Blog Archive

What a Worn-Out Flight Attendant Has to Do with Your Real Estate Lead Gen ROI

So I spent a few weeks in Europe and on my way back I had a layover in Atlanta. I like the Atlanta airport.

It’s one of the most organized and efficient ones I know in the U.S.

I like to observe people when I am in a place like an airport or train station. 

That likely comes with being a digital marketer and sales copywriter with experience in real estate.

You can learn a lot about psychology and behavior.

At such a place, many different people from all walks of life come together, hustling and bustling in one place.

Usually, you forget all these people you briefly come across during travel. More so when you are sleep-deprived and jet-lagged.

The human brain is a pretty efficient energy-saving machine. 

However, Sometimes Someone Stands Out…

It was a female flight attendant (biological age about 64, chronological age about 49) walking by.

She looked pretty tired, and she had a shuffling step and used shoes way too large for her feet. 

And all the make-up in the world didn’t help her to look fresh. What’s more, it’s possible I’ve seen her before in the same airport about a year ago.

Many get lured into this lifestyle as something attractive when they are younger. At first glance, it looks interesting; you see the world’s hotels and get decent pay.

But is it true? 

Did they really make a correct economic assessment, thinking of the true ROI of their decision to become a flight attendant?

Bear with me, I’ll circle back in just a second to how this relates to your potential real estate lead gen ROI.

So let’s make an honest calculation, including also hidden costs a starting flight attendant may not have on their plate. 

I looked into the various salaries and a starting flight attendant earns $35,000 as a gross salary and after all taxes a net salary of $23,572.

Similarly, an experienced flight attendant earns a net salary of $39,210 and a senior one $53,847.

Okay, but let’s also look at their hourly net salary. We can assume 1,200 annual working hours.

That would be $19.64 for the starter flight attendant, $33 for the experienced, and $45 for the senior one.

Well, at least it’s above minimum wage, but did I get the whole picture here? 

Nope, I don’t think so. 

On a long-distance flight, I always ask myself how this lifestyle can really be enjoyable in the long term.

You spend most of your time in a closed environment in so many different time zones, disrupted sleep patterns.

As a cherry on top, it strains your relationships.

But maybe that’s just my issue with flying. 

Yes, when you can use the first class, things change a tiny bit.

You can avoid the so-so food and have more space. 

But still, you can’t avoid your biological clock, sleep disruption, and the stress it causes for your system.

Why this little “health-rant” on flying airplanes across different time zones?

Well, flight attendants and pilots don’t get paid for the time they need to recover from the frequent sleep disruptions. 

So to be honest, they would need to factor that in and add it on top of the 1,200 hours per year to get their real honest pay per hour.

We can assume that they need an additional 50% of their official working hours to recover.

So they don’t work 1,200 but 1,800 hours (600 hours cutting into their free time). 

Now the hourly net income looks quite different:

• Starting flight attendant: $13.10 
• Experience flight attendant: $21.78
• Senior flight attendant: $29.92

Okay, Full Circle… What Can You Learn from That for Your Real Estate Lead Gen ROI?

Be like the flight attendant who is brave enough to look at their true hourly relative income. 

Because they consider recovery time as part of their working hours.

This helps you make better (business) decisions.

What does it mean for your digital marketing efforts to generate real estate leads? 

Well, you want to consider the full scope of your efforts for your ROI. 

This also suggests to really track your lead gen results.

It includes post-campaign analysis and optimization when evaluating ROI. 

And don’t forget to include your time cost. 

That is, if you do time-consuming marketing.

You want to include resources spent on planning, execution, follow-up, and analysis.

By the way, That’s why I also included the time cost for content marketing (video marketing, article writing, etc.) in the “Ultimate Real Estate Lead Gen Strategy & Performance Suite.”

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Why Real Estate Conversion Rates Are 6-Times Below Average

Did you know that the average lead conversion rates of real estate websites are actually pretty bad?

For a few months now, I’ve been trying to find a likely reason for this.

But how bad is the lead conversion rate on real estate websites?

According to this source, it’s 0.6% on average.

Is it that bad? 

Well, when you compare it to the average website conversion rate across all industries, it is. 

Across all industries, it’s 3.68%, according to a statistic from this source. 

So in real estate, it’s six times less.

Why is that?

To find out why, I conducted a small study to analyze the websites of the one hundred largest real estate brokerages in the U.S.

I looked at their methods for generating seller leads. 

My goal was to identify a pattern and, hopefully, uncover a reason for these low conversion rates.

I used the data from the website Realtrends and went through it one by one.

Do you think I found a pattern?

You bet.

But before we dive into my little study, what do you think I analyzed on these real estate websites? 

I will give you a hint.

It’s what persuades visitors to leave their contact information on a website. 

It refers to an incentive, also known as a freebie, giveaway, lead magnet, or what some might call an ethical bribe.”

Offering something for free in exchange for an email address and a name usually does much better than just having a contact form or offering something extra-ordinary, such as…a newsletter.

Getting on a newsletter without anything in exchange was a thing when you got a dopamine hit when you received a new email in 2001, but now, not so much.

And since in the current market, it’s still more difficult to generate seller leads than buyer leads, I focused on the seller lead generation part of these websites.

The Results of My Small Study

Of the hundred analyzed websites, almost half (49%) offer exactly zero, nada in terms of incentives to generate seller leads. 

There are only contact forms for potential sellers who may be interested in selling. 

That’s it.

Then almost again, half (47%) offer the famous free home valuation as an incentive.

And only a tiny percentage offer a different type of incentive.

What are these different types of incentives?

Well, 2% offer an instant cash offer seller lead magnet (these brokerages may also work as wholesalers), and another 2% offer a tool-based lead magnet called Move Meter.

The move meter can help potential sellers and buyers compare two different locations so they can find out whether it makes sense to move or sell and then move.

But often, these incentives were offered together with the standard home valuation lead magnet.

So they offer two lead magnets simultaneously.

Now, have you already a hunch why the real estate website conversion rates are so below average?

The Likely Reason for Below-Average Real Estate Website Conversion Rates

Let’s get into the first most obvious reason.

I think if just half of the brokerage websites would start using a lead magnet instead of just a contact form for sellers, this average could already be doubled.

So the first reason is not using a seller lead magnet at all.

The not-so-obvious reason has more to do with marketing strategy and psychology.

Let’s say you decide to start going to the gym (you can still tackle these New Year’s resolutions).

Now, in your city or area where you live, for some weird reason, it is common practice that people have protein shake stands (like lemonade stands). 

They give away free protein shakes.

Now you go shopping for a gym membership.

You go to the first gym, and when you leave your contact information and consider a membership with them, you get free protein shakes in exchange.

Sounds okay, but well, you can get a free one already at the next street corner.

So you go to the next gym and see what they have to offer, and what a surprise! They also offer free protein shakes in exchange for your contact information.

You do this with two more gyms, and each one offers the same.

In the end, you don’t know anymore which gym you would prefer over the others.

All of them sound somewhat the same.

And that’s exactly what happens when almost everybody offers the same lead magnet.

On top of that, you can get free home valuations from other platforms like Zillow, Eppraisal, and Chase’s home value estimator.

This leads to potential sellers perceiving it as less valuable.

And when website visitors, such as potential sellers, find the same lead-generating method repeated across different real estate websites, they become desensitized.

It’s like the famous banner blindness or ad blindness. 

Your website visitors don’t even see this free offer anymore. Their brains shut it out.

So this is the second, less obvious reason why I think real estate website conversion rates are below average.

And this is not a good thing when you operate in a highly competitive market like real estate. 

So instead of a differentiated value proposition, the free home valuation becomes a basic expectation from potential sellers and buyers.

What can you do instead?

Well, this also depends on the degree of freedom you have with your real estate brokerage’s website.

Many of the websites I analyzed are from well-known large brokerages. 

As an agent for these brokerages, you usually get to use their website framework.

But suppose you have greater flexibility. 

Given that a home valuation tool has become a standard feature on real estate websites, I would suggest keeping it but not requiring contact information in exchange.

Instead, I would recommend offering a unique seller lead magnet that will help you stand out.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Finding Marketing Channels for Apartment Advertising

You can either use the traffic of others or generate your own.

That’s the case for real estate marketing channels (actually the case for all marketing channels),

However, strictly speaking, there isn’t much difference between the two approaches.

Because if you use your traffic, you have likely built it already.

You did it either by:

• Investing your time
• Investing the time of others, as in the case of content marketing and SEO
• Or having paid for it and then retaining it through an email list.

Of course, the email list should also be used in the case of content marketing.

So, the main difference is time.

The question is whether you start from scratch or if you already have an established website that you can use.

A large, unordered list of various marketing tactics and ideas can feel overwhelming.

Yet, there are only a few marketing channel categories.

I have discussed them in various articles, such as the one about real estate lead generation.

Below, I will discuss each marketing channel.

And for each, you want to find out whether your ideal clients or target group use them and also which product and service awareness level they have.

You will target more cold or hot real estate lead types depending on the product and service awareness level. The hot ones are closer to a real estate transaction, and the cold ones are farther away.

Additionally, you want to estimate the lead time for each one.

Let’s say you have a short-term income goal.

In that case, you don’t want to deal with marketing channels with cold but cheap leads and a long lead time.

“Lead time” means the time you need until you can make an apartment advertising campaign work.

But now let’s get to the marketing channels.

Outbound Real Estate Lead Generation (paid and “free”)

Digital:

• Text message prospecting
• Push notification ads
• PPC advertising on social media (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, YouTube Ads, Waze Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.)
• PPC advertising on search engines (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo Ads, etc.)
• Native ads

Offline:

• Cold calling
• Calling expired listings (a subcategory of cold calling)
• Cold-calling FSBOs
• Real estate direct mailing
• Radio ads
• Local TV commercials
• Print ads
• Door Knocking

Database Marketing

• Past client direct mailing
• Past client marketing
• Past client retargeting via ads on search and social media
• Email marketing
• Sphere of influence marketing

Inbound Real Estate Lead Generation (paid and “free”)

Digital:

• Content marketing on your website (publishing blog articles, videos, downloadable whitepapers, free giveaways, etc.)
• Content marketing on social media (posting on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.)
• Answering questions on social media, forums, Quora, etc.
• Lead magnets (often combined with email marketing and nurturing campaigns)
• On-page SEO
• Webinars (with strategic partners)
• Guest-posting (however, not Google’s favorite anymore)

Offline:

• Publishing content in larger publication channels (local and national newspapers, magazines, etc.)
• Organizing a housewarming party
• Organizing an open house event
• Organizing educational events

Real Estate Referral Marketing

• Partnering with retirement home projects
• Partnering with probate attorneys
• Partnering with divorce attorneys
• Strategically get referred to others by satisfied past clients.
• Using referral real estate lead companies
• Participate as a guest in an open house.
• Going to non-real estate events to network
• Become a member of the local chamber of commerce.

Free and Partially Free Property Portals to Advertise Your Apartment

In some way or form, all the rental property portals are free.

You might get a free posting in many. But your visibility will likely be suboptimal without paying additionally for advertising.

So, below, you will find a collection of the most well-known ones, which I categorized as free and partially free.

Ultimately, I analyze them to find out which would be the best, so you are not left with just a long list of property portals you can use for advertising.

4 Really Free Rental Property Portals

• Craigslist (free)
• Oodle (free)
• Rentdigs (free)
• Rentberry (free)

12 Partially Free Rental Property Portals

• Zillow’s Rental Manager (first posting of the year free)
• Hotpads (first posting of the year is free)
• Realtor.com (posting is free but commission-based)
• Padmapper (free for one rental property)
• Rent.com (basic listing free, but not advertising)
• Airbnb (posting free but commission-based)
• Apartments.com (basic listing free, but not advertising)
• Nextdoor (basic listing free, but not advertising)
• WalkScore (basic listing is free, but not advertising)
• Cozy.co (basic listing free, but not advertising)
• ForRentUniversity.com (basic listing free, but not advertising)
• ApartmentFinder (basic listing free, but not advertising)

1) Craigslist

Only a few real estate professionals don’t know about this popular classified platform.

I’m sure you know that already.

It’s a classified advertisement website where you can post completely free classified ads in sections such as:

• Jobs
• Housing
• For sale
• Services
• Items wanted
• Gigs
• Community service

The overall monthly traffic is 351,500,000, with a rental property inventory size in the U.S. of 1,500,000.

2) Oodle

Oodle is kind of a copy of Craigslist and is also an online marketplace. It was founded in 2004.

You can also advertise completely for free. The monthly traffic is 1,830,000, and the property rental inventory size is 1,094,237.

The property rental inventory size is 1,094,237.

3) Rentdigs

On Rentdigs, you can also advertise property rentals for free.

The difference between the first two is that it doesn’t offer a wide variety of sections and only focuses on different rental properties.

According to SimilarWeb, the monthly traffic is 697,870. Inventory data wasn’t available.

4) Rentberry

Rentberry is another free rental property platform similar to Rentdigs.

Their focus is also on available international rentals and not that much on the U.S. market.

According to SimilarWeb, the monthly traffic is 668,950.

I requested the inventory size from the provider, and they reported having an inventory size of 125,000.

5) Zillow’s Rental Manager

I already covered Zillow in depth in this, this, and this article.

It’s a pretty well-known platform. Real estate professionals and independent property owners can advertise their properties on it.

Zillow’s Rental Manager combines different tools and information to help you manage your rentals.

When you post your rental property there, your listing will be displayed on Zillow, Trulia, and HotPads.

In terms of pricing, the very first posting is free for the first year.

According to SimilarWeb, Zillow gets a monthly traffic of 256,600,000 and has an inventory size of 54,709.

The next would be HotPads, but this platform is part of Zillow.

This platform offers its users a different view of the data Zillow already has, such as, for example, a certain map view with a focus on apartment rentals.

Technically speaking, it’s basically Zillow’s data filter for apartment rentals.

6) Realtor.com

Realtor.com should also be quite well known, and it’s another real estate listing platform providing property for sale and rent.

The only ones able to advertise or list there are realtors and brokers.

So, as a direct apartment owner, you will need to work with a realtor and be ready to pay a commission.

According to SimilarWeb, the monthly traffic is 136,570,000, with an overall inventory size of 202,012.

7) Padmapper/Zumper

Padmapper can’t be mentioned without mentioning Zumper Pro.

It’s a rental property portal solely focused on apartment rentals, and Zumper bought it in 2016 (source).

Padmapper’s mission is to make apartment hunting almost fun.

Apartments are displayed on a big map, and potential tenants can filter them according to their needs.

So since Padmapper is actually Zumper, the monthly traffic for Zumper is 707,130, and the inventory size is 195,479.

8) Rent.com

Rent.com is another rental property platform and apartment search engine.

Its focus is rather on millennials, and it was founded in 1999 as viva.com.

The monthly website traffic is 9,780,000.

I also requested the inventory size from the provider without a response yet.

9) Airbnb

This one is a well-known rental property marketplace specializing in vacation rentals.

Its specialty is to help property owners or people with access to a property who Airbnb calls “hosts” share their places with “guests.”

Airbnb’s monthly traffic volume is 58,340,000, and the overall inventory size is 4,400,000.

10) Apartments.com

Apartments.com is an online apartment listing website. And several other rental property websites are part of its networks, such as:

• ForRent.com
• ApartmentFinder.com
• Apartamentos.com
• ForRentUniversity.com
• ApartmentHomeLiving.com
• CorporateHousing.com
• After55.com
• WestsideRentals.com
• Cozy.co.

The monthly traffic volume of apartments.com is 38,620,000, and its inventory size is 120,049.

11) Nextdoor

Nextdoor’s focus is not just an apartment rental platform. It’s also a facilitator to connect neighbors and everything else in the neighborhood.

So, apartment rentals are just one of many things you will find on that platform.

The monthly traffic volume is 121,210,000, and the inventory size is undisclosed.

I requested it from the provider, but the response is still pending.

Although the monthly traffic is 121,210,000, you will have to consider something else.

You not only share this traffic with others offering rental properties but also other items, services, etc.

While this is not direct competition, it’s the same traffic you will have to share.

12) Walkscore

I find quite inspiring the concept of walkability score.

This rental property website provides potential tenants with the classic search function and a particular colored map overlay for the area they are searching for.

The different areas are rated in terms of walkability scores.

Having the green color means being close to or at a 100 walkability score, and being in the red color range means coming close to a 0 walkability score.

Walkscore is part of Redfin and has a monthly traffic volume of 928,420.

I also requested the inventory size from the provider with a pending reply.

The data generated by Walkscore can also be used on other websites. That’s to further promote certain neighborhoods and properties.

For that, they offer a widget you can include on your website.

Now, let’s analyze the portals regarding their traffic. 

To do that, I analyzed them with a reasonably accurate tool called similarweb.com. 

This tool can analyze the monthly traffic of a webpage.

Where this tool couldn’t be applied, I used secondary data from further research on the web.

So, after having this traffic data, we can just compare the monthly traffic of the different websites and sort out the one with the most traffic. Right?

Well, not so fast. 

There is also a second step involved. 

You also need to consider the competing rental properties you will be up against and with which you will be sharing the overall monthly traffic. 

So, we need to determine the average monthly traffic one rental property listing will get. 

Why?

Because if you know this number, you can apply a certain conversion rate.

You can then estimate the number of leads the particular platform may generate for you. 

And if monthly costs are involved, you can also determine your cost per lead or acquisition.

You will find below-average numbers, so they need to be taken with a grain of salt. 

Why?

In some geographic areas, you might have fewer competing rental properties and thus get more overall traffic per listing.

In contrast, this competition could be much higher than the average in other areas, and you will get less traffic per property.

Or the demand in certain areas will give certain sections of an apartment rental website above-average traffic.

I have another side note before I present you with the results.

Not all of the above rental property portals reasonably disclosed their inventory size, so I could use it in my calculation.

From some, I could get the inventory size at once (disclosed on their web pages).

Or I could at least check each geographic area one by one (kind of laborious work) and sum up the total number of listings.

And here are my results, also including pricing information:

So, from the available data, we can make out two winners in terms of best when it comes to traffic per rental property listing.

In the free category, the winner is Craigslist, with an average monthly traffic of 234.3 page views per listing.

Zillow’s Rental Manager is the winner in the partially free category, with 4691.4 page views per listing per month. 

 Now that you know about the whole range of different marketing channels, I wanted to remind you of the infographic from above.

Also, just picking one without considering the other factors (e.g., your goals, constraints, etc.) isn’t wise.

This leads me to….

Assess Your Goals and Resources (Constraints)

Picture assessing your goals and constraints as a journey—your personal real estate odyssey. 

Just like any journey, there are some vital things you’ll need to consider. 

Think of these as your travel companions:

• Your gross commission
• Brokerage commission split
• Income tax rate
• Average income from each apartment deal you seal. 

With these pals by your side, you’ll be able to figure out how many successful closings you’ll need each year and even each month to reach your goal.

But the journey doesn’t stop here, does it? 

You’ll need to set your timeline. When do you want to reach this net commission milestone? In a year, two years, or maybe three? 

The answer might surprise you, as it can rule out some of your marketing channels immediately.

Imagine feeling spry and wanting to sprint towards your net commission goal within 12 months. 

But you’re also contemplating content marketing, also known as inbound marketing. 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s akin to trying to win a marathon on a Pogo stick. 

It’s fun, sure, but it’s likely to take you longer than 12 months to see results, even if you’re pretty experienced.

Next, you’ll want to consider your monthly marketing budget. 

Knowing this and the average cost per lead is like having a map for your journey. 

It helps you figure out if you can drum up the necessary monthly leads to reach your annual net commission goal.

Also, consider whether your timeline is realistic in the first place.

And what about your “sweat-equity” budget? 

This is when you’re willing to invest in lead generation methods that may not cost money but do cost something even more valuable—your time. 

Your monthly budget isn’t exactly overflowing.

In that case, the answer to this question will determine if you can generate the needed monthly leads within your desired timeframe.

The next question you need to ask is how well you know your ideal real estate clients or target audience. 

