Identifying and attracting ideal real estate clients is essential to success, at least to generate high-quality leads.
So in this article, I will explore what ideal real estate clients look like and why identifying them is crucial.
However, it’s not just about demographics and psychographics. I will also dive into behavioral and geographic analysis to help you develop a complete understanding of your target market.
With the proper tools and strategies, you can create a buyer persona perfectly matching your real estate services and properties, leading to a better return on investment.
So without further adieu, let’s get started and find out how to find your ideal real estate clients.
What Are Ideal Real Estate Clients?
Let’s make a short visit to the fantastic real estate market of Narnia.
Here you can meet Mr. Perfect. It’s the ideal real estate client with a high six-figure salary, a perfect credit score, and an endless budget.
But wait, there is more…This ideal client knows what he wants, is decisive, never changes his mind, and, as a seller, accepts any offer and, as a buyer, makes offers without haggling.
And that’s not all. He always answers his emails, calls, and texts, pays commissions, and gives you tips and bonuses.
Oh, and since he is also an interior designer, he does staging and decorating.
And we haven’t spoken about renovations and repairs yet, which he also does take care of.
Well, this would be a realistic characteristic of an ideal real estate client in Narnia.
In our world, these individuals or businesses also have characteristics.
You can call them ideal when they fit your services or properties well.
These are characteristics to consider (tying into real estate target audiences):
- Demographic information (e.g., age, occupation, income, etc.)
- Psychographic information (e.g., values, interests, personality traits)
- Behaviors (e.g., search history, past actions)
- Preferences (e.g., likes, dislikes, needs, wants, etc.)
Why Is Identifying Ideal Real Estate Clients Important?
You can allocate your marketing budget and resources more effectively and efficiently since you will reach and engage potential buyers and sellers better.
This, in turn, will lead to higher conversion rates and, thus, a better ROI.
In this article, I discussed real estate niches and the benefits of focusing on one.
I didn’t mention the benefit explicitly, but specializing in a real estate niche will make your life much easier regarding finding your ideal real estate clients.
Because the niche in itself will already give you hints about who your ideal real estate client is, especially regarding the demographic information.
Let’s take the niche of first-time home-buyers .
By specializing in this niche, you will know quickly that the age group will likely be millennials.
Suppose your real estate niche is high-end properties (my article).
In that case, your ideal client is likely a high-net-worth individual looking for exclusive and upscale amenities.
In contrast, when you focus on commercial properties as a niche, your ideal client may be a business owner looking for a top location with the best exposure and accessibility so their business will benefit.
Having this earlier knowledge about your potential ideal real estate clients, you can target your marketing efforts more effectively and develop a better message-market fit.
Why?
Because you will also better develop a deeper understanding of your target clients’ interests, wants, needs, and preferences.
So as you can see, by already focusing on a particular real estate niche, you will automatically reduce potential overwhelm by narrowing down different target audience characteristics and criteria, making your life a bit easier.
How to Identify Your Ideal Real Estate Clients
Identifying your ideal real estate clients focusing or not focusing on a real estate niche can be done by four types of analysis: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic analysis.
1) Demographic Analysis
When using demographic analysis, you gather and examine data related to demographic characteristics such as age, gender, income, education, and occupation.
The goal is to better understand a population segment and their behaviors related to real estate.
Here are the steps involved:
- Identify a specific population you want to analyze, such as a target market for your real estate business (again, more manageable when you already know your real estate niche) in a particular geographic location.
- Now you want to collect data from surveys, market research reports, and census reports. Suppose you have a real estate website and Google Analytics (my article) running in the background. In that case, you can also use this tool to gather demographic information about your website visitors.
- Once you have the data gathered, you want to organize it into categories and subcategories based on the demographic characteristics (e.g., the number of people in a particular age group)
- Now it’s time to analyze and interpret the organized data in 3). So you want to identify patterns and trends that could inform your real estate marketing strategy and what you can change or improve. It will also help you better understand your target market or real estate niche.
- The final step is using the insights you gained from the above steps and creating targeted marketing campaigns that are better tailored to the needs and preferences of your target market. This will increase your success rate in generating higher-quality leads.
If you read my last article, you can see that the above steps slightly overlap with real estate targeting strategies.
I researched several tools you can use to do a demographic analysis, such as…
2) Psychographic Analysis
The next analysis you can carry out is psychographics to understand your potential real estate clients’ personality traits, beliefs, values, interests, wants, and lifestyles.
As I mentioned in this article, this is more difficult than demographic analysis.
These are the steps involved…
- Research the market using questionnaires and surveys to gather information about your potential client’s interests, beliefs, and attitudes.
- Check and analyze social media profiles to understand what content they share and engage with. This also gives hints about their interests.
- Identify patterns you find after some time doing 1) and 2) so you find common beliefs, interests, wants, and values.
- Put yourself emphatically into their shoes and create a buyer persona. By the way, this is also helpful regarding real estate sales copy (my article) and involves creating a narrative (a day in the life) around the persona integrating all the gathered information. When you really get deep into this, you may come up with struggles and pains they likely have, although not yet found in the data.
- Now you want to segment your potential real estate clients into groups based on their psychographic traits. You may have encountered different patterns and commonalities, so each segment may warrant and represent its buyer persona.
- In this last step, you iterate, test, and refine the various marketing messages you use in your campaigns to generate leads targeting your buyer personas. You want to do this based on the feedback you may receive from your potential clients or the marketing performance data (my article) you hopefully gather running the campaigns.
3) Behavioral Analysis
Behavioral analysis is tracking and analyzing the actions and behaviors of potential real estate clients. It is again a bit easier than psychographic analysis since it’s less subjective and more measuring and tracking tools are available.
It can be done by…
- Using website tracking and analytics tools such as Google Analytics to see how visitors behave on your website. You can see how they arrived on your website, most visited pages, time on each page, conversion rates into your real estate funnels, etc.
- Past client surveys include questions about their past real estate experiences and why they chose a property, communication preferences with real estate professionals, etc.
- Social media tracking via Facebook or Twitter to see which posts or ads receive the most engagement, content type shared, and which other pages they follow.
- Tracking email marketing performance data such as open rates, conversion rates, click-through rates, etc.
4) Geographic Analysis
Running a geographic analysis, you study the location-based characteristics of a specific real estate market or population segment. Hence, you gain additional information about behavior, needs, and preferences.
You will see that various of the earlier analysis types will overlap with geographic analysis.
You could also imagine geographic analysis as just an additional geographic layer on top of the first three analysis types and not necessarily consider it as a separate analysis type.
It can be done by…
- Determining the geographic area you want to analyze (e.g., neighborhood, city, state, region). Again this will be easier if you specialize in a real estate niche.
- Combining the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data you gathered and analyzing how it may focus on particular geographic areas.
- Identifying opportunities based on the patterns you can use for real estate lead generation campaigns.
- . You may find that a specific area has a high demand for student rentals (and you happen to be in this niche).
How Does All The Analysis Translate Into Your Ideal Real Estate Clients? (Final Thoughts)
In the end, finding your ideal real estate clients is actually finding and defining your buyer persona, as mentioned above.
So the research and different types of analysis you do should result in your ability to define one or more buyer personas as your ideal real estate clients.
Why the term “ideal”?
Because by doing all this work, you will increase your success rate of your marketing message meeting open eyes and ears because it speaks your “ideal real estate clients” language.
And it speaks their language because you researched their problems, needs, wants, pains, etc…
This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.
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