Being a real estate agent you are in one of the most competitive industries in the world. Often sales and fortunes are made or lost on pure emotion.

How as a professional real estate agent can you get more listings – sell more property? How can you stand out, be remembered and even more importantly be referred? I will share with you some ideas that can help you generate more new clients and sales.

As you know in real estate the money and security are in the listings. So how do you get more listings? That is a great question.

What do home sellers want? What are we looking for when we choose an agent?

The answer is simple…we want to sell our home fast for top dollar!

A better question would be what do we fear most when choosing a real estate agent?

From the viewpoint of the person selling the home, the biggest fear is to hire an agent who just wants to list the home. We are afraid of hiring an agent who thinks its enough to just put a sign in the yard and collect a commission check in 3 or 6 months – for basically doing nothing but putting a sign out front and getting the property listing in the MLS.

The Introduction

The first impression does make a difference. I recently sold my home and interviewed 6 realtors. It amazed me that five of the six showed up dressed in what I will call generously “business casual”. I was going to pay the agent I listed with $60,000 in commission and they did not think it was important to dress up for someone that was going to pay them $60,000.

The realtor we finally listed with came to the house dressed to the nines. She has been a realtor for 25 years and she has sold almost a billion dollars in residential real estate last year. Her appearance and presentation said to me that she knew what she was doing and was a professional.

Outline Your Strategy For Marketing The Property

You know the drill on this one, comps, professional property pictures, staging, etc. This also is the point where you build confidence that you are going to do more than just put a sign in the front yard and collect a check in six months.

How to get buyers to the property. Do not just say “List it on the MLS or put on Zillow!” Everyone does that. If I’m going to hand you a commission check I want to feel like you EARNED IT!

The agent I mentioned previously held a Broker’s Open House. Nothing new, a lot of agents do this. What was different is in the quality of the food she had. It was not hors d’oeuvres, but a catered meal. She said that to get other agents and brokers to show up you needed to feed them. She had photos of the Broker’s Open House that showed a lot of people and of the food.

Demonstrate

What is your track record? What can you do to show your expertise in the area? “Show” does not mean, “say or tell” it means to show them a printed, tangible proof of what you have done. At this point, this would mean a nice brochure with testimonials, show the client mailers you send out to promote your other properties. If you don’t have something nice that sells you – it is well worth the investment to hire a professional designer.

Validate

After you get the listing, validate the seller’s decision to hire you by doing one thing—be in communication.

• Do not wait for the client to call you. You call them every week with an update.
• Send them copies of the promotions and advertising you sent promoting their property.

If you are not mailing promotion out every week you are costing yourself new listings, sales, and referrals. Sellers talk to their friends about their listing agent, especially if they have evidence you are busting your tail to sell their home. Printed marketing materials are the validation that they chose wisely the right agent to list their home.

• Develop a newsletter and mail to your existing and past clients, and to areas you want to get more listings in. A good newsletter would have tips, and trivia, and also showcase the current listings you have.

The last statistics I recently saw stated that today people will sell their home every 5 to 7 years, so if you are not staying in front of your old clients you are losing potential listings.

Today, it is easy to slip into the cheap and easy email blast promotion or social media post which is fine to do but should not be the only thing you do. Email marketing that is sent out is forgotten 3 seconds after it is sent and is deleted along with hundreds of other emails. A printed postcard, newsletter, or flyer is more real and has more of an impact than something emailed out.

Your Website

Finally, your website today is one of the best investments you can make in your business. A couple of tips for your website:

• Sell yourself: bios, experience, specialty areas or neighborhoods, and testimonials.
• Make sure your phone number is easy to see and find.
• Content, tips, and tactics that interest and engage.
• One of the best things you can do is to install a live chat feature on your website. People today are rushed and will not fill out an online form or call right away. Many will live chat, though. This gives you the ability to have a conversation with a prospective seller or buyer.

If you need help strategizing and coming up with a marketing plan to get more listings and sell more homes, give us a call at 727-536-4173 or fill out the form below and one of our Marketing Consultants will contact you shortly.