Also, do you need more apartment buyers, sellers, rental leads, or all three equally? 

This depends on your real estate niche and the USP I discussed earlier.

What does the answer to this question determine?

The marketing channels you should use to target the particular apartment buyer, seller, and/or rental prospects. 

Finally, what is your advertising or lead generation skill level for each potential marketing channel?

For instance, let’s say you are highly skilled and have already had experience with one or more.

It can shorten the lead time to get to a reliable lead-producing apartment advertising campaign.

Picture you cooking for the first time vs. the master chef in your family.

The master chef knows a receipt by memory.

Or they can improvise something with the remaining ingredients from your fridge in twenty minutes.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

73 Real Estate Niche Ideas and Beyond

Each real niche has different target audiences with different needs. 

Based on these, you often need to use the most suitable communication approach to reach them.

The real estate niche you want to approach also depends on the type of real estate professional you are.

Some niches are more appealing to investors. Others are more appealing to realtors and other real estate professionals.

Below, you’ll find various real estate niche ideas for your inspiration. 

I also include a technique that helps you innovate and find even more.

Overview of 73 Real Estate Niche Ideas

The short paragraphs below explain these different real estate niches in more depth.

For that, I picked a small selection from each category.

By the way, the above table is not just a table; it’s a matrix you can use to brainstorm and generate even more real estate niche ideas.

How to do it?

You combine different ones.

You can get quite creative in creating new sub-niches by combining vertically and horizontally.

For example, you could create a real estate niche of tiny houses close to golf courses for single military members.

The more you combine, the narrower the real estate niche gets.

And the narrower the niche gets, the higher the risk of getting too thin and ending up with a potential target audience that’s too small.

Real Estate Niche By Property Type

1) Commercial Real Estate – Retail

If you are looking for the most diverse section of the commercial real estate market, it’s the retail sector.

These properties include shopping centers, individual stores, ‘big box’ stores, and pop-up shops.

2) Commercial Real Estate – Office

This commercial real estate sector includes all kinds of office spaces found in smaller or larger buildings.

There are two types: urban and suburban.

Urban areas can be found in cities, skyscrapers, and other high-rise properties.

The smaller ones are often grouped in office parks and belong to suburban office spaces.

3) Condos & Townhomes

An apartment owned by one individual within a building of other condominiums can be called “condos” or “condominiums.”

As a condo owner, you usually contribute to maintenance and amenity services via HOA (homeowner association) fees.

Townhomes are similar to single-family homes.

They are multi-story homes and are part of a multi-unit complex.

Its walls usually border adjacent units. The occupants are primarily tenants, but you can purchase them too.

4) Green Homes

When someone calls a home a green home, it usually means it was built sustainably with environmentally friendly materials.

Additionally, they are also built to focus on the efficient use of water and energy.

Different green building standards can be used as guidelines, but also to better market a green home afterward, such as:

• International Code Council’s 2012 International Green Construction Code (IgCC)
• ANSI/ASHRAE/USGBC/IES Standard 189.1-2011
• ICC 700-2012: 2012 National Green Building Standard (ICC 700)
• Green Globes™
• US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®)
• The International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge™, version 2.1 (May 2012)

Real Estate Niche Based on Contract

1) Mineral, Air, and Other Property Rights

Mineral rights and air rights always concern a particular type of land.

The first relates to underground resources, such as oil, silver, or natural gas.

At least in the U.S., mineral rights allow the owner to exploit any natural resources beneath the land.

Different online auction providers and brokers exist, such as EnergyNet and Oil & Gas Asset House.

Air rights are the property interest in the “space” above the earth’s surface.

When owning such rights, you will have the right to use and develop the space above the land without interference from others.

2) REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts)

REITs, also known as real estate investment trusts, are inspired by mutual funds.

It’s an incorporated company that owns, operates, or finances income properties.

To legally operate as a REIT, you need a taxable entity for federal purposes, such as a corporation.

Directors or trustees must also govern it, and shares must be transferable.

Another requirement is that it must have at least 100 shareholders.

Not five or fewer than five individuals can own more than 50% of the value of the REIT’s stock.

This isn’t allowed for the last half of its taxable year.

A REIT allows individual investors to earn dividends from real estate investments.

It’s without going through all the tasks a direct real estate investor must handle. 

These tasks are usually finding a deal, buying, managing, maintaining, tenants, and financing.

This is possible because REITs can pool the capital of numerous investors.

3) Crowdfunding Loans

Crowdfunding loans are part of something called peer-to-peer lending.

If you want a loan like that, you do the same as applying to a bank.

The difference is that the money doesn’t come from a bank but from existing funds contributed by many investors.

This can be an exciting alternative.

That is to say, for individuals and businesses that didn’t raise funds by using the traditional banking route.

Real Estate Niche By Demographic/ Life Situation

1) 55+/ Baby Boomers

I’ve already discussed this in-depth in this article about how to market to baby boomers.

You can also focus exclusively on this niche and cater to the needs of baby boomers.

Real Estate trends for baby boomers are, for example:

• Renting in Urban Areas
• Communities of Like-Minded People
• Rural Living

2) Hispanics

Hispanics will allegedly comprise 56% of all new home buyers in the U.S. by 2030 (source).

So, this is another demographic you may want to consider as a real estate niche.

Here are some areas where Hispanic homeownership is growing:

• District of Columbia
• Wake County, North Carolina
• Washoe County, Nevada
• Pasco County, Florida
• Gwinnett County, Georgia

3) Single (Women)

There is an interesting sub-niche within the Millennial homebuyer generation.

You can also find it in other generations, such as Gen X and Baby Boomers.

It’s singles and, particularly, single women.

A slightly older statistic, as of 2015, is that only 9% of purchases accounted for single men compared to 15% for single women.

This contrast is most substantial in the age groups of 51 to 60 and 61 to 69.

The main reasons for this developing trend are the loss of a spouse and the need to downsize afterward.

There is also a potential niche combination between the single women’s niche and tiny houses. Just an idea.

Real Estate Niche By Geography

1) Overseas Retirement Properties

This type of niche is kind of self-explanatory.

It’s all about properties that suit retirees who wish to retire overseas.

The reasons for this decision can be manifold.

Very often, because of climate reasons, they can become winter birds and live in a better climate during the colder months of the north.

Other reasons are the lower costs of living in places outside the U.S.

2) Walkable Neighborhoods

Walkability is part of a real estate niche within the larger niche of wellness real estate, which focuses on health.

It measures how friendly a specific neighborhood or area is to walking.

The following are factors that influence the walkability of neighborhoods:

• Presence or absence of footpaths
• Quality of footpaths or sidewalks
• Traffic and road conditions
• Building accessibility
• Safety
• Land use patterns
• Residential density
• Frequency and variety of buildings
• Presence of trees and vegetation
• Entrances and other sensations along street frontages
• A high number of places to go to near the majority of homes
• Street designs that work for people, not just cars

Real Estate Niche By Need

1) Vacation Rentals

Vacation rentals don’t need much of an introduction.

These are mainly properties in tourist hotspots.

This can be a mountain cottage close to a ski resort or a beach house with great views and lovely ocean breezes from the sea.

These properties can be interesting to focus on as a realtor.

You can attract investors and/or, as an investor, generate income from vacation rentals.

You will have to deal with different target customers and communicate with them via the proper marketing channels.

This will depend on the tourist hotspot,

2) Supported Living

Individuals with disabilities and their families most need supported living properties.

These properties are usually connected with some sort of residential service.

Why?

To help the individuals or inhabitants attain or keep their independence.

3) Turnkey Rentals

From the investor’s perspective, turnkey rentals are basically already income-generating properties.

The whole part of finding, negotiating, closing, on a case-by-case basis, fixing, and putting a tenant in is already done for you.

It is almost like a real estate investment trust.

The difference is that you will need more capital.

Why?

You buy the whole property and not just a share of a pool of several already rented-out properties.

Usually, the company offering turnkey rental properties also provides property management.

The company also screens the tenant already in place, generating investor income before the close.

Real Estate Niche By Seller Situation

The real estate niches defined by seller situations are usually more troublesome.

Sellers are often in difficult situations.

This is the underlying condition in almost all cases.

1) Fixer-Uppers & Properties with Structural Issues

These are run-down properties.

There are numerous reasons for that (often financial or legal ones).

Sellers couldn’t or didn’t want to invest more money into their properties for renovations.

These fixer-uppers are also properties with structural issues that might be more challenging to fix.

The fixer-upper investor usually buys such property cheaply, fixes it, and then re-sells it, ideally at a profit.

2) Tax Delinquencies

Some sellers can’t or, for some other reason, couldn’t pay property taxes and become delinquent.

This is often an opportunity for real estate investors to negotiate a good deal with the seller to buy the property.

This provided he cancels the tax liability by making the purchase.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

8 Upsides and 3 Downsides of Targeting a Real Estate Niche

It’s essential to consider targeting a real estate niche. Why? Selecting and targeting one informs many aspects of your real estate business.

And it ultimately affects your lead gen success rate.

However, it has its upsides and downsides:

Read on, and you will learn more about them in depth.

What Is a Real Estate Niche?

This is Wikipedia’s definition of a niche market: 

“A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. The market niche defines the product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality, and the demographics that it is intended to target.“

So, a real estate niche is a subgroup or segment of a larger real estate market with its own demands and preferences.

When you focus on a real estate niche, you can often provide better solutions to the needs of specific consumers than competitors. 

Namely, competitors that target a larger or broader audience.

For instance, as a real estate developer, you could focus on building and selling only green homes under a certain green building standard.

This would be instead of building just properties in a specific price range.

8 Upsides and 3 Downsides of Targeting a Real Estate Niche

8 Upsides of Targeting a Real Estate Niche 

1) Fewer Competitors

Offering more specific services to a particular real estate niche will enable you to have less competition. 

There is also a lower risk regarding competing with price and getting into a draining “price war.” 

Between realtors, this would correspond with increased commission discounts.

2) Easier to Cater to Specific Seller and Buyer Needs

You can better target the specific needs of your target customers.

Let’s say you focus on second homes in geographic areas that attract vacationers.

This would make you more competitive as a realtor.

Or suppose you focus on second homes with great views.

In that case, you can make yourself unique and differentiate yourself from your competition.

You would cater to the specific needs of a potential home buyer in this vacation spot.

It will also be easier to develop additional service offerings.

Let’s stay with the second homes with great views niche.

An additional service offering could be a concierge service during the owner’s absence.

If you don’t target a niche, your additional service offerings may be all over the place.

3) Easier to Become the Expert

Focusing on one real estate niche topic or field of knowledge is easier than being a jack of all trades.

This will also allow you to become a specialist in the respective real estate niche with its related products and services.

So you could do a certificate such as “Certified Seniors Specilist” or “Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist.”

This wouldn’t make much sense if your business would operate in a broader niche.

Once you are a leader in this niche, you can expand your products and services into broader markets or adjacent real estate niches.

4) Easier to Determine Your Target Audience’s Wants and Needs

When you cater to a large variety of different seller and buyer types, you will find that each can have different needs and wants. 

Marketing and selling to such a variety can get pretty complex.

When you have just one target real estate niche, this complexity simplifies.

So, it gets much easier to determine your target audience’s wants and needs.

And the better you know them, the more persuasive you can be and thus increase your lead gen success rate.

Knowing their needs also ties into your sales process. 

Suppose you specialize in the luxury real estate niche and nothing else.

You would know exactly what buyers and sellers typically want. 

If you had all kinds of sellers (lower-end properties, distressed, probates, etc.), you would have to be pretty versatile in your sales communication.

5) Developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) Is More Straightforward 

Differentiating from competitors helps position yourself uniquely.

This makes your offerings more attractive and improves lead conversion.

In addition, when you target a real estate niche, developing a USP gets easier.

Sometimes, just the niche you target can already be your unique selling proposition.

This happens when your competitors stay generic.

6) Less Effort to Find Potential Partnerships and Referral Sources

This can extend your reach and provide you with new channels for lead generation.

Suppose you decided to target the probate real estate niche.

In that case, the choice for potential partnerships becomes pretty clear. 

One obvious choice would be working with probate attorneys.

This wouldn’t be as straightforward when you follow a broader approach.

7) Marketing Channels and Messages Becomes More Effective

Imagine you were all over the place regarding seller prospects.

You would go after commercial property owners, townhouse owners, single family, etc.

This would create quite some overhead regarding the marketing message and channels to choose from.

You would need a marketing campaign for each property owner type to be effective.

Targeting one real estate niche (e.g., commercial property owners) becomes much more streamlined.

You would only have to determine the most effective marketing channel for this type of seller.

And you could also better tailor your marketing message (sales copy).

8) Higher Chances of Loyal Customer

This is related to becoming an expert when targeting a real estate niche.

Why?

Let’s say you become an expert and specialize in a real estate niche.

Then, seller and buyer clients will perceive you as having more knowledge in a specific area of interest.

As mentioned earlier, targeting a real estate niche also helps by offering a personalized service.

This offering can also lead to higher customer loyalty. 

Finally, you will be able to create a community of investors with similar interests more easily when you target a specific real estate niche.

This also increases the chances of having more loyal customers.

3 Downsides of Targeting a Real Estate Niche

While I think there are more upsides than downsides to targeting a real estate niche. Let’s not forget some of the things to watch out for…

1) Limited Market

You’re saying no to a broader market when you choose a niche. 

This means you’ll have fewer potential clients. 

If the niche is small or gets less popular, you might find it harder to keep your business strong.

That’s why selecting a profitable niche from the start is so important.

2) Risk of Changes

Markets can change, right? 

You could find yourself in a tough spot if you’re all in on one real estate niche and the market shifts, like new regulations or changes in what people want. 

And some real estate niches are more sensitive to economic ups and downs. 

That’s the case for commercial real estate. 

During the pandemic, I had a rough ride to find new tenants for one of the commercial properties I co-own and manage.

3) Need to Stay Updated

Your clients might expect you to be a top-notch expert in your niche.

This is great if you are, but it also means there’s more pressure to live up to those high expectations.

It also means you want to stay super sharp in your niche. 

And this requires continuous learning and staying on top of trends and changes. 

If you don’t, you risk falling behind.

However, this downside is kind of weak.

Because the same is true when you have a broader real estate market approach.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

LinkedIn for Real Estate: Ultimate Guide to Generate Leads

According to some, LinkedIn was and is considered the next big thing. 

Can it get as big as Facebook and other popular social networks?

When you hear those predictions, you might wonder whether it is also worthwhile for real estate.

LinkedIn is a social media network where your chances of generating high-quality real estate leads are high.

Even though the lead cost of $105.20 is higher than on Facebook, you will likely have significantly lower costs per sale since the lead quality is higher, according to various statistics. 

This longer article will analyze the platform deeply and discuss its importance, essential statistics, benefits for real estate, and tips for using it efficiently, whether the organic or the paid lead generation approach.

What Is LinkedIn?

In one phrase, LinkedIn is basically Facebook for professionals and another social network.

In contrast to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the other networks, its focus is helping people make business connections.

But, of course, you can also do the standard things you might be used to doing on Facebook, such as sharing, liking content, and messaging other users.

When checking a profile, you will soon realize the rather professional structure of the network.

Here, your profile is instead a resume, where you can present your work experience, accomplishments, referrals, and recommendations.

Another professional feature is a career board, where you can search and apply for jobs.

The page you land on when you click “Home” is similar to Facebook’s news feed.

There, you will find posts published by other LinkedIn users, and you can also post your posts.

Again, similar to Facebook, you can decide who can see your posts (only your connections or just everyone (the public)).

When you click “My Network,” your existing network of connections is displayed. 

Here, you can look for other users to join your network and check if you have existing invitations from other users.

If you click “Jobs,” you will get to an extensive career site to search for and apply for jobs and/or research companies you might be interested in. 

Here, you can also get notified when there are new job offerings.

“Messaging” is again similar to Facebook Messenger, where you can chat with people in your network. 

You can also send messages to people outside your network using LinkedIn Premium. This is called “InMail.”

You can find your profile by clicking on “Me.” 

And then, you can add your resume with your career history, including your accomplishments, work experience, education, current location, and more.

It should be as shiny as a resume you would send over to the human resources department of a company. 

Why? 

You can assume and expect professional connections and potential recruiters to visit your profile and, of course, potential real estate leads you want to generate.

But more about optimizing your LinkedIn profile in a later section of this article.

How to Generate Real Estate Leads With LinkedIn The Organic Way

Let’s start with the organic way, which will cost you rather time than money.

1) Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile (3 Tips)

As you may be well aware, your LinkedIn profile is the first point of contact with potential real estate leads, making it vitally important to nail. 

Yet, it’s also a field rife with missed opportunities and commonly overlooked elements. 

Let’s delve deeper into what you can do to optimize your LinkedIn profile…

A Professional Headshot and Banner: 

First impressions matter, right? 

A professional headshot is essential. It’s like the gleaming “For Sale” sign in the yard. 

Your banner, on the other hand, is your chance to display a bit more personality or branding. 

So you may want to ask yourself whether your picture and banner are inviting enough.

Headline and Summary: 

This is where you share your value proposition. 

Your headline should be a snappy, bite-sized encapsulation of your professional identity. 

Your summary is your opportunity to elaborate on your skills, experience, and what you bring to the table. 

However, since this is basically real estate sales copy, you want to prioritize explaining what’s in it for your potential real estate leads and talk less about you.

Sure, you want to write about your skills, experience, etc… Still, as with features in copywriting, you want to align them with benefits for your potential clients.

So, both your headline and summary will benefit if you bring copywriting skills to the table.

Recommendations and Endorsements: 

These are like your homebuyer testimonials. 

Positive feedback from colleagues, clients, or partners can make a big difference in building trust. 

So it’s a good idea to actively seek recommendations and endorsements.

It wouldn’t be an article from Hacking Real Estate Marketing without also taking a critical view of things and making you aware of some pitfalls.

Profile optimization is essential, but it can also lead to tunnel vision. 

It’s easy to obsess over perfecting your profile and forget that LinkedIn is a networking tool, not just a digital resume.

Overemphasis on Self-Promotion: 

One pitfall to avoid is turning your profile into a non-stop self-promotion tool. 

Yes, you want to highlight your skills and accomplishments but remember that building connections involve listening and engaging with others.

Failing to Update Regularly: 

Too often, people set and forget their profiles. But LinkedIn is dynamic. 

Are you updating your profile regularly to reflect recent accomplishments, new skills, or changing career goals?

Overlooking SEO: 

LinkedIn is a search engine, much like Google. 

Are you incorporating relevant keywords in your profile to ensure the right people (buyer or seller prospects) find you?

Ignoring the Value of Authenticity: 

Many people lose sight of authenticity in seeking a polished, professional profile. 

Does your profile reflect who you are, not just what you think potential leads want to see?

Profile optimization is not just about looking good; it’s about looking real, and relevant, and constantly looking for improvement.

2) Building a Powerful Network with Linkedin

Building a powerful network on LinkedIn can be compared to building a thriving, connected community in a new housing development. 

It’s about more than just the number of houses, or in this case, connections. 

It’s about fostering a sense of community and meaningful relationships. But, as we all know, every silver lining has a cloud.

First, let’s look at the sunny side and what you can do to build a robust network for your organic real estate lead generation with LinkedIn…

Making the Right Connections: 

You wouldn’t invite just anyone to your housewarming party, would you? 

Likewise, you should be strategic about who you connect with on LinkedIn. 

Do they align with your business goals (e.g., real estate lead generation)? 

Are they in your industry or a complementary one (in the case of real estate cross-marketing)?

Again as with any other lead generation method, it’s about targeting the right audience and ideal clients.

Engaging with Your Connections: 

The best neighbors aren’t the ones who just wave from their porch; they’re the ones who stop and chat. Well, as long as they are not the overly needy ones who can’t stop talking…

So you want to comment on posts, share valuable real estate content, and participate in discussions. 

Personalized Connection Requests: 

Imagine you’re at a party, and someone walks up to you and says, “Hello, person, nice to meet you.” 

