by Starting in real estate with the concept of lead generation will put you miles ahead of your competition. Most real estate professionals start with the idea that if you just have a few key relationships in place you will experience tremendous success. While relationships certainly are important a solid lead generation plan is essential when you want to close business each and every month.
Getting high quality real estate leads isn’t something that will happen with only 10 minutes of work, but when you put a little bit of planning in you can have a consistent flow of people contacting you each and every day. Keep in mind that generating quality leads (i.e. when you know you can close a certain percentage of the leads coming in monthly) is like going to the gym….you won’t get in shape with one workout and 1 month of “lead generation” isn’t going to make you the best lead generator either.
To help you transform your real estate business to one where you can count on leads daily, consider the following tips:
- Focus on Lead Generation – When you focus on lead generation you won’t send any marketing out that is just “branding”. Branding ads waste money and won’t generate leads. Keeping your focus on leads will ensure that any marketing you do (online, print, etc) will have the focus on generating calls and leads. This focus may seem odd to those around you in the real estate community and that’s OK. Many times in real estate it is suggested that you have to “introduce yourself to the community” or “get the word out” but that just wastes money. Keep the focus on what will generate leads each and every day.
- Investing – Leads will rarely come free. Investing capital into your real estate business will help you to get leads at a much faster rate. A good rule of thumb to stick to is spending no more than 7% of a standard commission on your advertising. Every 7% you spend should generate 1 transaction. Sticking to the 7% rule will keep more money in your pocket and make your marketing work harder for you. Anything that isn’t generating leads for just 7% of a commission will have to be cut. This means that if your average commission is $10,000 then you can spend $700 in marketing expenses to acquire that closing. Looked at another way, if you were paying $50 per lead that means you would get 14 leads for $700 and you would need to get 1 closing out of those 14 leads. When you start to evaluate your marketing with this lens it might make you rethink quite a bit of your marketing efforts.
- Marketing Strategy – I am a big fan of an online real estate marketing strategy, but it’s not for every agent. Having a plan in place for your real estate lead generation activities will make it easier. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just know what steps you are going to take to generate leads. This may mean having more than 1 system to generate leads for you. Top real estate coaches around the country recommend having 4 marketing systems to generate leads for you. Each system must adhere to the 7% rule and must generate at least 2 transactions a month. The systems involved with your marketing strategy can be varied (i.e. websites, blog, postcards, magazine ads, etc.) but just ensure that each of them are generating enough leads for you to close 2 transactions per month, per system.
With just the above three steps you will be able to start getting real estate leads. Remember, your plan doesn’t have to be complicated; it just has to have enough steps so you can see where you need to take action. Keeping your focus on generating real estate leads (and making sure it’s cheap) will have you closing transactions each and every month.
