hate people coming in to my office.” That actually happened on one project and the guy worked for a big, glamour Company and was in charge of a large division of the outfit. As a partner of mine said when I was relating the story, “He must be the Director of Non-Human Resources.Yet I see it everywhere I go. In the case above the change was major, the moving of the headquarters to another site a world away. The subjects of the change were long tenured employees who loved the company and their jobs. It was being moved just like the recent Halliburton annou
A third way to get real estate leads is through internet marketing. In this case, I mean building your own website with contact pages as well as subscribing to some kind of online lead generation service. By doing both, you can both harness your own real estate leads and also get plenty of leads from an outside source.
My advice? Go with all three. A good mix of direct mailings, networking, and internet marketing should have your pipeline a mile long with real estate leads. Keep in mind though that you will have to spend a little money to get all those leads!
Following up with Real Estate Leads
Without follow up, your real estate leads will be leads forever, never clients. Following up simply means to increase the effectiveness or success of something with further action. Following up with real estate leads can involve phone calls, emails, direct mailings, dropping by the property, etc. Basically, use any means necessary (within reason) to make contact with your real estate leads to determine what you can do for them. It may take 2 weeks of follow up to convert a lead, it may take 2 months, it may even take 3 years, but as long as you are consistent and persistent with follow up tactics, you can convert your real estate leads into clients.
One thing to keep in mind with follow up is that you should always have a reason to be contacting your real estate leads. Don't give them to much information in one mailing, or else you use up your reason for contacting them at a later date. Instead, send them pieces of useful information regularly over extended periods of time. It doesn't even necessarily have to be directly relating to home buying or selling – you can send them information about their community they may not know, the schools, job opportunities in an area you know they were thinking about moving to, the standings for the little league championship their son was in, etc. The information you're sending your real estate leads should be a individualized for each lead.
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One of the biggest keys to having a successful website is to be able to drive potential clients to your site. This is not easy since the competition is fierce. It won't matter if you have a great website and a needed service, if no one knows that your site exists. One of the best ways to get your site noticed is with Google's Adwords. This is an advertising service provided by Google and is bound to increase the flow of traffic to your site.Google receives over 200 million queries on their search engine. Did I mention that that was per day? Yep, you heard me right. Consider how many sales you could wrack up if just a fraction of those 200 mill came to pay your site a visit. Listing your business on t
One thing to keep in mind with follow up is that you should always have a reason to be contacting your real estate leads. Don't give them to much information in one mailing, or else you use up your reason for contacting them at a later date. Instead, send them pieces of useful information regularly over extended periods of time. It doesn't even necessarily have to be directly relating to home buying or selling – you can send them information about their community they may not know, the schools, job opportunities in an area you know they were thinking about moving to, the standings for the little league championship their son was in, etc. The information you're sending your real estate leads should be a individualized for each lead.
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Internet marketing through article writing is both an efficient and effective way to increase web traffic to your website. Even though this strategy is not totally cost free due to the time required to write and submit the articles, article writing is cost effective and contains additional benefits when compared to other marketing solutions such as AdWords.So how do you regularly write so many articles that drive traffic to your site? The best way is to open your mind and be aware of the opportunities presented each and every day. For example, during a strategic planning executive coaching session, one of my clients made the following statement: Your dashboard does not include cruise control.ways have a reason to be contacting your real estate leads. Don't give them to much information in one mailing, or else you use up your reason for contacting them at a later date. Instead, send them pieces of useful information regularly over extended periods of time. It doesn't even necessarily have to be directly relating to home buying or selling – you can send them information about their community they may not know, the schools, job opportunities in an area you know they were thinking about moving to, the standings for the little league championship their son was in, etc. The information you're sending your real estate leads should be a individualized for each lead.
Are you going to convert all your real estate leads? No. Do you need to convert them all? No. Should you still TRY to convert them all? Always! Most people will need a real estate agent at some stage in their life, so you might as well be the agent right there to help them out, answer any questions and keep them informed with useful information.
Employing a System for Follow Up
A system is simply any formulated, regular or special method or plan of a procedure for obtaining an objective. In the case of real estate, your objective is to convert real estate leads to clients through follow up. Your system of follow up is simply an organized, efficient and general procedure to get in contact with your leads.
Without some sort of system of following up with your real estate leads, it's very easy to waste precious time because of disorganization. Having a system is the most effective way to streamline your follow up so you still have time to actually list and sell your clients' homes! After all, with hundreds of real estate leads to constantly follow up with, when are you supposed to have time for listing presentations, settlement, advertising homes for sale, etc?
By having your own organized plan of follow up, you can dedicate certain hours in your day to your follow up of real estate leads. There are services out there that “sell” follow up systems to real estate agents, but they're really not necessary for everybody. If you're already disciplined and organized, there's no reason you can't formulate your own system of follow up, like designing several email templates, dedicating a certain amount of time each day to phone calls and creating an easy to access, track and monitor database of your real estate leads which includes all the important contact information needed to get in touch with them.
A system can be something as simple as creating a schedule for yourself and then rigidly adhering to that schedule. Having a systematic approach to following up with your real estate leads is the best way to maximize your conversion rate and minimize time spent following up.
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