real estate lead generation - AgentEDU Blog

After you’ve closed the sale and received your commission, it’s tempting to think the job is over. It’s not! Now is your opportunity to set the tone for an ongoing relationship with your clients.

Once you’ve proven yourself by closing a sale, you can start building a lifelong business relationship. This is your chance to position yourself as the go-to real estate expert, prompting your closed clients to comfortably send you referrals and ask you to represent them in their next purchase.

Building Relationships

Here are eight basic relationship builders used by top agents, all of which are actions you should take after the closing.

#1. Update Your Database

Your database will be one of your most important tools, so make sure it contains contact information about each of your clients. Make notes about your clients’ preferences and how they engage with their community. Are they foodies? Sports fans? What about hobbies? You should note kids’ names, schools, or other people who are important to them.

#2. Send a Thoughtful Closing Gift

If your clients are buyers, you can send a closing gift to their new home with a personalized note. This shows your appreciation for their trust and business. Try to personalize the gift — perhaps a gift card to a local restaurant in their new neighborhood. If your clients were sellers, send something special to them, like a bottle of their favorite wine. Don’t send form letters with closing gifts — always send a personalized note.

#3. Check in On Them After They Close

#4. Ask for Referrals

Referrals are the backbone of a strong real estate business, and you should ask your closed clients if they know anyone in need of an agent. Let closed clients know that you enjoyed working with them, and that if they know anyone who is looking to buy or sell, you will do a great job for anyone they refer. If you stay in touch in a friendly, professional and helpful manner, your business will grow and customers will come to you.

#5. Send a Post-Close Survey

One great way to improve your business and build long-term relationships is to follow up with a survey. In your efforts to always do the best work you can, you should have the survey ready to go.

#6. Get a Testimonial

Another relationship builder is asking for testimonials. While you’re still top of mind with your clients, ask them if they would give you an endorsement. A testimonial is just a few sentences about their experience working with you.

#7. Make a Social Connection

If you haven’t already done this, make a social networking connection. Use your Facebook business page to friend them, and post smart real estate-related items. Remember: This is NOT your personal page. It’s a chance to show your professional knowledge of the community while sharing news about your awards and successes.

#8. Stay in Touch

Most importantly, use your good marketing practices to stay in touch with your closed clients. Send them cards, emails and neighborhood invitations to join you at community events, for example. Some agents even have client holiday parties and invite all of their past clients.

The Closing is Not the End of the Relationship

A closing does not mark the end of the relationship. It’s an opportunity to set the tone for an ongoing relationship with your closed client and build your referral network.

For more information on how to build your referral network, receive a seven-day free trial at AgentEDU.com and view the Building Your Referral Network course today. For even more, check out our entire Building Your Business learning track.

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Finding potential buyers for your listings is one of the most important aspects of a real estate agent’s job — and marketing is essential to their success with this task. As an assistant, your role will be to use marketing to attract and secure new customers for your agent’s business, and once engaged with a client, you’ll use marketing to sell properties.

Tools of the Trade

In this blog post, we’ll focus on three things every real estate assistant needs to know about marketing their agent’s listings.

#1. Multiple Listing Service (MLS)

The first place you’ll want to put a listing is in the MLS, or Multiple Listing Service. This central database of listings allows home sellers a centralized location to post details on the properties they have for sale and is an industry standard.

Accuracy in preparing a listing cannot be overstated. Not only is the MLS the central location for your listing, but listing sheets are generated directly from the system and sent to agents and buyers.

Also, websites that are accessible to any potential home buyer, such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com, use the data directly from the MLS. So remember to check and double-check that the specifications and descriptions for the site are exactly as you want them.

Besides the standard form data, which includes details on the home such as square footage and the number of rooms, you’ll have an opportunity to provide a 1,000-character description. This description will appear on the listing sheet and on any websites that pick up MLS data. It’s important that this copy sells the home, and should be treated like any other marketing material.

#2. Photography

Photography is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan and should be handled with care. You may consider outsourcing the photographs to a professional photography company like VHT Studios. Along with ensuring that your photographs are of the best quality, there are a number of other concerns when preparing your photos to upload. Use this checklist to make sure your photos are ready for the market.

Photos should be beautifully lit, color-corrected, cropped properly and show off your property’s best qualities.
Individual photos can be no larger than 10 megabytes.
The image size can be no larger than 2880 x 2880 pixels.

Most MLS allow a limit of 25 photos, but don’t confuse quantity with quality. A photo of the exterior of the home is standard, and a good strategy for the other photos is to have at least one photo per each feature mentioned in your description. For example, a description that mentions an attached garage, a bay window and high ceilings should have photographs that show each of these features.

#3. Social Media

The most popular social media used in real estate are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Your agent might use one, some or all of these. Each platform comes with its own set of analytics, so you can easily see if your postings are effective in driving engagement and, ultimately, sales.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to schedule posts, but if you’re using more than one platform, a dashboard like Hootsuite allows you to generate all your posts from a central location. Depending on your subscription level, you can easily replicate posts across platforms and receive great analytics to help you determine how well your posts are performing.

There are four general pillars to consider when using social media across all platforms.

Accuracy

The Internet is unforgiving of typos, broken links and other inaccuracies, any of which can also cost your brand credibility and trust. When a posting about one of your listings contains errors, it can negatively affect your chances of a sale. When posting about your business or brokerage, it can damage the perception of your brand. Check and double-check before you post content online.

Relevancy

Social media is a crowded landscape with a significant amount of content competing for an audience. The more relevant your content is, the more likely it is to drive engagement. Engagement can help your business even if it doesn’t directly lead to a sale. Make sure that each and everything you post has some value to your reader.

Positivity

Never engage in negativity online. Avoid controversial topics like politics or religion, and never disparage one of your clients or competitors. Bring value to your audience by staying upbeat and sharing more positive content. If it’s a beautiful day in a neighborhood where you have a property, share a photo with your audience. If you’re involved in a community fundraiser or charity event in support of a favorite cause, invite others to attend as well.

Personality

Social media is an opportunity to share your unique personality. An Instagram photo of your agency serving meals to the homeless shows that you’re compassionate; a Facebook post about your team attending a baseball game shows that you’re fun. These are qualities that a client wants in a real estate agent, and social media is a great way to show them off.

A marketing plan can have multiple other pieces, including brochures, floor plans and open houses. To learn more about an assistant’s role in marketing real estate listings, view the full course here.

Explore the entire AgentEDU Assistants track today, which features eight different courses designed to provide real estate assistants with the most comprehensive online training available.

Tag: real estate lead generation

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