Building a solid pipeline of leads is an essential cog in every real estate agent’s business engine. While many agents have been able to rely on paying a third-party service to feed the machine with leads, times are undoubtedly changing.
As the housing market continues to slow, the ability to generate leads will be as crucial as ever. However, a potential recession and waning home sales will likely put a strain on budgets, forcing many to figure out how they will reel in prospects without breaking the bank.
That’s a topic that industry experts discussed at length during RISMedia’s 34th Annual CEO & Leadership Exchange held this past September. With hundreds of real estate leaders gathered at the historic Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C., top brokers and chief executives delved into their tried-and-true methods for lead generation.
The talk, titled “Beyond Buying: Cost-Effective Ways to Generate and Cultivate Leads,” was led by Cleve Gaddis, managing partner and broker of the Gadis Group, RE/MAX Center, and featured panelists: Hadi Atri, broker/owner of RE/MAX Executive; David Howell, executive vice president and CIO at McEnearney Associates Inc.; Bill Redmond, broker/owner Watson Realty ERA; Ige Johnson, CEO/Founder of IGE Johnson Group Brokered by EXP Realty; and Joe Gazzo, VP of Ohio Region for Coldwell Banker Schmidt Family of Companies.
“I think that many agents around the country don’t understand the exchange of value that takes place when you are trying to generate a lead,” Gaddis said. “If your business is anything like most of the clients I work with, they are continuing to increase their lead costs, and they are continuing to invest more money into the referral fees or buying the leads upfront, so I think it’s a good and refreshing conversation to talk about how we can generate leads without spending a lot of money.”
Atri, who has been in real estate for 35 years, believes in the power of organic leads and continues to build his business on that foundational piece.
“Our business is a relationship business, and that business hasn’t changed,” Atri said, emphasizing that gaining leads is all about connecting with people however possible.
While he acknowledged that technological advances improved the efficiency of several aspects of real estate, he indicated that he is a proponent of reconnecting with clients who one may have lost contact with over the years.
“Typically, when you talk to clients, more than 90% say they’d use their agents again, but only 13% do because we have this issue of not following up,” Atri said.
His firm’s training emphasizes the importance of staying in touch with clients while providing agents with different strategies to create leads.
One method he highlighted during the discussion was farming neighborhoods—a tactic he used himself as he got started in real estate.
“The company I was working with gave me 50 blank cards and said, ‘send them to your sphere of influence,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know anybody,'” Atri said.
He changed that by picking three neighborhoods and sending marketing materials each month to cultivate relationships with the people in those markets.
“After about a year, I started getting calls to go to listings, and that’s how I started my business,” he added.
Howell echoed similar sentiments during the discussion.
“Let’s face it, I don’t know a human being that wants to be thought of as a lead,” he said. “They want to be thought of as people. This is still very much a personal relationship and connection.”
Howell’s firm focuses on making sure its agents are armed with plenty of “hyper-local market information,” so that they can have relevant conversations with their clients and prospects consistently.
Along with leveraging past clients for leads and business, Howell also encourages agents—especially newer ones—to work rentals to build their pipeline of prospects for the long run.
With more than half of the inquiries on his company website coming from people looking for rentals, Howell ensures that his firm treats them similarly to prospective homebuyers.
“Those renters are next year’s buyers and the buyers after that,” he said. “We know at least three-fourths of those tenants are likely to buy a home sometime in the next two to three years, and if we consistently stay in touch with them, those are much better than leads.”
Over the past couple of years, social media has blossomed into a fixture for most agents’ businesses, especially when it comes to marketing and branding. For Johnson, it’s also been a means to build and nurture relationships that ultimately feed her business.
“We have to go where our clients are, and if you look at the statistics on our phones, we spend more time on social media than we do talking on our phones … People want to be able to connect with us in a personal way,” she said.
Toward that end, Johnson said she and her brokerage have doubled down on social media and use it to connect with clients, leveraging “organic content” rather than staging all of her posts.
“We want to think too much about staging social media, and that needs to go in it, but if you’re at the beach or at the pool with your son and they are doing backflips, video it,” she said. “People just want personal connections and relationships.”
As she has built her pool of top clients, Johnson also said that social media features—like custom lists and group pages—have made it easy to keep in touch with them without having to stay online for hours.
“I can pull up the custom list and see what’s going on with my clients and interact with them personally, so they feel like they are getting that one-on-one connection,” she said.
The benefits of the recent tech revolution in real estate don’t end with social media, however. With three pieces of information, Johnson said she has also been able to feed her firm’s CRM through “reverse prospecting.”
“My IT department has a couple of different sites they use where they do reverse prospecting, and they can gather names, phone numbers, and email addresses…so we just pull all of that data and dump it into our CRM,” she said.
From there, she said they reach out to the prospects.
Redmond and his firm have also leveraged emerging tech like QR codes to upgrade tried-and-true lead generators like open houses. His agents post QR codes at open houses and require visitors to scan and register for the event. That information goes straight to his firm’s database, he explained.
Gazzo also spoke favorably about open houses and their ability to foster strong leads with prospects.
“I believe there are two things that can happen at an open house,” he said. “Number one, you’re going to get buyers coming in, but I also believe that there is a certain percentage—albeit a small percentage—of those coming in who are not only looking for homes, but they are also looking for an agent.”
He emphasized how that is an opportunity for “agents to shine.”
“It’s an opportunity to establish a relationship with somebody when they walk through the front door,” he said.
Even with all the bells and whistles that have emerged in recent years, sometimes, the best way to source leads is to get back to basics.
That’s been the case with Gazzo, who is a big believer in the “power of the pen.”
“There probably isn’t a person in this room that believes in the power of the pen more than me,” he said, highlighting the benefits of a handwritten card when trying to connect with prospects.
He mentioned that he thinks agents have fallen out of the practice of trying to get “belly-to-belly” with people.
“I always try to look for the silver lining in things, and I know that COVID threw off many people,” he said. “I’m a belly-to-belly person,” Gazzo continued. “Most people in this room are belly-to-belly too, and that’s what we want in this business. I think getting engagement and having agents come back in the office and be belly to belly, and stressing the importance of meeting your clients, staying in touch with them, and staying in touch for sure with your database .”