Not very engaging, right? 

So, personalizing your connection requests can increase the chances of them being accepted.

It’s the same with email marketing. You will also get a better open rate when you use the recipient’s name in the subject line.

Utilize Introductions: 

LinkedIn allows you to be introduced to a 2nd or 3rd-level connection through a mutual connection. 

This is like a friend introducing you to another friend at a social gathering.

Now let’s take a critical view on networking building with LinkedIn and potential pitfalls…

Quantity Over Quality: 

In the quest for a larger network, many people fall into the trap of connecting with everyone and anyone. 

But having a thousand connections means little, if none, are relevant or engaged. 

Are your connections meaningful? 

This can easily happen when you lose track of your goal with LinkedIn, which in our case, is generating real estate leads.

So connecting with everyone would be like targeting everybody in a lead generation campaign.

One-Way Communication: 

Networking isn’t just about broadcasting your content. 

It’s a two-way street that requires active listening, interaction, and engagement with others’ content. So you also want to ask yourself whether you “listen” as much as you “talk.”

Ignoring Offline Connections: 

In the digital age, forgetting about our offline relationships is easy. 

So, are you incorporating your real-world connections into your LinkedIn network?

Inconsistent Engagement: 

Building a robust network requires consistency. 

You can’t expect to disappear for months and pick up where you left off. Are you consistently present and engaging on LinkedIn?

3) Using an Engaging Content Strategy

As I covered when I wrote about 254 real estate content ideas, if you already do content marketing anyways, your work is already half done since you can also use it on LinkedIn.

Why?

Because if you have already produced videos or written articles, you can repurpose them on LinkedIn.

And here are four tips on using your real estate content on LinkedIn to drive engagement for your lead generation…

Value-Driven Content: 

Your content should be like a treasure trove of knowledge for your connections. 

Are you providing valuable insights, sharing interesting industry news, and offering helpful tips?

Again, this work will be much easier if you already have a content marketing strategy.

Diversified Content Mix: 

Just as variety is the spice of life, a mix of content keeps your LinkedIn profile interesting. 

So you want to use different content types, like posts, articles, infographics, and videos.

Suppose you are more focused on writing articles for your blog. 

In that case, you can repurpose them occasionally and convert them into short videos, for instance.

Regular Posting Schedule: 

Consistency is crucial to keeping your audience engaged and coming back for more. 

This is something basically all social media platforms have in common.

Their algorithms hook you with that.

Do you have a regular posting schedule that your connections can look forward to?

User Engagement: 

It creates a two-way dialogue when you engage with your audience, respond to comments, and ask for feedback. 

It also strengthens relationships. 

Are you having conversations, or are you just talking to people?

Now what about the pitfalls?

Overly Promotional Content: 

Yes, LinkedIn is a professional platform, but that doesn’t mean your content should be constant sales pitches. 

Are you creating genuine value or just promoting your real estate services?

Lack of Authenticity: 

Are you true to yourself and your brand in your content, or are you just echoing what everyone in your industry says?

Ignoring Audience Feedback: 

Audience engagement is a two-way street. 

If you’re not listening to your audience’s feedback and adjusting your content accordingly, you’re missing a key part of the content strategy puzzle. 

So you want o be responsive to your audience’s needs and interests.

Neglecting SEO Principles: 

I mentioned it earlier when I wrote about how you can optimize your LinkedIn profile.

Since LinkedIn, like other digital platforms, is driven by algorithms, you want to use relevant keywords, engaging titles, and other SEO principles to ensure your content is discoverable.

4) Using LinkedIn Groups for Prospecting

You could envision LinkedIn Groups like local clubs or interest groups. 

It’s where like-minded individuals gather to discuss, share insights, and connect on specific topics. 

Yet, as with any social gathering, there are rules and pitfalls to avoid.

Let’s see what you can do to use them for your real estate lead generation…

Identifying Relevant Groups (Back to Audience Targeting): 

Like choosing the right neighborhood to live in, selecting the right groups to join on LinkedIn is crucial. 

Are these groups populated by your target audience or industry peers?

Active Participation: 

Groups are like community meetings. Simply showing up isn’t enough; you need to participate. 

This means sharing valuable insights, commenting on discussions, and starting conversations. Are you an active participant or a wallflower?

Building Authority: 

Regular, valuable contributions to group discussions can help establish you as a trusted authority. 

So here, too, you want to share your expertise in a way that benefits others and boosts your reputation.

Prospect Identification: 

The right LinkedIn Group can be a goldmine for real estate prospecting, offering a concentrated pool of potential leads. 

Are you tactfully identifying prospects and fostering relationships within the group?

Now, let’s talk about the pitfalls…

A “Salesy” Approach: 

You know them. I know them.

Those social media groups, where things get out of control, and you end up in a pile of spammy product and service posts with no engagement and interaction. The same happens on LinkedIn.

So you want to remember to provide value to the group and not simply try to sell your real estate services.

Irrelevant Groups: 

Joining groups without strategic thought can lead to wasted time and resources. 

It’s like targeting Bayboomers for an electronic music festival or a cross-fit competition in the age range between 25 and 40.

So you want to make sure that the groups you think of joining align with your lead generation goals and have a high likelihood of containing your ideal real estate clients. 

Inactive or Low-Engagement Groups: 

Not all groups are buzzing with activity. Joining inactive or low-engagement groups can be like shouting into a void. 

You want to check the group engagement levels before joining so you don’t end up in one of the spammy groups.

Time Commitment: 

Active participation in LinkedIn Groups takes time and effort. Are you prepared for the commitment or spreading yourself too thin?

By the way, this is generally true for the whole organic lead generation route with LinkedIn. 

It’s time-consuming because LinkedIn is about community and value, not just lead generation. 

5) Using LinkedIn Analytics

As with all lead generation and marketing endeavors, you want to know how they perform. 

And LinkedIn Analytics provides valuable insights into your content’s performance, followers’ demographics, and more. 

So using LinkedIn Analytics give you these benefits…

Understanding Your Audience: 

LinkedIn Analytics provides demographic data about your followers and page visitors. 

It’s like a survey of your neighborhood – who are your neighbors? What do they do? How can you better serve them?

Evaluating Content Performance: 

Analytics allows you to see how your content is performing. 

This data can help you understand what resonates with your audience, much like a successful open house can tell you what buyers in the area are looking for.

This data allows you to produce more of what has already worked.

Tracking Engagement Over Time: 

By monitoring trends, likes, shares, comments, and other engagement metrics, you can understand what strategies are working and how to optimize your efforts. 

Are you steadily building a community, or are you losing traction?

Learning From Your Competitors: 

LinkedIn provides data on how you stack up against similar pages. 

This can offer insights into how you might improve your strategy. How do you compare to others in your industry?

What about the pitfalls?

Data Overload: 

LinkedIn Analytics offers a wealth of data, but not all may be relevant to your goals (e.g., lead generation). 

Are you focusing on the metrics that matter, or are you getting lost in the data?

Misinterpreting Data: 

If you don’t have a data context, it can lead to false conclusions. So you want to consider all factors when interpreting your data.

Short-Term Focus: 

Getting caught up in the weekly or monthly analytics fluctuations is easy. 

But real estate, like LinkedIn (and any other content marketing effort), is a long game. 

Are you keeping an eye on long-term trends and not just short-term changes?

Ignoring Qualitative Feedback: 

While analytics offer hard numbers, they can’t capture everything. 

Qualitative feedback from your connections can provide invaluable insights that numbers can’t. 

Are you listening to what your connections are saying?

In a nutshell, LinkedIn Analytics can be a powerful tool in guiding your LinkedIn lead generation strategy. 

Still, it’s essential to focus on the right metrics, interpret the data correctly, and balance hard numbers with qualitative insights.

How to Generate Real Estate Leads With LinkedIn the Paid Way

Going the paid LinkedIn route to generate real estate leads can be an attractive alternative if you don’t want to spend too much time with the organic route.

However, just a heads-up, instead of time, you will spend money.

1) LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Content

Let’s delve into the fast-paced world of LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Content.

It’s like your billboard space in LinkedIn’s bustling “city,” but with a catch: you need to know who to target and how.

By the way, as you can see, targeting is one of the evergreen principles of (real estate) lead generation and marketing.

On my site, you will come across it over and over.

Now let’s start with the positives of this approach for your lead generation…

2) Audience Targeting Options

LinkedIn Ads offer incredible targeting capabilities. 

You can target based on the following (source):

• Locations
• Audience attributes (company, demographics, education, job, interests, and traits)
• Matched audiences (for retargeting campaigns)
• Audience size

3) Variety of Ad Types

LinkedIn provides different ad formats, including Sponsored Content (reach your audience in the newsfeed), Sponsored Messaging, LeadGen Forms (forms with pre-fill LinkedIn profile information), Text, and Dynamic Ads (classic display ads in LinkedIn’s right rail). 

Nevertheless, there are also downsides and pitfalls with this approach… 

Let’s delve into it.

High Cost

Compared to other platforms, LinkedIn Ads can be costly. 

According to this source, from 2023, you will pay $8 to $11 per click for LinkedIn Ads, $0.5 to $1 per send (sponsored messaging), and $33.80 per 1,000 impressions (e.g., sponsored content).

Toward the end of this article, I will give you a calculation and show you which paid method is likely the best.

By the way, the high costs don’t make this platform suitable for easy campaign testing. 

What you can do to mitigate the impact on your wallet is to test an ad campaign on less expensive platforms such as Facebook first with a similar target group, of course. 

For instance, it could be that you first test a particular ad copy or content and how it works regarding lead conversion rates.

Once you have a “campaign” winner, you can move from the less expensive (but likely lower lead quality platform) to LinkedIn.

Learning Curve 

Navigating LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager and creating effective ad campaigns requires some technical know-how and strategic thinking. 

So you must be prepared to invest time in learning or hiring a professional.

Organic LinkedIn Real Estate Lead Generation v.s. Paid

Now, let’s break it down and see how organic LinkedIn lead generation compares to the paid approach for real estate.

So, organic and paid strategies have their place in a well-rounded LinkedIn marketing approach for real estate lead generation. 

Organic strategies are key for building relationships and establishing credibility. 

In contrast, the paid approach can help increase visibility and reach a targeted audience quickly. 

12 LinkedIn Statistics Informing Your Decision on Real Estate Lead Generation

• There are 930 million LinkedIn users, of 224 million who come from the U.S. (source).
• 31% of users are older Millennials, 24% of users between 40 and 49, and 20% of Gen Z use LinkedIn (source).
• Concerning content marketing, LinkedIn is the number one channel for B2B marketers (source).
• You can expect a 2x to 5x higher return on ad spend (ROAS) on LinkedIn than on other social media platforms (source).
• B2B marketers (40%) rated LinkedIn as the most effective channel for generating high-quality leads (source).
• The best-performing article titles have 40 to 49 characters (source).
• LinkedIn is part of the digital marketing mix of B2B marketers in 92% of the cases. 97% use it for their content marketing (source), and 79% consider it an effective lead-generation method (source).
• It is better to upload videos separately on LinkedIn (if at all) because posts without videos perform better (source).
• LinkedIn is used by 41% of millionaires (source).
• Using a professional headshot in your profile will get 21 times more profile views and nine times more connection requests (source).
• According to a study, the average conversion rate of various LinkedIn Ads is between 5-15% (source).
• The best click-through rate receives the ad type of sponsored content with single image ads. It’s 0.56% (source).

Summing Up: 9 Fact-Based Performance Tips to Use LinkedIn Efficiently as a Realtor

From all the above, I can derive ten tips on how you can use LinkedIn efficiently for real estate lead generation:

1) Use it when your primary market and target audience is in the U.S. and if you also want to target high-net-worth individuals.

2) Post professional and good quality content regularly, ideally how-to & list posts, and don’t make the title longer than 49 characters

3) Use a good headshot profile picture to get 21 times more profile views.

4) When using the LinkedIn Advertising Platform, focus on sponsored content with single image ads since they get the highest click-through rates (0.56%). 

5) Take advantage of your LinkedIn Company page, where you want to add every detail about your business. 

You can also add a well-designed banner image for your page header.

6) Another page that can be beneficial is a showcase page, where you can provide more information about your real estate business.

A showcase page resembles a landing page and the company page of the real estate website. 

You can promote content, offers, and more on the showcase page.

7) To find local community members or users, you should also create or join LinkedIn groups related to real estate.

8) To find background information on your current leads and to identify new potential clients, you want to use the advanced search.

9) Finally, to know if you are using LinkedIn efficiently, you need to also check your LinkedIn analytics.

Is LinkedIn for Real Estate Worthwhile? 

When asking whether LinkedIn for real estate is worthwhile, the real question is whether it is good enough to generate new leads or new business.

So, in that case, we need to compare it to the metrics of other marketing channels and do some numbers crunching.

One good metric is the cost per lead (cost per acquisition).

So we would calculate the cost, including the costs per click, click-through rates, and the conversion rate on the landing page you use for real estate lead generation.

For this calculation, let’s focus on LinkedIn Ads with the highest click-through rate: sponsored content with single-image ads.

They get a click-through rate of 0.56%.

We also know from the above statistics that LinkedIn ads get a conversion rate between 5 and 15%. 

This wide range comes about because, according to the source for some, a conversion is the click of a button. For others, a conversion is a website visitor entering contact information in a lead capture form.

Let’s assume the lower 5% conversion rate since lead capture forms cause more “friction” than clicking a button, thus reducing the conversion rate. 

However, the 5% is still significantly higher than the general website conversion rates of 2% and 5% across various industries (an average of 3.5%) (source).

The last variable we need is the LinkedIn Ad cost for the single image ad.

While you can choose between different LinkedIn Ads bid types (e.g., by impression, click, send), for an easier calculation, let’s use costs per click.

The average cost per click is (ouchie) $5.26 (source)

Since we don’t bid on impressions, the click-through rate is basically irrelevant, and we need only the following two marketing performance data for the calculation:

• Website CVR: 5%
• CPC: $5.26

For a landing page with a lead conversion rate of 5%, you need 20 visits (1 divided by 5%). 

These visits are the clicks you need to get and thus buy from the LinkedIn single image ad.

Then logic dictates that you will pay $105.20 per lead (20 visits/clicks x $5.26 CPC).

Let’s compare this to the cost per lead you pay with Google Ads and Facebook Ads, which are $44.70 and $16.52, as discussed in my article about real estate lead costs.

At first glance, Facebook Ads look like the winner, and LinkedIn is the loser.

But before you jump to premature conclusions, don’t forget the differences in lead quality.

Based on the earlier statistics, you will likely need to generate significantly fewer leads from LinkedIn than from Facebook to close one real estate transaction.

So already, if you need 20 leads from Facebook (20 x $44.70) to have one high-quality lead that you can close and four from LinkedIn (4x$105.20), in that case, Facebook would be more expensive regarding your return on investment or return on ad spend.

The number of leads you need to close one sale not only depends on the lead quality but also on your sales skills. 

Because the best quality leads won’t cut it if you can’t close them.

It also depends on how good your landing page sales copy and other conversion-increasing factors are. 

Nevertheless, after this analysis and estimation, I conclude that LinkedIn is worthwhile for real estate lead generation. 

The argument favoring my conclusion is the reported higher lead quality and, thus, a likely lower cost per sale because you need fewer leads per closing.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Real Estate Sales Skills: Insights to Drive Your Success

So, would you like to improve your real estate sales skills?

I hear you, and I think sales is one of the most important skills you can learn in any industry and as an entrepreneur. 

Some considered it to be even a million-dollar skill.

But how to improve your real estate sales skills?

According to the statistics, you do this by becoming a better communicator, qualifying early, asking the right questions to learn about the customer’s needs, communicating the value you provide, pitching less, not forgetting to close, and practicing sales role-play.

The line is blurry between marketing and sales in general. 

And since many real estate agents may feel that they need to improve their sales skills, I will tackle this question in more detail in the rest of this article. 

You will learn 15 inspiring sales statistics, how to increase your odds for better real estate sales, and more details about improving your sales skills.

If you are a big fan of robocalls and sales scripts without wanting to listen to a potential customer, this article might not be for you. If not, please read on.

What Are Real Estate Sales Skills?

Real estate sales skills are techniques, knowledge, and abilities a real estate professional needs to successfully move a potential buyer or seller prospect or lead through a sales process and convert them into a paying customer that finalizes a deal.

In other words, while the line is slightly blurry, real estate sales skills start where lead generation skills end.

When you look at the below infographic, it is more or less where the red area begins, where your sales skills are needed.

Here are some of the most essential real estate sales skills:

• Effective sales communication
• Presentation skills (showcasing a product or service)
• Negotiation
• Closing
• Customer service (often also seen as post-sale skill)
• Resilience (think cold calling, and you know what I mean)
• Product knowledge (e.g., local real estate market)
• Relationship building to increase the odds of repeat business (e.g., past client marketing)

15 Sales Statistics that Inform Real Estate Sales Skills

You can already get a feel and clues for the areas that need to be attacked to improve your real estate sales skills when we look at some interesting general sales statistics I found during my research for this article.

So, let’s have a look first. I will distill the most relevant stats for the sales areas that need to be attacked afterward and bold them in the bullet points below.

1) After potential buyers have researched their options and created a shortlist, 60% want to connect with sales during this phase (source).

2) If a sales representative would call back at a scheduled and specific time, a little less than half (42%) of people would be motivated to make a purchase (source).

3) One major difference between top and non-top performers is that 47% of the first group asks for referrals versus only 26% of the second group (source).

And what happens to those who ask for referrals? They earn 4 to 5 times more than those who don’t.

4) The large majority (92%) of customer interactions happen over the phone (source).

Also, according to Sales Insights Lab 2021 (source), 41.2% of sales representatives consider their phones the most effective sales tool.

5) A sales representative or vendor that responds first gets 30 to 50% of the sales (source).

Additionally, you want to be aware that when you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond, there is a 10x drop and even a 400% decrease in lead qualification when you respond within 10 minutes in contrast to 5 minutes (source).

6) Most sales (80%) will need five follow-up calls after a meeting.

And in my article about follow-ups, I already mentioned that 44% give up after just one follow-up.

7) Something important to keep in mind for later – only a tiny number (13%) of customers think that a salesperson understands their needs (source).

This goes together with the stat that you will have better sales success when you ask potential customers questions about their pain points and goals (source).

8) Your calls will be most successful if you focus on the value you can provide (96%), then work together with your customers (93%), give them perspective through market insights and other information (92%), and again assist them in understanding their needs (92%) (Hubspot, 2020).

9) More than half (55%) of the people working in sales lack the skills to be successful (source).

This is additionally supported by the fact that 85% of prospects are unsatisfied with their phone experience (source).

10) Only 5% of presentation attendees remember statistics, but 63% remember stories (source).

11) For sales, qualified leads are closed by 30% of the best companies and, on average, by 20% (source).

In the same context, it is important to note that at least half (50%) of prospects are not a good fit for the product or service sold (source).

12) Not qualifying a potential client well is responsible for 67% of lost sales (source).

13) In almost half (48%) of sales calls, no attempt is made to close a sale. So, it makes sense that the overall closing rate is 27% (source).

14) Non-top sales performers do a lot more pitching (19%) or “premature sales presentation” compared to 7% of top sales performers (source).

15) Comparing top performers with non-top performers regarding sales-related activities, 81.6% of the first group spends 4 hours or more on these activities compared to 60.8% of the second group (source).

Before I bore you with more statistics, let’s see what we can make out of them regarding what sales areas need to be attacked to improve your real estate sales skills.

Based on the Stats, How Should You Improve Your Real Estate Sales Skills?

From the sales statistics mentioned above, we can conclude several things that can move the odds in your favor regarding real estate sales success.

So, what can be concluded?

The phone or, for a better word, direct ear-to-ear or, even better, face-to-face (e.g., FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, etc.) conversations seem to be essential to have good customer interactions. 

For sales skills improvements, this means you want to be a good communicator via these mediums. 

I will come to what being a good communicator means later.

