As a real estate agent, how does your business find new customers? To be consistently successful as an estate agent, you need a constant flow of clients who want to buy or sell a house. These clients should be a good mix of returning customers and new ones.
This is a game of numbers; your prospects for success depend on the quantity and quality of leads you get. The more people you have calling to make inquiries, the greater the likelihood that some of them will eventually sell or buy a home through you.
The two big questions are:
- How does your real estate agent find these new customers?
- How much does each new customer cost your business?
There are lots of things you can do to improve your ability to reach more potential customers. The most popular options for the majority of estate agents are email marketing, a professional company website, social media, content marketing, and organizing an open house.
These methods are all effective in their own way. The problem is they cost a lot of money and everyone is doing them. Also, it takes a bit of time before you start to see results. Moreover, they rely on your ability to convince perfect strangers to take a chance on you.
But there is a different and more cost-effective way to approach your quest for new customers. This method is better because it takes advantage of your existing relationships. With this system, instead of dealing with strangers, you will be tapping into the power of your networks.
How do real estate agents find new customers?
The best way to maintain a constant stream of new customers to your estate agency is to rely on your personal and professional relationships. This means making the following the foundations of your customer acquisition strategy:
- Becoming a pro at real estate networking
- Building a system of referrals
- Leveraging your sphere of influence
To ensure a steady influx of new customers to your business, you need a referral network comprising of a group of non-competing but related businesses. To create this kind of network, you must find businesses in your industry that you can partner with in a mutually beneficial way.
In this regard, one of the best kinds of partnerships for estate agents is a referral network with local property management firms. Property managers and real estate agents operate in the same market and often have to deal with the same clients.
But since each one provides a different service to the client, estate agents and property managers do not compete with one another. The work of the property manager begins where the estate agent’s work ends after the client has bought a property.
Conversely, the work of the estate agent often starts where the work of the property manager ends, when a property owner decides to sell their property. This connects the property manager and the estate agent in a way that allows the two parties to actively assist each other’s businesses.
How can property managers benefit estate agents?
As a real estate agent, maybe a property manager near you has access to a landlord who is looking to sell one of their existing properties and buy a new one. At the same time, you may also know of at least one person who is planning to buy their first rental property.
That property manager’s client is a potential customer to your business, in the same way, that your client is a potential customer to the property manager. By collaborating with the property manager, you can help each other’s businesses while also making your customers’ lives easier.
What are the advantages of building these kinds of partnerships with local property managers?
- Get high-quality referrals: The potential customers you get from a property manager are not people who are merely shopping around. They are on the verge of selling or buying a property. These could be renters who are about to buy their first home or investors who are expanding their portfolio of investment properties.
- Long-term relationships with client: By referring a client who buys an income property through your real estate agency to a competent local property manager, you continue the relationship with that client. With your business still in the picture, these former customers will automatically call you when they are ready to sell their property or buy a new one.
- Expand your sources of income: For every referred client who ends up signing an agreement with the property manager, you get to earn a referral fee. This adds one more source of income to your business. You also improve your chances of selling more houses as the property manager also refer clients your way.
- Offer clients more services: Lastly, you will be offering additional benefits to your clients. By linking them up with property managers you know and trust, you make it easier for those clients to succeed with their rental properties. Those clients will value your business for that and will be more likely to recommend you to others.
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