In the following interview, Lee Goldstein, president of InTrust Realty in Raleigh, N.C., discusses conditions in his local market, as well as online lead generation and marketing, including social media.
Region Served: Wake County, N.C.
Number of Agents: 22
Number of Offices: 2
Facebook: InTrust Realty
What challenges did your market face this year, and how did you overcome them?
The challenge we faced this year was low inventory. It’s easy to sell houses—it’s very difficult to find buyers the homes they’re looking for. The way we overcame that was to make sure we were available to get out there and show the client the listing right away.
Where does the most opportunity lie in your market?
The biggest opportunity lies in listings—the more listings you can get, the more buyers you can get on those listings, and the more you can help people either move up or move down.
What strategies have you implemented to reach today’s connected consumer?
One that we use is RISMedia , but aside from that, we also use a system called Kunversion, which posts all of our listings to social media and generates leads—it’s a lead-generating machine. I also hired a writer this year to write information about the 11 towns and cities in Wake County, as well as the top 100 neighborhoods, to add to our website.
We also generate leads through realtor.com®—we’re one of the top companies that buys leads from them, and they’re, in my opinion, the best leads in the industry. We also started a program to learn how to take better care of our past clients to be able to generate more business through referrals. One of the things we’ll do is an annual review about their personal real estate market—it’s not a sales call; it’s more about keeping up with our past clients, talking with them about having a home for every person in their family, plus one.
How do you use social media to nurture referral and repeat business?
We use social media by pulling information, rather than pushing it. We don’t send a ‘Happy Birthday’ on social media—we’ll call them and wish them one. We’re using Facebook as a tool to data-mine information and help us learn more about our clients.
You recently added RISMedia’s ACE to your social media marketing strategy. What aspects of the system are most appealing to you?
You don’t always have time to post interesting articles about real estate—the cool thing about RISMedia is that everything they post is real estate-related. It’s a great way to get posts on our business page that help our clients learn more about real estate.
What value does ACE hold for your agents?
The same value for our main page ACE would do for all of our real estate agent pages. Most of my agents don’t have time to post to social media—ACE posts for you, and posts relevant information.
For more information, please visit ace.rismedia.com.
Suzanne De Vita is RISMedia’s online news editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at sdevita@rismedia.com.
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