While it’s not directly related to real estate sales skills, it may improve your numbers if you want to respond quickly to inquiries or calls you get.

You want to better understand your potential customers’ needs by asking them the right questions. 

This comes back to being a good communicator.

When it comes to objections, you may want to focus on communicating the value you can provide aligned with the needs you discovered beforehand by again asking the right questions.

In contrast to stats, most people remembering stories gives us a clue about the importance of emotions. 

Why? 

Because stories usually convey emotions. 

This means, in turn, that if you manage to sell by triggering some emotions in your potential customer, more of what you have to offer will be retained. 

This is not limited to stories. 

There are many other ways you can trigger emotions in a sales call, such as, for example, exacerbating pain points further.

The next clue from the statistics is that you likely need to improve in qualifying potential customers or prospects. 

You can waste a lot of time when you first give a large presentation, the prospect picks your brain to get a free consultation, and then start to qualify or rather disqualify her way too late at the end of the call to find out that she needs to think about it, wait until the next full moon, or light a candle in the church first and doesn’t have the budget.

The opportunity costs are huge. 

The time you wasted with this type of unqualified or late-qualified client could have been spent talking to several more that may have resulted in a sale.

We can also learn from the stats that you might need to improve your closing skills. 

Remember that almost half of salespersons don’t attempt to close a sale.

This can often happen when you may have prepared a nice presentation for a sales call. 

And since you put so many hours into the preparation, you may focus on giving the presentation quickly and miss the buying signal from your potential customer.

What happens? 

Instead of skipping the presentation and going into the close, you go through the presentation. 

The potential customer goes from very interested (“shut up and take my money”) to less interested (“maybe I should reconsider”).

The above statistics further confirm that this problem seems to be a reality: the high performers pitch less than the lower ones.

And lastly, another element to improve your real estate sales skills seems to be to increase the hours put into sales activities. 

It’s kind of common sense, but the more you practice this skill by doing it, the better you will get.

How to Improve Your Real Estate Sales Skills

There are three areas influencing how you can improve your real estate sales skills, which are:

• Leveraging real estate market dynamics
• Building relationships and effective communication
• Negotiation skills

By different degrees, this is already confirmed by the above statistics.

Let’s start with the first one, which may not be obvious at first glance, of how it informs the improvement of your real estate sales skills…

1) Leveraging Real Estate Market Dynamics

Why is it essential to be well-versed regarding property market trends, neighborhood characteristics, and economic factors that influence property prices regarding real estate sales skills?

Well, the more in-depth your understanding of the market, the more effectively you can guide your seller or buyer clients and help them make informed decisions.

How to get better in real estate market dynamics?

Regarding market research and analysis, you want to regularly study industry reports, real estate news, and local listings. 

This means you want to know and understand what’s selling, what’s not, and why. 

Next, you need to dive into the local economy’s health and factors that could impact it. 

Is a major company moving into the area bringing jobs? Or is an industry struggling, leading to potential unemployment? 

What follows is learning about neighborhood characteristics since each one has its own “microclimate.”

Schools, transport, crime rates, and nearby amenities – all affect property desirability and prices. 

Then, you want to keep an eye on property values over time. 

This means identifying trends and patterns that can provide future predictions. 

Just as fall follows summer, do prices in your area tend to peak and drop at certain times of the year?

Now, understanding all this is just half of the equation. 

You can use this to improve real estate sales skills when you leverage these insights to guide your seller or buyer prospects effectively. 

But it’s not only the ability to guide potential clients. 

You can also use these insights to:

•  Give you an edge in negotiations. Knowing the fair market value of properties and the trends affecting them can empower you to negotiate deals more effectively and confidently.

• Tailor your real estate marketing strategies to attract potential buyers or sellers. For instance, if a particular area is becoming popular with young families, you can highlight properties with features that appeal to that demographic.

• Build trust and credibility (a crucial factor in improving your persuasive power). You demonstrate your expertise when you can provide knowledgeable insights about the market.  

• Make proactive decisions. This might involve focusing your efforts on a particular real estate niche (e.g., certain property types or locations poised for growth).

2) Building Relationships and Effective Communication

Let’s explore why building relationships and effective communication are essential to real estate sales skills.

Real estate is not a small-ticket purchase. 

People are making one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives, and they need to trust the person guiding them through it. 

That’s where relationship building comes in. 

As a real estate professional, cultivating trust and building genuine relationships with your clients is thus essential. 

Like a solid foundation for a house, trust sets the stage for successful real estate transactions.

To effectively guide your clients, you must truly understand their needs, desires, and fears. 

By the way, this is also crucial to write good real estate sales copy.

Is the young couple looking for a family-friendly neighborhood? Is the retiree hoping to downsize? 

The more effectively you communicate and empathize with them, the better you can cater to their requirements. 

Ever played a game of telephone and laughed at how the message gets distorted? 

In real estate, that’s not quite as amusing and can end in disaster. 

So clear and timely communication is essential to prevent misunderstandings and keep transactions on track. 

As the adage goes, “Time is of the essence” in real estate, and effective communication ensures everyone is on the same page at the same time.

Negotiating deals, persuading hesitant clients, handling objections – these are all instances where your way with words comes into play. 

The art of persuasion informs whether you close or lose a deal.

But more about negotiation skills in the next section…

3) Negotiation Skills

Aren’t negotiation skills part of effective communication and building relationships?

And yes, negotiation skills can be seen as a subset of effective communication, as negotiation certainly involves aspects like a clear expression of points, active listening, and response formulation.

Therefore you will find some aspects will overlap with the earlier section.

However, I separated negotiation as its own subtopic due to its unique characteristics and importance within real estate. 

Negotiation goes beyond general communication and requires a specific set of strategic skills. 

In real estate, negotiation often involves:

• Understanding the Psychology of the Other Party: You need to understand buyers’ and sellers’ motivations, needs, and constraints. This understanding can help you create compelling arguments and identify potential compromises.

• Managing Objections and Resistance: Negotiations often involve pushback. Whether you can handle these objections effectively swings the balance between closing or losing a deal.

• Deal Structuring: Negotiation in real estate also involves crafting deals that benefit all parties, requiring a sound understanding of financial and legal implications.

So as you can see, these aspects are significant and have a specialized nature. 

Therefore it is better to consider negotiation skills as a distinct area of improvement to further improve your real estate sales skills.

Nevertheless, effective communication, as I discussed earlier, undoubtedly serves as the foundation for these more nuanced negotiation skills. 

Now, how can negotiation skills improve real estate sales skills?

Just as an artist’s final brush stroke completes a painting, negotiation skills often decide whether a deal goes through. 

The art of negotiation can turn a maybe into a yes and a no into a deal of a lifetime.

The more skilled you are in negotiation, the better you understand the other party’s motivations, needs, and constraints. 

Like understanding the tones and hues on a painter’s palette, this deep comprehension of the buyer or seller allows you to adapt your strategy and reach a successful agreement.

Every real estate transaction has its challenges. 

Negotiation skills are like your palette knife, smoothing out these bumps and objections. 

Handling and navigating through resistance is key to closing a successful deal.

Master artists don’t just paint what they see; they interpret and reimagine it. 

Similarly, negotiation isn’t just about the price. 

It’s about identifying creative solutions that can satisfy both parties. 

Maybe it’s a flexible closing date, creative financing, or including furniture in the deal. These nuances all come into play during negotiations.

When negotiations are handled skillfully, they can foster mutual respect and pave the way for future transactions. 

Each successful negotiation can lead to repeat business and referrals.

The final goal of any negotiation is to reach an agreement between all parties. 

The better your negotiation skills, the better you’ll be at orchestrating win-win scenarios that satisfy everyone.

Bonus Tips to Improve Your Real Estate Sales Skills 

Concerning persuasive communication and negotiation skills to improve your real estate sales skills, I would like to mention the G.U.T.S sales system by Claude Diamond, which considers most of the earlier statistics.

And to become a better communicator and persuader, rather than using and getting attached to sales scripts, you want to have a communication system in place or better ingrained in your mind that you have already practiced several times via so-called role-plays, where your role-play partner gives you a hard time.

The problem when you use a script is that many things I mentioned to increase your odds for better real estate sales will fall under the table.

Why? 

Because first, it will be more difficult to listen to the prospect when you focus on the script. 

This means you will lose out on knowing your potential customer’s needs, pains, and greed.

You also can’t be prepared with a script for every eventuality that may come up in a conversation. 

If you do, you will have such a complex script at the end that you will lose the whole picture quickly. 

In this context, I would like to mention a nice article from indeed.com I found during my research. 

It mentions what is considered the 10 top communication skills:

• Active listening
• Using the right communication method (when you sell things like real estate where amounts are usually above $1000, you want to use face-to-face communication, for example; in e-commerce, this would be another story)
• Friendliness
• Confidence
• Providing and accepting feedback
• Volume and clarity
• Empathy (e.g., “I am so sorry to hear that you need to sell your lovely house. It must be tough to leave this place”, etc.)
• Respect (not only from you to the customer but also from the potential customer towards you)
• Being able to pick up nonverbal cues
• Responsiveness

So, you may already know the answer of how good of a communicator you would be if you are using scripts or rather are too attached to a script.

But the same is true if you don’t get the role-play practice if you have the theoretical knowledge of a good sales system such as the one from Claude Diamond.

It will be like learning to drive. 

First, you will have to focus way too much on your conscious head-eye-foot coordination but won’t be able to react spontaneously to suddenly occurring situations on the street.

But once you have put the hours in, it starts to work automatically, and you become a better driver because you can adapt flexibly to most situations. 

You might even start texting and driving (which you shouldn’t do, of course, 😉).

You can read many sales, persuasion, and communication books. Still, it won’t make much difference if you don’t practice what you read or learn. 

It needs to be mastered so that it enters your subconscious.

Now, when you look again at the conclusions from the section before, you will find that most conclusions from the statistics tie in with what makes a good communicator.

In the past, I’ve also read many books on sales and persuasions and also watched several videos from so-called sales gurus. 

But up to now, only one guy stood out to me who, although he possibly could call himself a millionaire real estate guru, came across as modest, approachable, and trustworthy.

I will mention him one last time in this article. 

It’s Claude Diamond, and when I compare his sales system to what the stats in this article say, the conclusions I drew, and what is considered good communication, it basically covers all of that.

His system is based on asking good questions, qualifying early, not giving early presentations, mutual respect, and different persuasion moves during a sales call when you encounter objections. 

And, of course, not using any scripts and role-plays.

He offers several different coaching packages and info products where, depending on what you choose, group role-playing is also included.

You can visit his website here and his YouTube channel, especially the role-play playlist here.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

TikTok for Real Estate: A Viral Route to Your Next Sale?

Maybe you have already heard of TikTok, and perhaps you have also heard of the new video format on YouTube called YouTube Shorts that aims to take on TikTok.

But how to use them, and which of the two is better? And more importantly, which are more suitable for real estate marketing?

I will answer these questions in this article.

You will learn what TikTok and YouTube Shorts are, important statistics, marketing key performance indicators, which type of content marketing is working on each platform, and how you can advertise on both.

I will give you the pros and cons and compare them directly to make your own decision.

But a minor spoiler right at the beginning: to me, there is only one winner at the moment when it comes to real estate marketing (it’s YouTube Shorts).

But that’s just me.

So please, keep reading.

What Is TikTok?

It is not associated with the Spanish Netflix comedy called Toc Toc.

In this comedy, many people with psychological issues and mental health conditions have to wait in a doctor’s office, trying to get along with each other for the time being.

Although some videos you may find on TikTok may indicate that psychological help wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea.

Some say that TikTok is the fastest-growing social media network so far, which is somewhat true when observing the growth over the last few years.

By the way, its original name is actually Douyin.

Why does this rare name sound a bit Chinese? 

That’s because it is Chinese and is known under that name in China.

TikTok is just the international version of Douyin and was launched in September 2017 for iOS and Android.

But this date didn’t make it available worldwide just yet, only after they merged with the Chinese social media service, Musical.ly on August 2nd, 2018. 

So the latter is the date when it really became available.

So it’s a Chinese video-sharing social networking service, and ByteDance owns it.

Suppose you happen to have watched some of the TikTok videos there.

In that case, you might have already noticed that they have a maximum duration of 60 seconds, and the minimum duration is 3 seconds.

The content you will find is dance, comedy, and education-based short-form videos.

TikTok Features

Now that we have established what TikTok is, you might want to know what you can do with it, hence its features.

As already mentioned, you can create videos for a maximum length of 60 seconds and share them. 

This is different from the social media service Miscal.ly with whom they merged; it has a broader range, and not only lip-syncing videos can be published there.

It provides users with a large selection of different song and sound snippets. 

Additionally, you can add special filters and effects. Videos created on a smartphone can also be directly added.

In September 2020, TikTok included a feature called “reactions.” 

You can record and share reactions to a particular video with this feature.

To better control screen time, a digital well-being feature was added. Once users spend over two hours on the app, they receive an alert.

TikTok has added eight additional features focused on user protection and security over time.

The Eight Further TikTok Features

Screen Time Management: This feature allows users to configure their maximum daily screen time limit. 

You can select whether you want to spend 40, 60, 90, or 120 minutes daily on TikTok. 

Once users surpass this limit, they need to enter a password.

1) In-App Suicide Prevention: 

As it seems, some TikTok users became suicidal in the past.

An in-app suicide resource page was implemented that provides users with key contacts and tips to counter these problems.

2) Age Gate: 

I found this one a bit doubtful because only users above 13 are allowed to log in and create a TikTok Account. 

According to TikTok, this prevents underage users from using the platform.

3) Restricted Mode: 

This feature is designed to restrict minors on TikTok with an optional account setting. 

The display of content that might not be appropriate for minors will be limited. It is also protected by a password that is valid for 30 days.

If you want to consume unfiltered content in this mode, entering a password will be required.

This feature might be obsolete if they increased the minimum age for users to create new accounts in the first place (just an idea).

4) Comment Filter: 

Some people like to give nasty comments; the comment filter is the countermeasure. 

Users can predefine particular words that need to be filtered out in the comments section. The list can be modified anytime afterward.

5) In-app Reporting: 

If and when users find unacceptable content or behavior, it can be reported in real-time to TikTok.

6) Risk Warning Tag:

Videos that may be inappropriate or contain “risks” for certain users are tagged.

7) Family Pairing:

As parents, you can link and unlink TikTok accounts, so you can configure several privacy and safety settings for your teen’s account. 

Once this feature is active, you will control the abovementioned features, such as screen time management, direct message settings, and restricted mode. 

The TikTok Statistics & Demographics

TikTok currently has 800 Million monthly active users (source) and a total number of downloads of 1.65 billion (source). 

In the U.S., the number of monthly active users is 26.5 million (source).

It is primarily downloaded in India, followed by a significant difference in download numbers in the United States (source).

It has 1 billion video views per day, and 60% of users are aged between 16 and 24 (source), over 50% are aged between 18 and 34, and 25% are aged between 45 and 64.

Interestingly, 37% of Americans have never heard of TikTok. Only 5% plan to use it, and almost half are not interested (49%) (source).

Regarding gender, 63.4% of users are female (source).

Another interesting statistic shows that 37% of users have an annual income of more than $100,000, and 30% have an annual income of $40,000 or less (source).

Should You Use TikTok for Real Estate?

To answer this question, we first need to look into the most active demographic (hence buying and selling houses/properties) on the real estate market.

Which demographics are the largest when it comes to real estate transactions?

In this, this, and this article, I concluded that millennials and baby boomers have the largest share concerning real estate transactions when it comes to buying and selling homes. 

So let’s get back to the TikTok demographics I mentioned initially. 

The critical part to remember from this section is that 60% of users are between 16 and 24, over 50% are between 18 and 34, and 25% are between 45 and 64.

So, in the 50% demographic, besides many Generation Zs (usually not ready to buy or sell a home), you will also find many millennials. In the 25% demographic, you will also find baby boomers.

We also can keep in mind that according to the statistics above, 37% of users have an annual income of more than $100,000. 

Generation Z wouldn’t usually qualify as potential home buyers because they are not quite ready yet economically. 

But on TikTok, you might even have the chance to find some affluent ones. 

I wouldn’t go all-in on that, though, regarding advertising. 

I believe the millennial group and baby boomers should be the first focus.

So the short answer is yes. 

You may try it, provided you can target a fair share of millennials and some baby boomers.

Or, if you want to play the long game and target potential future home buyers, Gen-Z is another approach.

How to Use TikTok for Real Estate

From a content marketing perspective, gaining followers organically on TikTok is quite interesting compared to YouTube.

First, you need to know that the main page on TikTok is the “For You” page. It’s similar to a newsfeed, and TikTok curates personalized content for every user.

You can find different recommendations based on your behavior on TikTok. This is primarily viral content. 

When it comes to turning a video viral, the playing field is a bit more level than YouTube.

The chances are generally higher to get millions of views, even if your account has only a few or even zero followers.

The downside is that you won’t have good chances to drive traffic to your real estate website because you can’t include links in video captions.

Only certain users can add a link to their bio. 

But you can link to other social media accounts, such as Instagram.

On the other hand, this is possible with YouTube Shorts.

You need to mention your business name in the videos and motivate viewers to search for you on Google or other search engines and find your website directly.

What Content Works on TikTok?

The content type that works on TikTok is probably another challenge in real estate. 

On TikTok, everything is about trends when it comes to content. 

The videos that perform best are often ones that are a variation of an existing trend.

These are the common trends on TikTok:

• dance routine videos
• animals
• lip syncs
• beauty transitions
• comedy moments
• pranks
• fitness workouts and tips
• camera hacks
• challenges

The most successful ones often have in common that they are basic and fun.

Videos should also use trending sounds and hashtags to be discovered better.

So if you are a real estate agent and wouldn’t mind creating 80% of content consisting of lip-synching, having fun and dancing, and 20% of the time featuring some listings, you might want to give it a try. 

There is a real estate agent that managed to do that. Her name is Jennifer Brough from Jennifer Homes Realty, and she managed to build a large following on TikTok. 

In the same article, also another real estate agent is mentioned.

This other realtor had an interesting argument that a large part of the demographic is still too young to buy a home. 

To him, it is a long game, and you can already build a following of future buyers.

According to this article, the type of real estate content you can post on TikTok is: 

• Behind-the-scenes footage
• Teasers and snippets of longer videos about different property listings
• Aligning real estate topics with trending hashtags and creating videos with the hashtag in mind
• Playful videos with kids and pets

The 6 Different TikTok Ad Types

1) In-Feed Video Ads

These are ads displayed in the user’s newsfeed (the For You page) and are short-form videos. 

They blend into the feed since they look almost like normal TikTok videos.

In in-feed ads, you can include several call-to-actions; the maximum video length should be between 9 and 15 seconds.

The potential issue with this ad type is that it can be easily skipped or scrolled past. 

So you will need to grab the attention of people who usually don’t have a long attention span (e.g., millennials, Generation z).

This makes it even a bit more complicated.

Like any other TikTok video, your in-feed ad can be liked, shared, and interacted with.

Costs for TikTok In-Feed Video Ads

In-Feed Video Ads is the ad type where you will have the most control because you can set your budget and schedule. 

The current minimum campaign budget is $500, and the minimum ad group daily budget is $20. (source)

2) TikTok Brand Takeover Ads

When you open your TikTok app, an ad is immediately displayed. That’s a Brand Takeover Ad.

This ad usually displays a full-screen video targeted to a predefined audience. It can also be displayed on the For You page as a static image, GIF, or video. 

They can link to a landing page or a Hashtag Challenge (source).

Suppose you want to increase brand awareness and generate direct sales (more relevant for e-commerce, and not the case for large products, such as properties). In that case, this is the ad you want to go with.

Costs for TikTok Brand Takeover Ads

Prices for the Brand Takeover Ads period range between $50,000 and $100,000 per day.

This might be an option if you are a larger real estate company with a much higher advertising budget (source).

3) TikTok TopView Ads

This type of ad is similar to Brand Takeover ads. 

But they are less aggressive in contrast to them and aren’t displayed as soon as a user opens the app. 

You can also change a Brand Takeover Ad into a TopView Ad.

They instead display as an in-feed post after the first 3 seconds and appear on the For You page.

Costs for TikTok TopView Ads

The costs are similar to Brand Takeover Ads. For 7.4 million impressions, you can expect to pay $65,000 per day. (source)

4) TikTok Branded Hashtag Challenge

With TikTok Branded Hashtag Challenge Ads, you enter the premium ad level on TikTok. 

You will know what I mean once I tell you what it costs.

A campaign like that creates a particular hashtag where users can create comedy challenges or bespoke dances.

It’s kind of a call-to-action campaign that takes six days.

When you select Branded Hashtag Challenge Ads, it’s an ad package because it includes Brand Takeover Ads.

Costs of TikTok Branded Challenge Ads

The flat fee per six days for this type of campaign is $150,000. 

And if you want to promote it, you will need an additional amount of between $100,000 and $200,000 (source).

5) TikTok Branded Effects Ads

With this type of TikTok ad, you can add 2D animated lenses to your views, and they can be triggered via face and hand movements.

Who’s creating these lenses? It’s TikTok’s in-house creative team.

Costs for TikTok Branded Effects Ads

For 30 days, you can expect to pay $45,000.

6) TikTok Influencer Ads/ Brand and Creator Collaborations

This ad campaign can be created on the “Creator Marketplace,” where brands meet creators, and both can collaborate.

There are four different creator packages for these ad types:

The Mid-tier package

This package lets you collaborate with five creators/influencers with less than a million followers.

You can expect to pay $12,000 for this package.

The Top-tier Package

This is basically the same package as the Mid-tier package, and the only difference is that the five influencers will have between one and five million followers.

Here, you can expect to pay $35,000 for the package.

The Value Hybrid Package

Cost-wise, this package is between the Top-tier package and the Mid-tier package. 

You will get two top-tier creators/influencers and three mid-tier creators/influencers advertising for you for that.

Expect to pay $20,000 for this package.

The Premium Hybrid Package

If you select this package, a mix of creators/influencers will advertise for you.

It will be one VIP Creator with over 500 followers, two top-tier creators/influencers, and two mid-tier creators/influencers.

This package will cost you $30,000. (source)

TikTok Advertising Costs & Conversion Rates

Overall, it’s slightly more challenging to find clear information about TikTok’s Ad cost structure to have a baseline to estimate the overall performance of this platform. 

According to this source and based on a budget of $50,000 spent in the United States, TikTok ads can generate 155% more clicks while costing 36% less compared to Facebook and Instagram.

You pay $0.19 per click (CPC), which is higher than Facebook and Instagram ads.

TikTok doesn’t charge on a per-click basis, such as Google AdWords. 

Their pricing is on a cost-per-mill impression basis (CPM), roughly $1.82 (source). 

This sounds quite positive; however, the barriers to entry are higher than on Facebook Ads or Google Ads platforms. 

You will need a reasonably high advertising budget to achieve the above costs per click from the start.

For example, the cheapest option is the In-Feed Video ads with a minimum daily budget of $20.

So, it’s not very friendly for real estate advertisers who need to start out with a small budget and test and optimize their way up to higher budgets once a successful campaign converts well.

My Little Workaround and Ninja Trick for the Higher TikTok Starter Costs

My idea for a workaround for advertising starters with a lower budget would be to first test video ads on the Facebook Ads platform, targeting only mobile users. 

My longer article about real estate marketing on Facebook might be helpful in this context. 

This Facebook ad’s testing can be done with a lower budget than TikTok ads.

You then optimize the Facebook campaign until it converts well and is successful. Then you can pass this proven campaign on to TikTok. 

You will risk slightly fewer advertising dollars at the beginning than starting with TikTok.

TikTok Ads Conversion Rates

Hard data based on the experience of various TikTok advertisers are hard to come by regarding conversion rates.

The only metric is TikTok engagement rates, which are 29% (source).

The problem with engagements is that they don’t correlate with conversions. 

The engagement rate metric only tracks how a particular audience is involved with the content and measures things like comments, shares, and “likes.”

I don’t know about you, but I have never met someone who could pay the bills with likes or comments. 

I am interested in what TikTok can do in terms of lead generation. 

So what can we do? 

We can only assume or estimate a conversion rate based on longer, existing advertising platforms dealing with video ads. 

Which are the largest ones in this context? Exactly, YouTube Ads and Facebook Video Ads.

The conversion rate of YouTube is 0.5% (source).

Generally, the conversion rate in real estate for Facebook Ads is 10.68% (source). 

Considering this conversion rate is increased by 20-30% using video ads (source), we can assume a Facebook video ad conversion rate for real estate of between 12.8% and 13.8%.

Let’s take the average between YouTube and Facebook Video ads to have some conservative numbers, which is 6.65%.

This is the number we should also apply to TikTok Ads. 

A TikTok Costs per Acquisition (CPA) Estimation

Now that we have established some baseline numbers to estimate the performance, we can estimate the costs per acquisition.

We will need the average CPM and the conversion rate of TikTok, which is $1.82 and 6.65%.

To get a bit more exact, we can include the average click-through rate between 1% and 3% (source). Let’s make it an average of 2%.

So the impression-to-lead conversion rate would be 6.65% x 2%, which is 0.133%.

Now we can calculate how many impressions you will need to buy to get one lead.

We divide one by 0.133%, which is 751.8, 75.18% of 1,000 impressions.

And 75.18% from $1.82 (what you pay per thousand impressions) is $1.37.

So, according to this estimated calculation, you would pay $1.37 per acquisition. 

This is pretty low compared to other CPAs I mentioned in my real estate prospecting article.

But I have to remind you again that while the CPA metric is better than the conversion rate metric, it won’t tell you much about the lead quality you get. 

You might get cheap leads, but will they buy or sell real estate? 

This will all depend on your audience targeting, your ad copy, and your offer.

9 TikTok Real Estate Influencers

You may wonder how other realtors and real estate pros use TikTok.

Therefore I added an overview table below with a link to their accounts and a short description of their type of content to provide additional inspiration.

Pros and Cons of TikTok for Your Real Estate Business

The TikTok Alternative for Real Estate: YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts was launched in September 2020 and wants to attack TikTok since the future of TikTok stands on shaky ground in the U.S. 

And as you can read in my statistics part about TikTok, almost half (49%) are not interested in using it.

Besides that, some security concerns for the U.S. were already mentioned in various articles, such as this one, this one, and this one.

Like with TikTok on YouTube Shorts, you can upload only vertical videos with a maximum length of 60 seconds. 

You will need to include the hashtag “Shorts” in the title or description for YouTube to recognize it as such and make the algorithm do its magic.

The advantage is that besides displaying these videos in your channel, they will be highlighted in a different section on the homepage Shorts shelf of YouTube.

In the YouTube app on your smartphone, you can find a short-form video creation tool that allows you to create videos up to 15 seconds long. 

There, you can also capture multiple clips.

The advantage of getting into YouTube Shorts from a content marketing perspective is that the algorithm will likely help you gain reach and rankings faster.

This will increase your number of subscribers more than conventional YouTube videos would.

It also includes several creative features, such as:

• Speed control to increase or slow down the recording speed
• Adding free-to-use songs
• A countdown timer to stop the recording automatically once the maximum time is reached

YouTube Shorts doesn’t suddenly have another target audience because it’s about Shorts. 

So you will also deal with the YouTube audience, where the following statistics apply:

• 2 billion active monthly users (source)
• 30 million active daily users (source)
• 1 billion mobile views per day (source)
• 77% of users between the age of 15 and 25 in the U.S. use YouTube (source).
• 73% of U.S. adults use it (source).
• Also, 77% of users between the age of 26 and 35 (younger millennials) in the U.S. use YouTube (source).
• 37% of users between 18 and 34 binge-watch YouTube daily (source).
• 51% of users over 75 watch videos on YouTube (source).
• 90% of U.S.-based users between 18 and 44 use YouTube (source).
• 83% of YouTube users have an annual household income of less than $30,000 (source).
• 89% of YouTube users have a yearly household income of over $100,000 (source).

As of now (2023), no valuable YouTube Shorts-specific statistics are available yet.

So we still need to apply the general YouTube statistics to Shorts users.

Knowing about the TikTok statistics and that YouTube wants to attack TikTok, you can assume that you will likely attract a larger share of the younger demographics on YouTube.

I will leave you with a comparison table below to summarize the differences between TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

Is TikTok or YouTube Shorts Better for Real Estate Marketing?

Taking a hard look at the pro and con tables, you will realize that the pro column of YouTube shorts is much longer than the short column compared to the TikTok pro and con overview.

While TikTok seems tempting regarding conversion rates or costs per click, the starters’ expensiveness is the main point of worry.

Another one is that 49% of Americans don’t plan on using it in the future.

YouTube still has way more users from America.

TikTok is often sold as the platform where many Generation Z people hang out and affluent ones.

Still, if you look closely at the YouTube demographics, there are even more on YouTube.

The same is true for baby boomers and millennials in the age groups doing real estate transactions.

With YouTube Shorts, you might have an excellent opportunity to gain organic reach faster than conventional YouTube videos.

Then there is a moral question you may have to consider.

As you learned, TikTok originates from China.

And there is a Chinese version of TikTok, and the one the West gets hooked on has many more addictive elements. 

For instance, while Western users under 14 may have unlimited screen time using it even in restrooms, in China, the usage time is 40 minutes daily for this age group.

You can read up on more differences in an article from the New York Post.

So the question is also whether you want to feed this Western TikTok version.

Ending this article, I think the winner is YouTube Shorts, but this concept still needs to prove how well it will perform soon since it’s still in the beginning stages.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Driving for Dollars: An Outcome-Driven Guide

More than real estate agents, investors might have heard about driving for dollars to find (motivated) sellers.

However, before jumping into your car and driving into a particular geographic area, you may ask yourself if this is worthwhile.

It will work if you don’t have too high marketing costs for the subsequent campaign after gathering seller contact information.

This resulted from my analysis, which is included in this article.

Besides this, you will learn what driving for dollars is, how to drive for dollars, the success rates, and the three apps that can assist you in driving for dollars.

And contrary to popular belief, driving for dollars is not a marketing method. It is a data-gathering method to prepare for a real estate advertising campaign, usually via direct mailing.

What Is Driving for Dollars in Real Estate?

First, let’s find a good definition and explanation of what driving for dollars in real estate is and what it means.

Driving for dollars’ aim is mainly to acquire real estate seller contact information to convert them into leads.

It is done by driving through a particular neighborhood where potential deals are expected.

To convert the collected seller contacts into leads, often direct mail or cold-calling campaigns are run afterward.

You could say that driving for dollars is actually a preparation method for direct mail or a cold outreach campaign to collect targeted data of specific property owners.

It’s like a treasure hunt. Only the treasure here is distressed properties, vacant homes, and ‘For Sale by Owner signs.

So, strictly speaking, it’s not a marketing method but a precursor to a marketing or lead generation campaign afterward.

It may thus save direct mail costs and potentially increase the quality of the leads when doing cold prospecting. Why?

Because without driving for dollars, you may have to send many more direct mailers to a broad geographic area or cold call many more likely unqualified leads.

The costs would be higher because the number of these mailers would also be much higher.

Some say it is free, but it’s not.

For one, you will spend time in your car (think opportunity costs) and have to factor in costs for gas.

In this context, it might be worthwhile to make a cost comparison calculation factoring in average driving for-dollars success rates.

You could then compare the total costs (e.g., driving for dollars plus direct mailing costs) with only direct mailing costs at higher quantities to the same geographic area.

“Dollars “in the term “driving for dollars” means that by driving through a geographic area, you will find good deals that can make you money, hence “dollars.”

The method is more popular with real estate investors but is also an option for real estate agents to find potential seller clients for retail deals.

The 5 Benefits of Driving for Dollars

As an old-school approach, “driving for dollars” still has its place. 

But why, you may ask, are these ‘treasures’ beneficial?

Let’s say, Kelly, a veteran real estate investor and realtor, has been in the game for 20 years. 

She swears by driving for dollars, and one day, Kelly spotted an old house with overgrown weeds and a sagging porch. 

It screamed, “distressed property!” 

She reached out to the owner, struck a deal below market value, fixed it up, and flipped it for a handsome profit. 

It was a win-win situation: the owner got rid of a property they couldn’t maintain, and Kelly made a good return on his investment.

With this exemplary story, I just described one of the benefits.

Let’s further break down the benefits of driving for dollars…

1) Discover Hidden Gems: Unlike popular online listings, these properties are often off the radar, reducing competition and giving you the upper hand in negotiations.

2) Local Market Knowledge: Driving for dollars helps you understand the local market in-depth. It’s like becoming a detective, uncovering the story behind each neighborhood.

3) Build Relationships: By engaging with local residents, you’re not just collecting data but also building relationships, which can lead to future opportunities and invaluable local insights, and sometimes even referrals.

4) Better Deals: Distressed or vacant properties often mean motivated sellers. With a compelling offer, you may secure properties below market value, increasing your profit potential when flipping or renting.

5) Flexibility and Control: You’re literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat. You decide where to go when to go, and which properties look promising.

So “driving for dollars” can be an adventure with potential financial rewards. This isn’t to say you should abandon digital strategies; far from it. 

In today’s world, you want a balanced approach combining high-tech tools with this hands-on method.

By the way, if you are still unsure which real estate lead generation methods you should focus on based on your goals and constraints, you may want to have a look at my “Real Estate Lead Gen Strategy & Performance Suite,” which can help you increase your lead gen success rate.

How to Drive for Dollars

Driving for dollars is not just hopping into your car and driving to a random neighborhood.

Because if you did, you might as well just call random phone numbers and see if you can get a seller client.

To make sense of it, you might want to approach this strategically.

So first, you want to determine which geographic area you are aiming for.

Depending on the type of property you are specialized in, you select the geographic area.

If you are a realtor for high-end homes, you may select a different area than a real estate investor looking for fixer-uppers.

And if you are looking for buy-and-hold properties either as an investment or to put under contract as a real estate agent, you might prefer neighborhoods with good rent-to-value ratios.

There are already numerous tools that you could use to decide which geographic area to focus on.

With that, you can get pretty creative and combine different tools and data to find the ideal focus area.

In this context, you might want to take a look at these:

• Statistical Atlas
• Buro of Labor Statistics
• Heatmap from Mashvisor
• Automatic investment reports from Zilculator using data from Zillow, MLS, and Rentometer

Your result should be a defined area in a particular neighborhood according to your criteria.

Based on this information, you can then plan an economic driving route.

The next step is to do the actual driving, take notes, and take photos of the property candidates you find.

This part is a bit of an art. Why?

Because you need to make good guesses whether the properties you find may have owners that could be interested in selling.

It’s a bit like detective work, where every detail you find could be an important clue.

When you aim for distressed properties, looking for obvious clues like overgrown grass and bushes, missing gutters, bad roofs, fallen trees, abandoned cars, and more is a bit easier.

For less motivated property owners or high-end homes, the clues are not obvious and more subtle overall.

For example, if your aim is expired listings (retail), you could note properties with ‘for sale’ signs and contact the seller once the listing contract expires.

Or you take note of for sale by owner signs. Garage sales could also be good clues.

Once you find a potential candidate, you have two options: you could try to knock on the door at once and see if you can speak with the owner in person.

In that case, you would basically combine driving for dollars with door-knocking.

Or you document each property you find well enough to do further research afterward.

Driving for dollars can get messy since you need to do several things simultaneously.

You navigate, check for clues, document, and sometimes knock on doors.

So you can quickly drive through a specific area twice without knowing because of similar appearances.

The research to find the contact information afterward can also become time-consuming.

Some apps for this use case can assist you in this phase and reduce potential time-wasters. You will learn about them later in this article.

Once back in the office again or still on the street, you can then find the owner’s contact information and additional property details (e.g., building date, tax value, etc.) with these tools:

• Listsource
• Redx (GeoLeads) 
• PropertyRadar
• Dealmachine

This can also be called skip tracing.

Depending on the contact information you find through the different tools, you can start running your prospecting and follow-up campaigns via direct mail, phone, or email.

9 Driving for Dollars Challenges

Unfortunately, like a road trip, ‘driving for dollars’ may have a few bumps. 

Knowing what challenges might arise is essential so you’re prepared to navigate them. 

So, let’s dive into some of the common challenges…

1) Time-Consuming: Finding the right property takes time and patience.

You’ll need to dedicate significant hours to drive around, research properties, and engage with owners.

2) Fuel Costs: I wish we could ride on enthusiasm, but unfortunately, your car runs on gas.

Regular drives can add up to quite a sum, especially if covering large areas.

3) Persistence is Key: You might drive past hundreds of properties before finding the right one. It’s not a sprint but a marathon.

The key is to persist even when the rewards seem distant. 

4) Finding the Owner Can Be Tricky: You’ve found the perfect property, but tracking down the owner isn’t always straightforward.

Public records, online research, and even knocking on a neighbor’s door might be necessary.

5) Weather Conditions: Seems a bit trivial? Not quite.

Inclement weather can disrupt your plans, making some days unproductive.

Rain, snow, and fog – can limit visibility and road safety. And honestly, who wants to scout properties in a downpour?

6) Data Management: Keeping track of all the data can become challenging as you find potential properties.

Addresses, owner information, property conditions – it’s a lot to handle. Without an effective system, crucial details can slip through the cracks.

7) Inaccessibility: Some properties, especially in rural areas, may be hard to reach or inaccessible by road.

This could make scouting them in person difficult, if not impossible. 

8) Misinterpretation of Property Condition: You only get an exterior view of the property when driving.

The real problems might be lurking indoors. This could lead to misjudgments about the property’s actual value and the cost of renovations. 

9) Competing with Online Listings: While ‘Driving for Dollars’ offers a chance to find off-market properties, it can be tough to compete with online listings’ sheer volume and speed.

In the time it takes to scout one neighborhood, an investor could potentially analyze dozens of properties online.

How to Combine Driving for Dollars With Other Real Estate Lead Generation and Marketing Methods

Driving for dollars is one tool in your real estate marketing toolkit, but the magic happens when combined with other methods. 

Let’s dive into how to intertwine this method with other strategies for maximum effectiveness.

1) Use Direct Mail Campaigns: Once you identify potential properties, you can run direct mail campaigns to potential sellers.

A good message with the proper sales copy could be the first step in starting negotiations.

2) PPC Campaigns on Social and Search: Use the data gathered from your drives to create targeted online ad campaigns. 

Services like Facebook or Google Ads allow you to zero in on specific demographics/ target audiences and geographical areas, increasing your chances of reaching potential sellers.

For instance, once you have enough contact data collected, you could run a Facebook Ad campaign with a custom and lookalike audience.

3) Social Media Engagement: You could share your driving for dollars journey on social media. 

A snapshot of a potential property, a fun anecdote from the neighborhood—such content can engage your audience and potentially lead to valuable connections.

4) SEO and Content Marketing: Share your driving experiences on your blog or website. Such content can help establish you as a local real estate authority, improve your site’s SEO, and attract potential leads.

5) Cold Calling: If direct mail isn’t getting a response, why not pick up the phone?

You could use public records to find contact information and contact property owners directly.

Driving for Dollars Success Rate [A Performance-Based Take]

Finding the success rate for driving for dollars is a tough one. Why?

Because it’s not an internet-based method to generate leads, and thus more challenging to access reliable marketing performance data than PPC advertising or SEO (content marketing).

And as I’ve already established, it’s not a marketing method per se but a data-gathering method to prepare for a direct mailing or outreach campaign via phone and/ or email.

That being said, I came across some performance data in different forums (here and here ) and from the app provider for driving for dollars, Dealsmachine.

This data is more like a puzzle I will put together for you to get some value out of it.

From the three sources, it is reported that…

• The closing rate was well over 25%
• 28 houses were needed to close one deal
• 40 vacant houses lead to one deal
• Sending voicemails to the sellers through slybroadcast led to a 70% response rate.
• Finding 200 properties and sending direct mail three times to those sellers leads to 1 deal on average across the U.S.

How can we break this data puzzle down?

First, we can categorize the data. We have data about the closing rate, house-to-deal rate, and the response rate of voicemails.

We, unfortunately, can’t use the first information regarding a closing rate of 25%.

We can’t use it because the source doesn’t reveal if this rate refers to the houses collected or the qualified property owners that could be reached.

If 25% of collected properties lead to a deal, I think this would be a utopic number. I instead see that this refers to the owners that could be contacted.

The next one is 28 houses led to one deal. This sounds better, and we can deduce a house-to-deal rate of 3.57%.

The next information in the same context was 40 vacant houses leading to one deal, and this would be a house-to-deal rate of 2.5%.

The information from Dealmachine across the U.S. is a bit more pessimistic in this regard.

Here you can expect one closed deal from 200 collected properties, provided you send them direct mail three times (600 mailers total) afterward.

This would be a house-to-deal rate of 0.5%.

So based on my calculation, we can assume an average house-to-deal rate of 2.20% (3.57% plus 2.5% plus 0.5% divided by 3).

Remember that this house-to-deal rate is not the lead-to-appointment conversion rate I calculated in my article about real estate prospecting conversion rates.

It basically includes the lead-to-appointment conversion rate and the closing rate.

To have some sort of comparison, we could apply the average closing rate across industries of 27% which I covered in this article, to the lead-to-appointment conversion rates from my conversion rate article, and then compare the different methods with driving for dollars.

Why are we doing this again?

Because the house-to-deal rate calculated above includes basically the lead-to-appointment conversion rate (when you contact the different owners and some of them agree to a phone call or a personal appointment) and the closing rate (when you close the owner with your sales skills).

I couldn’t find information about the closing rates of leads acquired by driving for dollars.

Therefore, we need to assume the average 27% closing rate across different industries.

This specific information would have been quite helpful because we could have learned more about the quality of leads of driving for dollars by ignoring the respective real estate professional’s individual sales and persuasion skills.

Below is a comparison table for driving for dollars based on the prospecting conversion rates I analyzed in my article.

As you can see in the table, I did some simple math calculations to get the potential average lead-to-sales appointment conversion rate.

Since we can use the same average closing rate of 27% and have the average house-to-deal rate or lead to a closing rate of 2.20%, we just need to divide 2.2% by 27% and get the approximate number of 8.14% (lead-to-sales appointment conversion rate).

Suppose my calculated approximation or estimation is halfway correct.

In that case, driving for dollars, at least from a lead-to-sales appointment conversion rate and lead-to-closing rate perspective, can perform better than cold calling, calling expired listings, calling FSBOs, and broad direct mailing (without driving for dollars beforehand).

But you may want to keep an eye on the cost per sale. Why that?

Since driving for dollars is often combined with direct mail, the costs per piece of mail may increase the overall costs and thus increase your cost per sale.

This cost may end up higher than the methods I compared driving for dollars against.

Does Driving for Dollars Work?

Based on the calculated estimation of the current marketing performance data, driving for dollars does work, provided you don’t have the high marketing costs of a following reach-out campaign.

Additional costs that can be a risk to this property owner gathering method is doing it disorganizedly without a strategy on what type of properties and owners to focus on.

Bear in mind that this strategy aims to get more granular on the target audience (certain types of property owners) for the advertising campaign that is run afterward.

The reason for a better-targeted audience is to drive marketing and advertising costs down and increase the quality of leads.

Driving for Dollars Apps (free and paid) – How They Work

You may also wonder if there are driving-for-dollar apps that could increase your efficiency and/or effectiveness regarding this method.

There are not many apps on the market exclusively for the use case of driving for dollars, but they exist.

But first, how do they work in general?

In terms of development, it is not rocket science.

Driving for-dollar apps, all use different application programming interfaces to use map data (Google Maps or other maps), then they use another programming interface to access property data.

Both are then combined with your GPS location once you are on the road and layered with each other.

The apps that feature direct mail will also have access to direct mail providers via another application programming interface.

Since none of the providers will hand out the secret sauce of how the apps work in detail, that is my estimated guess in terms of development.

Now let’s get back to the available driving-for-dollar apps.

I found three that may interest you during my research: Dealmachine, The Driving for Dollars App, and Propelio.

1) Dealmachine

Dealmachine, which I reviewed in this article, can track your driving routes, find out addresses and the seller contact information, contact sellers by sending direct mail, and following-up with sellers.

You can learn more about them here.

2) The Driving for Dollars App

This app is available on the Google Play store and has similar features as a Dealmachine.

It helps identify sellers or homeowners you can send direct mail. So it also finds contact information for you.

It uses an application programming interface to access data from a major data provider, so you can learn about current public information about a particular property.

You can then export this information into an Excel sheet which you can later use for your direct mail campaigns.

The difference with Dealmachine is that you can’t send direct mail directly from the app.

You need to do this extra step separately when using this app.

You can check out this app here.

3) propelio

In comparison to Dealmachine, it basically has the same functionality.

It is slightly cheaper and has a higher limit for seller leads (5000 lead downloads per day).

So this one may be an option because Dealmachine may not work perfectly in your specific area.

You can learn more about propelio here.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

How Will AI Affect Real Estate? A Look Into the Crystal Ball

If you want it or not, artificial intelligence has already started to reshape many aspects of daily life.

Among other things, it can enhance our productivity and revolutionize medical research. However, with each new technology come positives, such as opportunities and negatives.  

To tackle this development a bit deeper in this article, I will work out how AI affects real estate, and at the end, look in my magic crystal ball.

It will cover…

• Ten general benefits and risks of AI in different life areas
• 16 effects of AI on real estate 
• Future scenarios of how AI will affect real estate

10 General Benefits and Risks of AI in Different Life Areas

To tackle the question of how AI will affect real estate, it’s a good idea first to go from the general to the more specific. So I will first discuss AI’s generally positive and negative effects in different areas of life.

Based on that, I will identify areas of the real estate industry that see similar effects and extrapolate likely future scenarios.

5 General Benefits of AI

Let’s start with the positive first: 5 general benefits of AI.

1) Improved Efficiency and Productivity 

This one is obvious. Once you have overcome the learning-curve various AI tools can increase your efficiency and productivity by automating routine tasks, saving you time and money. 

2) Smarter Decision-Making

Since AI can help you spot trends and patterns, it can help you make better data-driven decisions.

3) Personalization

AI can understand individual preferences and tailor products or services accordingly. 

So it can deliver customized experiences in various areas where prospects and clients need individualized communication. Hence, basically all areas of business.

4) Medical Research and Achievements

AI can assist in early disease diagnosis, personalized treatment plans, and drug discovery.

Regarding early disease detection, for instance, AI algorithms can analyze medical imaging data, such as CT scans and X-rays, identifying subtle signs of diseases like cancer.

Or regarding personalized treatment plans, it can tailor treatments to individual patients based on their unique genetic makeup, lifestyle, and medical history.

When it comes to medical research, it can be used to find patterns in vast amounts of data needed when you want to analyze protein structures, also called protein folding (source).

5) It Can Drive New Discoveries

Examples like the ones I mentioned regarding AI in medicine show that AI can drive inventions and creative solutions by analyzing vast amounts of information and generating novel ideas.

You get a really potent cocktail when you combine AI with synthetic biology, which is the next big thing in the makings. 

For example, there are thousands of plants with medicinal properties in the Amazonas, which could take hundreds if not thousands of years to analyze. 

With AI you could do this in a fraction of time and use synthetic biology to reproduce these substances at scale without flattening the Amazonian rainforest. 

5 Risks of AI

Well, with the positive, you can live. That’s easy. So like me, you are probably more interested in the negatives, the risks.

It’s only natural to be more interested in this because we humans tend to give more importance to negative experiences than to positive ones. This is called the negativity bias.

So let’s check them out…

1) Job Displacement

This one is the first one you think of, I am sure. I wrote about this one in my article about whether AI will replace real estate agents.

So while AI can make lives easier, it will also replace some jobs, especially the ones involving repetitive tasks.

2) Privacy Concerns

Being able to process and learn from vast amounts of data sets is positive, on the one hand. On the other, it can lead to privacy issues.

For instance, imagine a facial recognition system deployed in a public space like a shopping mall or city center. 

Without their knowledge or consent, the system could continuously scan and identify people as they go about their daily lives.

This could lead to massive databases containing sensitive personal information, such as individuals’ locations, habits, and social networks.

If these databases were to be misused, leaked, or accessed by unauthorized parties, it could have severe consequences for individual privacy. 

For example, a person’s movements could be tracked and monitored, revealing intimate details about their life, such as their political affiliations, religious beliefs, or personal relationships.

3) Bias and Discrimination

Since AI is only as good as the data it learns, it can also be trained biasedly.

One example of bias and discrimination related to AI can be found in the use of algorithmic decision-making systems in hiring processes.

Companies may use AI-powered tools to screen and evaluate job applicants, automating the initial stages of the recruitment process.

These tools can analyze candidates’ resumes, online profiles, and social media activity to determine their suitability for a particular job.

Systems like that can increase efficiency and reduce human bias in hiring. However, they can also inadvertently continue with existing biases, leading to discrimination if not designed carefully. 

Let’s say an AI system might be trained on historical hiring data, which may reflect past discriminatory practices or societal biases. 

This could result in the algorithm favoring specific candidates over others based on gender, race, or age rather than solely assessing their qualifications and skills.

4) Becoming Technology Junkies

I bet a growing number of people would get lost if their GPS navigation stopped working today, and this technology is not even AI.

Another example of dependence on technology, specifically in AI, can be illustrated through the growing reliance on AI-powered personal assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, or Google Assistant.

These AI personal assistants have become integral to many people’s lives.

They help them manage their schedules, control smart home devices, provide news and weather updates, and entertain them with music or trivia.

Now imagine a scenario where a widespread internet outage occurs, rendering AI personal assistants non-functional. 

People who have become heavily reliant on these assistants for their daily routines might suddenly struggle to manage their lives without AI’s assistance. 

This could range from minor inconveniences, such as being unable to control smart home devices, to more significant issues, like missing essential appointments or failing to take medications on time.

And good luck with a fully automated toilet like this one in a scenario like that.

5) Misallocation of Resources

This risk or adverse effect is somewhat related to an economic context. 

As you may have noticed, the topic has attracted much attention lately. It will continue to do so (an arms race of AI technology is happening as we speak).

This can lead to many resources allocated to developing AI technology that may not be used for investments to solve other important social, environmental, and economic issues. 

16 Effects of AI On Real Estate

Now that we have a baseline of artificial intelligence’s general risks and benefits in various life areas let’s extrapolate them to the real estate industry.

11 Positive Effects on Real Estate  

In my articles about how AI is used in real estate and AI in real estate marketing, I already mentioned the positive effects of AI on real estate and real estate marketing. 

Since I am sure you are more interested in the negative ones, I will be brief with a bulleted list in this section and give you a short summary.

I was also more eager to analyze the negative effects which follow this section.

So here are the 11 positive effects on real estate I identified…

• A better property search
• More efficient real estate transactions
• An improved risk assessment
• Enhanced customer experience
• Improved property management
• Improved real estate lead generation (e.g., chatbots, audience analysis, AI-powered ad platforms, etc.)
• Enhanced product (property) presentations (e.g. 3D virtual tours)
• Faster property listing descriptions
• Faster real estate video production and editing
• Faster and more unbiased property valuations and market analysis
• Better and more efficient property pricing

5 Negative Effects of AI On Real Estate

1) The Risk of Getting Replaced

I would say this is the biggest and most obvious one of all the potential negative effects or risks of AI on real estate. 

All the others that come after that pale in comparison, and you may feel the same. 

Due to the attention, this topic gets and even websites popping up monitoring the replacement risks for particular job types (e.g., this and this one), it is likely the public’s biggest concern.

So regarding real estate, AI-driven automation may lead to job losses in some areas, particularly for roles involving repetitive tasks or low-level decision-making. 

As I discussed in a recent article, one such area is likely real estate appraisals and property inspections.

Regarding property inspections, a real estate company could automate the process by deploying AI-powered drones and image recognition software. 

This technology could quickly and accurately capture property images, identify damages or maintenance issues, and generate inspection reports. 

As a result, the need for human property inspectors decreases, potentially leading to job displacement within that specific role.

2) Privacy Concerns (Smart Homes)

AI systems used in the real estate industry may collect and analyze large amounts of personal data, raising concerns about data privacy and the potential misuse of sensitive information.

For instance, this could happen when a smart home system collects detailed data on residents’ daily routines and habits. 

This would raise concerns about the potential misuse of this information by unauthorized parties or for targeted advertising purposes.

3) Biased Property Valuations, Mortgage Approvals, or Tenant Screenings

As I mentioned earlier, AI can amplify and continue with biases it learned about.

In real estate, this can mean unfair or discriminatory outcomes in property valuations, mortgage approvals, or tenant screenings.

For example, an AI-driven tenant screening system, trained on historical data that reflects societal biases, could inadvertently discriminate against certain applicants based on their race, age, or income, leading to unfair housing opportunities.

4) Dependence on Technology: Cyber Attac on Property Management Platform

If you rely too much on AI-driven systems in the real estate industry, you will have a larger problem once it gets “cyber-attacked.” In that case, you may experience system failures or loss of control over critical data and infrastructure.

Suppose you have a real estate company relying too much on an AI-powered property management platform to handle all aspects of your business. 

A cyber-attack on the platform could result in the loss of sensitive data and disrupts the company’s operations, leaving you vulnerable and struggling to recover. And I didn’t even mention the opportunity costs that come with it.

5) Ethical Dilemmas Regarding Smart Homes and Housing Affordability

AI in real estate can raise complex ethical questions related to surveillance technologies in smart homes, the use of personal data for targeted marketing, and the potential impact of AI-driven property investment on housing affordability and accessibility.

For example, an AI-driven property investment tool could identify low-income neighborhoods as prime targets for development, leading to widespread gentrification and displacing long-time residents who can no longer afford to live in their communities.

This issue can get complex pretty fast.

Let’s Take a Look In the Crystal Ball – Future Scenarios of How AI Will Affect Real Estate

As I did when I analyzed whether real estate agents will be replaced by AI, I will do the same here and work with future scenarios.

You want to remember that I am not a magician with a real crystal ball, and it’s challenging to predict the exact trajectory of AI in the real estate industry.

However, I will try to extrapolate three potential scenarios for the next five years based on the benefits and risks I discussed earlier. They are my speculations and can change anytime.

Scenario 1: Widespread AI Adoption in Real Estate (High Probability)

In this scenario, the real estate industry embraces AI technology, leading to increased efficiency, improved decision-making, and personalized customer experiences.

AI-driven property valuation, virtual tours, and property management have become standard practices, streamlining various aspects of the industry.

Regulatory frameworks and ethical guidelines are developed and enforced to address privacy concerns, bias, and discrimination issues.

Job displacement primarily affects roles involving repetitive tasks. Still, new job opportunities arise in AI development, data analysis, and technology integration. 

These displacements will also affect roles (e.g., real estate agents) that reject AI or don’t manage to integrate it into their workflows. 

These roles won’t be replaced by AI directly but by people and businesses who manage to integrate AI efficiently.

Scenario 2: Selective AI Adoption in Real Estate (Moderate Probability)

In this scenario, the real estate industry adopts AI technology in certain areas while maintaining traditional practices in others.

So AI-driven tools are used primarily for data analysis, property valuation, and personalization. Still, human expertise remains central to negotiation and complex decision-making.

The industry grapples with addressing privacy concerns and bias, leading to uneven implementation of AI technology and potential disparities in service quality.

Job displacement is limited as the industry balances using AI with the need for human expertise.

Scenario 3: Limited AI Adoption in Real Estate (Low Probability)

In this scenario, the real estate industry only slowly adopts AI technology, and traditional practices continue to dominate.

AI-driven tools are used on a limited scale for specific tasks such as property valuation and data analysis but have not yet been widely adopted for other applications.

Concerns about privacy, bias, and job displacement hinder the widespread implementation of AI technology, leading to slow progress in addressing these issues.

Job displacement is minimal, but the industry may lag behind other sectors regarding technological advancements and efficiency gains.

To sum it up, the real estate industry’s relationship with AI will likely evolve over the next five years. 

The most likely scenario is widespread and selective AI adoption. 

The extent of AI integration will depend on the industry’s ability to address the associated risks and challenges while maximizing the potential benefits of this transformative technology.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

How to Use AI in Real Estate Marketing to Up Conversions

You came to the right place if you have wondered how AI can benefit your real estate marketing efforts. 

New AI tools you can use are currently popping up by the day. However, using AI just for the sake of using it is not the best idea, as you will later read toward the end of today’s article.

Much depends on how well you implement them into your real estate marketing business processes.

So in today’s article, I will discuss…

• What to expect from AI in real estate marketing (the benefits)
• Using AI to present the “product” (property) you sell to attract buyers and satisfy sellers
• Leveraging AI to find the sweet spot in property pricing
• AI for real estate lead generation (promotion)
• How to implement AI tools for your real estate marketing

What to Expect from AI in Real Estate Marketing: The Benefits

Before I discuss what you can expect from AI in real estate marketing, we first need to get on one page regarding the different real estate marketing areas.

Why?

Because based on the knowledge about the different areas, we can better categorize the areas of real estate marketing where AI can be used. 

Many see marketing as a synonym for “promotion.” However, in the evergreen and classical sense, that’s plain wrong.

The classic four areas of marketing are the so-called “4 Ps of marketing,” no matter what industry you are in. 

It is Product, Price, Place, and Promotion and goes back to the 1960s, first introduced by E. Jerome McCarthy.

There are also extended variations of the classical marketing mix with 7 Ps or even 8Ps. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s stay with the classical four.

“Product” in real estate marketing are the properties you want to market (e.g., single-family homes, apartments, etc.). It’s the question of how you want to present the property you sell so that it attracts buyers and satisfies the sellers.

“Price” in real estate marketing is self-explanatory. It refers to the right price for the property you have to determine (e.g., doing accurate property valuations, etc.).

“Promotion” in real estate marketing is where many focus on and include all types of real estate lead generation tactics), such as direct mail, content marketing, etc. 

It’s also the question about your marketing message and communication (e.g., sales copy and message market fit)

And finally, “Place” in real estate marketing involves using the proper marketing channels to distribute your message to your target audience ( buyers or sellers). 

One crucial success factor is having enough knowledge about your target audience so you select the channel with the highest success rate.  

But it not only refers to where the property is marketed (the marketing channels) but also where it is distributed (e.g., the neighborhood, location)  

Getting back to what you can expect from AI in real estate marketing.

Machine learning is already applied in all four areas. There is AI that can enhance your product (the property), such as with AI-generated 3D virtual tours or virtual staging.

Regarding price, there are AI solutions on the market helping you make accurate and quicker property valuations.

Regarding promotion, AI-powered chatbots, and virtual assistants can handle simple inquiries.

And in the real estate marketing area of “place,” you can use AI solutions to better analyze market trends and behavior patterns to, on the one hand, make better decisions regarding where you market or which marketing channel to use to reach your ideal clients, but also analyzing local market data about neighborhoods. 

Using AI to Present The “Product” (Property) You Sell to Attract Buyers and Satisfy Sellers

AI can support the workflow from your first property visit to producing offline and online marketing materials, such as property listing pages, brochures, and flyers.

For instance, using the proper prompts in Chat GPT, AI can generate persuasive property listing descriptions in a few minutes. 

To different degrees, drones taking photos from above already use artificial intelligence for navigation (source).

You can have AI generate a 3D virtual tour from photos you take of the property’s interior.

Or you can enhance them with various AI tools, such as Midjourney.

And if the seller can’t or doesn’t want to do home staging, you can do it virtually with, for example, this software.

If you recorded videos from the interior, you can edit them faster with the AI integrated into Adobe Premiere Pro.

As you can see, for many, if not almost all, of the different workflow steps of presenting a property you want to sell to attract buyers and satisfy sellers, you can already find support from various AI solutions.

Leveraging AI to Find the Sweet Spot in Property Pricing  

This section refers to the “Price” in the four Ps of (real estate marketing) and how you can leverage AI to optimize property pricing.

When AI is used in this area, it often uses one of several of the following models:

• Automated valuation models (AVMs)
• Dynamic pricing
• Predictive analysis
• Price optimization
• Competitive pricing analysis

The automated valuation models combine data analytics with machine learning algorithms to estimate a property’s value.

It uses several factors: comparable sales, property characteristics, and market trends.

The next model used for AI for property valuations is dynamic pricing, which can adjust property prices in real-time.

It does this by finding changes in market demand, supply, and other factors such as time of year and property condition.

Predictive analytics is another model used.

They can analyze historical data and identify patterns affecting property pricing: interest rates, seasonal trends, and economic indicators.

Then we have price optimization.

An AI-powered price optimization tool can analyze many different data points (e.g., location, property features, market trends) and, based on that, recommend the optimal price point for a particular property.

And finally, there is a competitive pricing analysis. 

AI tools can use this model to analyze your competitors’ pricing strategies (more relevant for developers), identify market gaps, and adjust pricing strategies based on this information.

These are six platforms using AI for property valuations:

• Zillow
• Redfin
• HouseCanary
• Quantarium
•  C3.ai
• Foxy.ai

AI for Real Estate Lead Generation (Promotion)

I have to disappoint you. I haven’t found an AI solution yet, where you can click one button, and then high-quality leads come dripping in.

However, various AI providers offer solutions for some real estate lead generation elements. So it’s AI specialized in one or a handful of tasks.

First, AI-powered advertising platforms use machine learning algorithms to target the right audience and optimize ad campaigns to generate the best results. You may already be using them without knowing they are using AI.

It’s, for instance, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Quantcast, Adwerx, etc.

In the current ad platform market, it’s almost standard to use AI to offer decent audience targeting options to their users. 

Then we have AI-powered chatbots you can use to engage with potential sellers and buyers and answer questions about a particular property or your services.

Some can also schedule viewings and follow up with interested seller or buyer prospects. 

Hyro or Chatbot are examples of these chatbots that can help you generate leads on your real estate website.

The next use case in which AI can help you in the promotion part (lead generation) of real estate marketing is 3D virtual tours and virtual staging. 

If you are an attentive reader, you may notice that I already mentioned this in the section about where AI can help with the “product” part of the 3Ps of real estate marketing. 

It’s because there is an overlap. On the one hand, it helps, of course, to improve the product (the property) presentation. Still, on the other hand, it also helps to generate leads. 

How so?

Because being able to enhance the presentation of the property for sale will likely increase lead conversion rates. 

It helps potential buyers visualize themselves living in the space and increase interest in the property.

A 3D virtual tours provider to mention is Matterport.  You can check out providers such as Boxbrownie and Virtual Staging Solutions for virtual staging.

The following fields of AI in real estate lead generation fall more into the segment of conversion optimization, which significantly ties into lead generation.

Why? Because for real estate lead generation to happen, two things must fall together: eyeballs on what you offer (traffic) and eyeballs taking action (conversion).

Earlier, you learned about AI-powered predictive analytics in “Pricing” The same model can also be applied to behavior. 

So, for instance, these AI models can analyze buyer behavior, preferences, and demographics data and predict which properties are most likely to sell and at what price.

One such provider using predictive analytics is SmartZip.

You can also use it to improve your message market fit and create personalized marketing messages.

Receptivity, for example, is an AI-powered software that can analyze people’s language and gain insights into their psychology, personality, and emotions.

Finally, another real estate lead generation area where AI can help you is in real estate content marketing, especially in content ideation and creation.

Many AI tools can assist you in producing articles (blog posts), videos, and images, such as:

• Wordsmith (text)
• Articoolo (text)
• Copy.ai (text)
• Writesonic (text)
• Shortly.ai (text)
• OpenAI’s Chat GPT (text)
• Hotpot.ai (image)
• Canva’s Image Generator (image)
• DALLE-E2 (image)
• Midjourney (image)
• Pictory (video)
• Deepbrain AI (video)
• Synthesia (video)
• Synthesys (video)

How to Implement AI Tools for Your Real Estate Marketing

A while back, I wrote an article about how you can automate your real estate business.

And there is little difference in how you implement AI tools for your real estate marketing and the question about how you automate your real estate business. 

The principles are basically the same. 

To implement AI tools in your real estate marketing, it’s important to first identify your business processes in this area. 

Mind maps can be a helpful tool for listing them all out and categorizing them. 

Once you’ve done that, identify which processes can be automated using software or tools.

Time consumption is a good indicator; you could order these tasks and business processes you identify based on that.

Next, research and find the most suitable AI tools or software to automate these processes. 

Many AI tools are available for real estate marketing, so research is important to find the right one for your goals. 

Look for tools designed specifically for the real estate industry with features that align with your goals.

Once you find some “candidates,” you want to test and implement these tools gradually, improving the processes as you go along. 

For those real estate marketing tasks where AI is not viable, consider whether they can be delegated to a human. 

In addition to some AI tools not covering a use case, you have to deal with a different constraint: your budget. 

So you also want to select the tools fitting within your budget. 

In this context, it also helps to prioritize from important to less important AI tools.

What do I mean by that?

You may identify a pretty time-consuming real estate marketing task or business process, so the AI tool that can help you with that and save you the most time would be the most important one.

By prioritizing, you can use a limited budget to only select one tool (the one that saves you the most time).

Once you have identified one or more AI real estate marketing tools, you want to train yourself or your team on them and implement them into your real estate business processes.

You must also monitor the results you may get with the AI tool and adjust as needed. 

So you want to keep an eye on your key performance indicators, measure how much time the particular AI tool is really saving you, but also the quality of the results (e.g., if you only get crappy articles with hallucinated facts and you spend more time editing than writing them yourself).

For the real estate marketing tasks that only can be delegated because there is no viable AI tool available, you want to create an operations manual for each process you delegate and gradually find and test employees or freelancers for handling the tasks you defined in the manual. 

Finally, identify any remaining business operations that can’t be automated or delegated and tackle them yourself. 

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Will AI Replace Real Estate Agents? (3 Scenarios)

It may come as no surprise that whether artificial intelligence (AI) will replace real estate agents has been an ongoing debate. 

Some say AI will bring efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings to the real estate industry.

In contrast, others argue real estate transactions require emotional intelligence, human touch, and specialized knowledge not (yet) replicable by AI.

But there is more to this debate than these arguments against and in favor.

Therefore, I will explore both sides of the argument in-depth and complement it with principles of futurology to assess the risk of real estate agents being replaced by AI. 

Sounds interesting? Please continue reading…

6 Typical Arguments for Real Estate Agents Being Replaced By AI

Since the question of whether AI will replace real estate agents is an ongoing debate where subjective opinions clash, in this section, I will first go down the typical route in discussing six standard arguments in favor of real estate agents being replaced by AI. 

The following section will then discuss typical arguments against real estate agents being replaced.

After these two sections, I hope you will see that it’s not the best approach to determine an answer to this question.

So here are the arguments for real estate agents being replaced by AI:

1) Efficiency and Speed

Have you ever played a strategy game with base building against an AI enemy?

If yes, you will know that the AI enemy doesn’t need to click, meaning it is faster in performing tasks.

The same is true for other AI.

It’s faster and more efficient than humans in performing tasks such as generating reports, analyzing property data, or identifying potential leads or scoring leads.

2) Cost Savings

An AI replacing a real estate agent would save commission costs for buyers and sellers if the only task of real estate agents were only having the role of an intermediary.

However, while AI may reduce costs, it may also lead to a lack of accountability and the potential for errors or mistakes, leading to long-term costs for buyers and sellers.

3) Accuracy 

Using AI instead of a real estate agent could make more accurate predictions.

Why?

Because it has access to a large amount of data leading to more successful property transactions.

For instance, when a real estate agent helps a client find a new single-family home.

He can recommend properties based on the client’s preferences and budget, and he will do this by using their experience and expertise.

However, these recommendations are often limited because of personal market knowledge.

In contrast, AI can analyze a large amount of data using various sources (e.g., public records, property listings, demographic data, et.). It can then apply machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and trends that are usually not immediately visible to humans. 

Consequently, the AI can make more accurate predictions about potential property value and the likelihood of it being a good fit for a real estate buyer.

4) It’s Available 24/7

We, humans, depend on our biological systems (our bodies).

Unless we have a larger team of assistants working in different time zones, we can not be available 24/7.

AI, however, can operate around the clock and provide potential clients with property information and other services.

5) Reduced Bias

Suppose you are a real estate agent helping a client to sell a property, and you like Victorian architecture and a particular neighborhood.

That’s already a bias that may influence how you price a property, and this can lead to overvaluation or undervaluation.

Unless it’s not programmed that way, an AI doesn’t have a preference for a specific architectural style or neighborhood. 

Instead, it can use data-driven insights to eliminate bias and provide a fair and transparent valuation for the property.

6) Consistency

We are back at the biological limitations of a human real estate agent.

Humans can get tired and prone to errors, whereas AI does not (it can still have some bugs, though).

So it can offer consistent service to clients without getting tired.

However, this argument can be weakened by saying that a human real estate agent can better adapt to unique situations and provide the same level of creativity and problem-solving. 

6 Typical Arguments Against Real Estate Agents Being Replaced By AI

Now let’s get to the typical arguments against real estate agents being replaced by AI.

1) Lack of Human Touch

Isn’t it nice to call a company’s customer service to be greeted by a well-done digital voice of an automatic answering system or a chatbot? 

And since technology, day by day, invades daily human lives, it will become a unique selling point to offer the real human touch. 

This was already discussed in this, this, and this article where studies confirm that most people still prefer communication from human to human.

Now imagine real estate, a field much more people-oriented than other industries. Many buyers and sellers value the personal touch real estate agents provide.

AI can’t replace that soon, especially regarding “products” (properties) that usually have one of the highest price tags compared to other products.

2) Complexity of Transactions

As you surely know, real estate transactions can get complex. So you need specialized knowledge and experience to navigate it without costly pitfalls.

You may have recognized a pattern in my article about real estate AI companies. 

There is no universal real estate AI for all imaginable use cases. 

It caters to particular use cases.

So while AI can assist with some tasks (e.g., property valuations), it cannot replace a human agent’s expertise and negotiation skills.

3) Unpredictable Situations

This is somewhat related to the complexity of transactions.

A first simple real estate transaction turning complex because the seller didn’t include the dryer in the offer can turn into something unpredictable.

AI cannot anticipate and adapt to that as easily as a human real estate agent can.

However, if someone would train AI on a vast dataset of all types of unpredictable situations that have occurred in the past in real estate transactions or related to real estate, this argument could be weakened.

4) Trust and Accountability

Since it’s usually larger amounts of money that change hands, real estate transactions are based on a high degree of trust and accountability between agents, buyers, and sellers. As an agent, you are held to ethical and professional standards.

You can also be held accountable for your actions if something goes wrong.

This is not the case with AI.

It usually lacks accountability and may not always act in the best interest of its users.

Even if it did, AI real estate providers would ensure its product or service can’t be held accountable to mitigate their legal risk exposure. 

5) Emotional Intelligence & Support

Depending on the type of property you specialize in, selling or buying property almost always involves emotions and stress.

An experienced human real estate agent can provide emotional support and guidance.

It would also need emotional intelligence, which current AI models can’t simulate sufficiently.

6) Local Market Knowledge

Real estate agents usually have first-hand knowledge of local markets to inform their clients about neighborhood trends, community amenities, school districts, and even one or two personal experiences with particular activities and amenities in the neighborhood.

AI is limited in this regard. It can access data about a particular area but not tell you about its favorite pastries in a local bakery. 

Why This Pro and Con Approach Is Not Ideal

Now after reading the arguments in favor and against real estate agents being replaced by AI, can you answer the initial question with yes or with no?

Exactly, me neither. I could have added more arguments for both sides, and we wouldn’t advance in finding an answer.

The person who would like AI to replace real estate agents would feel their arguments are stronger, and real estate agents not wanting to be replaced by AI would consider the other ideas stronger.

So what’s the problem? We just use something similar as pros and cons, which is usually pretty subjective.

What we need instead are principles of futurology to approach objectivity for that. 

Principles of Futurology to Assess the Risk of Real Estate Agents Being Replaced By AI

So what is Futurology?

According to the definition of Wikipedia it’s “the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social and technological advancement, and other environmental trends; often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future.” 

It is also named future studies or foresight.

Since it’s an interdisciplinary field, it combines different methods. Involved are areas such as psychology, sociology, and technology.

Based on these fields, scenarios, and forecasting of what the future might look like are developed.

Other tools futurists use are scenario planning, trend analysis, and speculative fiction.

What is the ultimate goal of futurology?

It’s not about making an exact prediction of the future but helping professionals from different business fields to make informed decisions and prepare for a range of plausible futures.

Well, I guess if futurists could predict the future, why would they work as such? They could get the lottery numbers each week right—the end.

So let’s now use different scenarios to predict better whether AI will replace real estate agents, and you can prepare yourself for each scenario, or at least the most likely one. 

AI vs. Real Estate Agents: Who Will Win the Battle for the Industry (3 Scenarios)

Before we get into the scenarios, I want to share some background information about AI development because it is crucial to determine whether it can replace real estate agents.

The below list includes different types of AI. It’s ordered from less to most developed. The latter one is almost human.

1. Reactive Machines
2. Limited Memory
3. Supervised Learning
4. Unsupervised Learning
5. Reinforcement Learning
6. Theory of Mind (still in development)
7. Self-Aware (theoretical concept)

The most basic types of AI are reactive machines and limited memory AI, almost with no learning capabilities.

More advanced are supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, and they can learn and make predictions based on that learning.

That’s where we are at present (supervised and unsupervised learning).

We are also just a few years away from the widespread application of Emotional Artificial Intelligence (source), which would be “Theory of Mind).

What is still much farther away is self-aware AI, which would be able to understand its existence and emotions, similar to human consciousness.

While significant progress has been made in developing AI, it is essential to note that even the most advanced types of AI still have limitations and cannot replicate the full range of human cognitive abilities.

Scenario 1: Real Estate Agents Are Entirely Replaced by AI-Powered Platforms (10% Probability)

In this scenario, AI-powered platforms replace real estate agents completely. 

This could only be possible if you can make an AI robot almost identical to a human.

So from the above, you would have to have reached at least a fully developed AI at the level of theory of mind.

I assign this scenario a 10% probability, a low one, since from the earlier mentioned arguments in favor and against, you could learn that buying and selling a property is a complex process with many variables, requiring many interpersonal and negotiation skills. Not to mention the legal part.

For AI, providing personalized advice and guidance to clients and negotiating and navigating complex deals is challenging.

And if there were such an AI, as already mentioned, in high-stake situations like real estate transactions, many buyers or sellers would still likely prefer to work with a human agent.

I estimate that in about ten years, a minority of real estate sellers and buyers may start using far enough developed real estate AI robots.

It will be buyers and sellers open to new technologies and comfortable with digital interfaces or a robotic appearance.

These types of buyers and sellers will likely have a particular personality type.

According to the Big Five personality traits, one of the few reliable ones, it will be clients who score high in traits such as openness to experience and extraversion.

Why?

Because these traits are more likely to embrace new technologies and try new approaches.

But personality traits are just one factor determining which type of buyer or seller would belong to the first minority of people using AI real estate (robot) agents. 

Scenario 2: The Friendly Assistant for Real Estate Agents (25% Probability)

In this scenario, AI-powered platforms take entirely over repetitive tasks of real estate agents, such as property listings or particular marketing tasks.

I estimate this scenario with a 25% probability because AI-powered platforms have already started taking over the routine tasks of real estate agents. 

You can already do things like have it create property listing descriptions, conduct marketing campaigns, score leads, analyze market trends, and more.

The current AI can use natural language processing (NLP), analyze property descriptions, and extract relevant information.

In this context, you want to read my article about the different real estate AI solutions (my article).

Scenario 3: AI-Powered Market Insights (65% Probability)

We can see this scenario now with the various AI real estate companies offering different solutions for different real estate niches (my article) already.

It’s the “light-version” of scenario 2.

So here, AI-powered platforms will work with real estate agents, providing them with data-driven insights and recommendations, such as property values, market trends, or buyer preferences.

Using this information as a real estate agent lets you make more informed decisions and provide more personalized advice to your clients.

In addition, AI can also assist you in managing your workload and streamlining your workflow.

I gave this scenario a high likelihood of 65% because these are the use cases already happening and a visible trend for the future. It’s just not yet adapted by that many real estate pros.

Conclusion

What can we conclude from the above? Will real estate agents be replaced with AI?

Looking at the arguments in favor and against and the three scenarios from above, it is unlikely that real estate agents will be entirely replaced by AI soon.

However, a particular type of real estate agent will likely be replaced within the next few years, but not in the way you think.

It’s the reluctant real estate agent who doesn’t want to integrate or embrace AI in their business.

As I discussed in scenarios two and three, this agent will not be replaced by AI but by real estate agents using AI efficiently. 

Why? Because these “AI-embracing agents” will have a significant competitive advantage over the reluctant ones.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

How Is AI Used in Real Estate?

Due to the rise of Chat GPT, public awareness of AI solutions has significantly increased. 

And the real estate industry has seen its fair share of technological advancements, including integrating artificial intelligence.

It can potentially revolutionize the buying and selling process of properties, managing properties, analyzing markets, and generating leads.

I wrote today’s article discussing what AI is, six benefits and risks, and 16 use cases to show you how AI can be used in real estate. 

What Is AI in Real Estate?

Machines that can learn and perform tasks that usually need human intelligence. This ability can be called artificial intelligence.

It is also called “machine learning”: when a computer learns how to do something without being exactly told what to do.

For example, let’s say you have a computer that can cook. 

But only when you tell him from a recipe each step individually. You need to tell it what ingredients to buy, what to do with them, etc. So you have to be there to observe and do a lot of micro-managing.

After a while, you may not see much of a benefit anymore in having to be there and do all the micro-managing. Doing it that way, you could do the cooking as well yourself.

So you give the computer an upgrade, you tell it: “Hey computer, I will cook different receipts now, and you observe.”

Of course, you prepared the computer for that so it can observe you and describe what you are doing in its own words. 

While you peel some potatoes, the computer observes and “thinks” by himself: “Alright, the first thing is peeling potatoes. If potatoes are dirty, I have to wash them. If not I can go ahead. If there are some bad parts, I have to cut them out with knife X, etc.” 

So the computer does a whole lot of thinking for just one receipt. This is thanks to a new program you wrote, enabling it to observe and learn and program itself.

Now the next time you tell it: “Computer cook me the nice potato receipt XYZ from last time,” you don’t have to stand around the whole time giving it orders for each and every step. It does it alone.

Of course, in the first iterations, it can happen that the computer may have missed when you cooked the potatoes. Its learning program may not have been prepared to take note of the maximum time to cook them.

So when you try the computer “cooked” meal the first time, you realize: “Oh boy, those potatoes are overcooked.”

You now give it feedback as may happen between a married couple sometimes: “You overcooked the potatoes.”

If you do this to your spouse and your marriage has problems, they may not learn to improve the cooking time but tell you to cook them yourself next time.

In contrast, the computer will not file for divorce and may instead ask in return to get input about what overcooked and different cooking times mean, etc.

In short, its program can learn independently and improve over time by the feedback it gets. 

In real estate AI (machine learning) can streamline processes, get valuable market insights, and increase overall efficiency (save time). 

6 Benefits and 5 Risks of Using AI in Real Estate

The 6 Benefits

1) A better property search: 

AI can help buyers and renters find properties that match their preferences, such as location, price, and amenities, more easily and accurately. 

For example, an AI-powered real estate platform can recommend homes to potential buyers based on their search history and behavior.

2) More efficient transactions: 

With the help of AI, you can automate many repetitive and time-consuming tasks involved in buying or selling a property, such as a document management, property valuation, and mortgage underwriting. 

For instance, the startup Opendoor uses AI algorithms to make instant cash offers to homeowners looking to sell their homes (source).

3) Better risk assessment: 

AI can boost property analysis and help lenders and insurers evaluate the risk associated with a property more accurately by analyzing various data sources, such as property records, credit scores, and weather patterns. 

This can lead to more informed decision-making and reduced risk of losses. 

For example, Cape Analytics uses AI to analyze aerial imagery and provide property data to insurers.

4) Enhanced customer experience: 

By using AI, you can give your customers a more personalized and interactive experience by using chatbots, virtual assistants, and other tools to answer questions, provide advice, and offer recommendations. 

For example, the real estate company Compass offers users an AI-powered video studio to create listing videos (source).   

5) Improved property management

Suppose you are a landlord or property manager. In that case, AI can optimize business operations and maintenance by providing real-time data and insights on occupancy, energy usage, maintenance needs, and tenant behavior. 

For instance, the startup Zenplace uses AI to automate property inspections and maintenance requests (source).

6) Improved Real Estate Lead Generation

With the help of AI, you can increase your real estate lead quality by analyzing behavior data and predicting which leads are most likely to convert. 

For example, through tools you may already use (e.g., Google Analytics), AI can analyze the online behavior patterns of potential clients and help you improve your marketing efforts to increase the likelihood of conversions. 

Additionally, AI can automate lead scoring and lead nurturing, allowing agents to focus on more high-touch tasks.

The 5 Risks

1) Biased decision-making:

AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on (remember the potato cooking earlier). This can lead to unfair and discriminatory decision-making. 

For example, suppose it is trained on data from predominantly affluent neighborhoods. In that case, it may undervalue properties in lower-income areas, leading to further housing inequality.

2) Not enough human interaction:

AI chatbots handling customer inquiries may not be able to give the same level of personalized service as a human can.

3) Privacy concerns:

Credit scores and employment histories may be collected and analyzed by algorithms. 

If AI does this from potential real estate clients’ social media profiles to determine their financial status, it could violate their privacy.

4) Over-reliance on AI:

If real estate pros rely too much on AI, it may lead to a lack of human intuition and decision-making creativity.

This can happen when AI models are always used to automatically generate property valuations.

In that case, real estate agents may become less experienced in assessing the value of properties themselves.

5) Security risks:

Data breaches potentially exposing sensitive information can always happen, with or without ai. However, since AI is still in its infancy, other types of cyber attacks are possible with it. They are called “AI attacks” and work a bit differently.

For example, this article mentions that “an AI attack can transform a stop sign into a green light in the eyes of a self-driving car by simply placing a few pieces of tape on the stop sign itself”

16 AI Use Cases in Real Estate

To better understand AI in real estate and its use cases, let me explain it through an analogy. 

As a buyer’s agent, you may try to find the perfect home for a client. You have to sift through hundreds of listings to find properties that meet their needs. 

This process can be time-consuming; even then, you may miss out on properties that would be a great fit.

Now, imagine if you had an AI-powered tool that could search through all those listings and identify the ones that match your client’s needs in a matter of minutes. 

That’s the power of AI in real estate and one real estate business use case in increasing efficiency and saving you time.

There are four areas of real estate where AI finds various use cases: lead generation (real estate marketing in general), property management, predictive analysis, market analysis, and ai for customer experience.

Let’s look at these use cases in more detail with some examples. You may remember some of the above benefits.  

1) AI Use Cases in Real Estate Lead Generation

Virtual tours:

Using AI-powered virtual reality and augmented reality tools to enable potential buyers to tour a property without ever leaving their home can boost lead conversion rates and save you time. 

However, this use case may be more useful for international buyers or those looking to relocate to a new area than potential buyers living closer to the particular property. 

Image recognition: 

A great property description with a decent sales copy can increase your lead conversion rates. However, they can be pretty time-consuming to create.

To save you time, in this use case, AI algorithms can analyze property photos to identify specific features such as the number of rooms, the type of flooring, and the style of the kitchen. 

This information can generate more accurate and persuasive property descriptions and thus convert potential buyers better. 

Chatbots:

As partially discussed in a past article, AI-powered chatbots can help you be faster and more responsive regarding answering common questions from potential buyers, tenants, or seller leads.

They can save you time and be used to schedule appointments, provide personalized recommendations, and do follow-ups.

Analyzing the Needs and Wants of Your Target Audience:

In past articles, I covered the importance of real estate targeting and finding your ideal real estate client for better quality leads. 

And AI can also help you with that (e.g., Chat GPT). 

With a decently engineered prompt, you can analyze large amounts of text from social media posts, forums, and online reviews to learn more about your target audience’s preferences and sentiments. 

You can improve and tailor your marketing message based on the collected and interpreted information.

Predictive lead scoring:

Some CRMs (my article) offer this AI feature in their software solutions. You can use AI to identify patterns and characteristics common among past clients and current leads to having it calculate which one is likely to convert in the future.

This can also free up time since you can focus your lead nurturing efforts on the few leads and past clients that are worth the effort.

2) AI Use Cases in Property Management With AI

Predictive maintenance:

AI can predict when maintenance is required based on data from various installed sensors on a property.

Property managers will save time and money with it since issues will be detected early before major damages occur.

Tenant screening:

As discussed above, AI can help property owners, landlords, and managers evaluate tenant applications. It can be done on factors such as employment status, credit history, and criminal records.

Rent prediction:

AI can also analyze trends in a particular rental market. This helps property managers adapt their pricing strategy accordingly, maximize profits, and reduce the risk of vacancies.

Energy management:

To reduce energy costs and promote sustainability in their respective real estate niche, property managers can use AI to analyze energy consumption patterns and identify where there is room for improvement.

Chatbots:

No more 3:00 am calls because of issues with toilets. An AI-powered chatbot can help tenants with routine inquiries and maintenance requests. 

3) AI Use Cases in Real Estate Market Analysis 

Predictive analytics and demand forecasting:

AI can use multiple market data sources such as demographic data, historical property prices, and market trends to predict (making a high-odds guess) market behavior in the future. 

This data can be used to find potential investment opportunities or to know which real estate niche you should start focusing on.

Property valuation:

While it can be risky if you over-rely on it, you can use AI to analyze property features and compare them to recent sales data. 

This helps the AI to estimate the value of a property accurately. 

Depending on the AI model, it may use a combination of various property valuation methods (e.g., cost-based, comparison, income capitalization).

Property Search:

If you use AI to enhance property search engines or even on your own real estate website you can provide the following:

• Personalized recommendations based on a user’s search history and preferences.
• Making it easier for potential buyers to find the right property.
• Thus increasing your lead conversion rates.

4) AI Use Cases in Real Estate Transaction Management

Contract Analysis: 

When I had my international real estate referral business, the legal parts were not my favorite parts (some may like it, though).

With AI, you can have it extract data from contracts to ensure they are accurate and identify any potential issues or risks.

Fraud Detection:

This use case may be something an escrow service company could implement.

You can use AI to analyze transaction data and identify any potential fraudulent activities or suspicious behavior, helping to prevent financial loss or getting into a money laundering scheme.

Transaction Monitoring:

I’ve been there, and you probably are too. Real estate transactions can cause inefficient communication overhead because you want to keep all involved parties updated. 

AI can also help save some time with this communication by monitoring transaction progress and providing automated updates to all parties involved. This helps streamline the process and reduce delays.

Escrow service companies, real estate transaction management services, or document management companies could also implement this type of AI.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

The Power of Real Estate Targeting to Boost Conversions

Do you want to achieve the proper message market fit for your real estate lead generation and marketing campaigns?

In that case, you need to look into the power of real estate targeting. Doing it right can boost your conversion rates and, thus, your ROI.

This article serving you as an introductory guide, will therefore cover…

• What real estate targeting strategies are and why they are important
• What a real estate target audience is
• The five types of real estate targeting
• Real estate targeting tools and technologies

What Are Real Estate Targeting Strategies, and Why Are They Important?

Real estate targeting strategies are methods and techniques to identify and reach the most relevant audience for a specific property or real estate service. 

By using these strategies for your real estate marketing and lead generation, you increase your success rate of reaching the right people with the right message, thus increasing your conversion rate and, consequently, your return on investment.

This is related to message-market fit. I already covered this topic a bit in this and this article. 

A real estate targeting strategy is crucial to achieving message market fit.

As a short reminder, message market fit determines how well your marketing message (your sales copy) resonates with your target audience.

When you develop a real estate targeting strategy, you will identify and learn about your target audience’s particular characteristics, needs, and preferences.

Based on this information, you can tailor your message (sales copy) to meet those needs effectively.

Let’s make a short example of bringing this point home. Say you sell a luxury apartment in a trendy neighborhood and target young professionals.

In this case, your message should emphasize the convenience and modern amenities of the apartment (e.g., high-speed internet, easy access to local cafes and restaurants, and a state-of-the-art gym).

This message (real estate sales copy) should significantly change to achieve message market fit when you target retired couples. 

Instead, you want to highlight the apartment’s spaciousness, closeness to museums, theaters, and stunning views.

So, when you use a real estate targeting strategy, it helps you identify your target audience’s demographics, psychographics, and behaviors to create a message that speaks to them in their language.

It will also help you decide which marketing channels to use for your real estate lead generation.

You can imagine how well your lead generation will perform (likely not with a pretty sad conversion rate) when you target retired couples with a TikTok campaign, mentioning the great party scene in the apartment’s neighborhood.

What Is a Real Estate Target Audience?

You can’t have a real estate targeting strategy without a target audience. 

To develop a real estate targeting strategy, you will need a target audience to reach and engage specific segments with tailored messages and content.

So a real estate target audience is a specific group of people you aim to reach with suitable marketing and lead generation endeavors as a real estate professional.

You can define a target audience via various characteristics: location, interests, demographics, and behaviors.

For instance, when you want to target first-time homebuyers (I covered them in this article) as a typical characteristic of this audience, you would narrow it down to people between the ages of 25 and 35 interested in buying a starter home in a trendy neighborhood.

So the target audience consists of…

• Demographics (age, gender, income, etc.)
• Psychographics (personality traits and values)
• Behaviors (actions taken)
• Preferences (likes and dislikes)

All of the above elements of a target audience can be used to target your potential buyers or sellers better and achieve an improved message market fit so you will be more persuasive. In the end, this will help increase your lead conversion rates.

What happens when you ignore all the above?

That’s easy.

You will risk wasting time and resources on your marketing and lead generation efforts, either generating no leads or sales at all or low-quality real estate leads.

You may produce content (in the case of real estate content marketing) or run lead generation campaigns that do not resonate with potential buyers and sellers, thus missing the mark.

This happens when you go about real estate lead generation with a scattergun approach, testing and experimenting with the long lists of tips and tricks you can find on the web without having clarity on your real estate marketing strategy, goals, and constraints beforehand.

Diving Deeper Into The 5 Types of Real Estate Targeting

Many of the various real estate targeting types are based on the above target audience characteristics.

So it will come as no surprise that there are the following types:

• Demographic targeting
• Psychographic targeting
• Behavioral targeting
• Geographic targeting
• Retargeting

1) Demographic Targeting

Suppose you sell a luxury penthouse. Would it make sense to target college students living on a shoestring budget in their twenties? 

No, it wouldn’t make sense (especially for your marketing budget).

So by using demographic targeting, you consider age, gender, income, occupation, education, and marital status so you can tailor your marketing messages to attract a specific type of potential buyer or seller.

2) Psychographic Targeting

This type of targeting is obviously more behavior centered.

For example, selling a fixer-upper property, you may want to target people interested in DIY projects and home renovation shows.

To do psychographic targeting successfully, it’s all about understanding the mindset of your target audience so you can tailor your real estate sales copy accordingly to it.

Compared to demographic targeting, it’s more difficult.

Why?

As you may already imagine, to know the behavior of your target audience, you need a good understanding of your target audience’s values, beliefs, lifestyles, interests, and more.

This information is more challenging to come by than demographic information, especially if you start out and haven’t gotten to know past clients better.

3) Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is like the little brother of psychographic targeting.

How is that?

Well, beliefs inform actions and actions are behaviors.

So when psychographic targeting is mostly about beliefs, behavioral targeting is about the actions that come from the beliefs.

This type of targeting is most commonly used online because it is easier to implement by technology. It involves tracking and analyzing user behavior on websites and digital platforms, and it can be easier measured online.

But there are also a few offline methods, such as tracking customer purchase histories and behaviors in brick-and-mortar stores.

So based on this behavioral tracking data, you can then target the specific behavior of your potential buyers or sellers.

Examples of behavioral tracking are…

• Time spent on a website
• Page views
• Clicks
• Items added to a shopping cart
• Search queries
• Social media interactions

For instance, if your real estate website has the feature to add properties to favorites, over time, you can analyze this data (e.g., which type of property was added most of the time to the favorites, which price ranges are most popular, etc.). 

Based on this data, you can tailor lead-generation campaigns on various viable marketing channels your target audience uses.

4) Geographic Targeting

I bet you are likely most familiar with this type of real estate targeting (geographic targeting).

An example of geographic targeting is if you try to sell a beachfront property to someone living in the middle of a desert thousands of miles away from the actual property you want to sell.

That doesn’t make much sense unless you are in the niche (my article) of international real estate, vacation properties, or second homes.

Geographic targeting helps you reach people actually interested in the location of the property you promote.

So you focus on reaching specific audiences based on their location, which can include potential clients in a particular city, state, region, or specific neighborhood.

It also includes targeting potential buyers or sellers based on their proximity to a specific landmark.

There are several ways to do geographic targeting for your lead generation. You can do it via local media (offline) advertising, targeted direct mail campaigns (my article), and online advertising platforms supporting geo-targeting, such as…

• Google Ads 
• Instagram Ads
• Facebook Ads  
• LinkedIn Ads  
• Twitter Ads
• Bing Ads.
• Native Ads 

5) Retargeting

Retargeting is the “stalking uncle” of all the above real estate targeting types. You could file a restraining order if someone did this to you offline.

So it is only limited to the online world (at least officially).

An example of retargeting is when you look at a pair of shoes online, only to see ads for those same shoes following you around the internet for weeks.

In real estate, an example of retargeting would be a potential seller who makes a home valuation on your website.

Luckily you have a Facebook pixel installed, making it possible to follow up on this website visitor with relevant Facebook ads afterward.

So since the potential seller visits Facebook daily, they now start to see your retargeting ads promoting your real estate services.

Shortly, here are some statistics about the benefits of retargeting:

• The average CTR (click-through rate) for retargeting is ten times higher than for display ads.
• It can boost conversion rates by up to 150% and simultaneously have an average CPC (cost per click) of only half of the search ads.

(source)

So you can likely assume that with a higher conversion rate and lower CPC, you will also have a significantly lower cost per lead.

Real Estate Targeting Tools and Technologies

Several types of tools and technologies on the market, free and paid, can help you identify and reach your target audiences.

1) Customer Relationship Software (CRM)

As already covered in this and this article in more detail CRMs can help you segment your client database and inspire you in the creation of targeted real estate marketing campaigns. 

Why? 

Because they support you in easier identifying your leads and current or past clients’ behaviors, interests, and needs.

2) Data Analytics Software

Data analytics software is a technology that belongs to the vast field of business intelligence.

Different software providers such as Google Analytics (free), Adobe Analytics, Tableau, and Salesforce Analytics can help you make sense of large volumes of data so you can more easily interpret it to gain more knowledge about your target audience’s behavior and with it tweak and optimize your real estate lead generation and marketing strategies.

3) Social Media Advertising Platforms

As mentioned earlier, most social media advertising platforms provide detailed targeting options for advertising campaigns.

This allows you to target specific demographics, geographic locations, and behaviors.

4) Geolocation Technologies

GPS and Beacon technology are geolocation technologies that can help you target prospects in specific locations.

For instance, you could use it to identify people close to a property that is for sale or rent and then send relevant text messages.

Some of the providers offering this technology are:

• Reveal Mobile
• Propellant Media
• Geofli
• GroundTruth

5) Email Marketing Automation

Most email marketing automation providers (my article) offer different list segmenting options today.

Here you can send emails automatically to leads that behave in a particular way.

You can send tailored emails to a more engaged segment with your content.

The typical indicator used here is the open rate. Or you could send only emails to subscribers that click on the links in your email content.

So regarding targeting, the focus is mostly on behavioral targeting. 

Using a combination of the above tools, you can create and improve real estate marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience and increase your ROI. 

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

How to Generate Real Estate Leads Without Getting Lost

If you look for information about generating real estate leads, you will undoubtedly stumble upon many different articles and videos that will provide you with a nice and long list of ideas.

There can often be more than twenty ideas from which you are left to choose, usually too many. 

According to a study from Caltech, the optimal number to not get overwhelmed by choices is between 8 and 15.

So this is where much of the content with long real estate lead generation lists fails.

And that’s why this article will take a different approach.

It will discuss…

• Why give real estate lead generation any importance in the first place?
• A “Choice-Filter” to cut through the noise of marketing channels for real estate lead generation
• The four marketing channels for real estate lead generation to keep it simple (and a bonus channel on top)

Why Give Real Estate Lead Generation Any Importance in the First Place?

You may roll your eyes, but for some, the importance of generating real estate leads is not that obvious.

So if this is already clear, you can skip this section. I won’t feel hurt.

However, if you need a bit extra motivation and want to know why real estate lead generation is essential in the first place, you may keep reading.

Suppose you just got your real estate license.

If you do nothing and think you will close property sales just because of holding a license, you will soon find out that nothing will happen.

No buyer or seller wakes up in the morning and suddenly thinks: “Oh yeah, let me check who has a real estate license in my state, so I can call them to help me find a property or sell my home.”

Well, maybe a tiny percentage of people do that, but I doubt this is a sustainable real estate lead generation strategy. 

Besides, it would be more out of your control than a proactively run real estate lead generation campaign targeting a particular type of potential buyer or seller.

So why real estate leads?

Well, you don’t have a business without real estate leads. It’s the lifeblood of the business, and lead generation is the heart.

Here are the benefits of real estate lead generation:

• It increases your sales opportunities because more leads mean more chances to convert potential clients into buyers or sellers.
• Builds a pipeline of future clients: real estate leads may not be ready to sell or buy now, but with the right follow-up campaign (my article) in the future.
• Is a prerequisite to growing your real estate business (my article) in the future 
• Over the long run, it can enhance your brand recognition and increase your visibility in the marketplace and make you stand out from your competition (with the right strategy) 

Your “Choice Filter” to Cut Through the Noise of Marketing Channels for Real Estate Lead Generation

Once you get into the rabbit hole of different real estate marketing channels, you can quickly get lost if you don’t take a strategic and thoughtful approach.

You may collect a list of 20, 30, or more real estate lead generation ideas, try to start each one, but master none in the end, because you weren’t aware of something you need to do before that.

By the way, this is where my “Ultimate Real Estate Lead Gen Strategy and Performance Suite” comes in.

So what is it that you need to know before you go all out with the different marketing channels you may find all over the web?

You will need to assess your goals and, most importantly, your constraints and conditions.

Regarding your goals, you would need to know the annual net commission goal you want to earn.

Once you have this number, you want to assess your conditions and constraints. Regarding your constraints and conditions, the list of questions you must ask yourself is much longer…

• What is your gross commission?
• What is your brokerage commission split?
• What is your income tax rate?
• What is the average property/ home value of your listings typically?

Based on these first four conditions and constraints, you can calculate the number of closings you need per year and month to reach your net commission goal.

It doesn’t stop here. You also want to ask yourself the following:

1) When do you want to reach your net commission goal (12 months, 24 months, 36 months, etc.)?

What you will answer here will inform and automatically exclude particular marketing channels for real estate lead generation.

For example, if you want to reach a sporty net commission goal within 12 months, and think of doing content marketing (inbound marketing), don’t do it. The lead time until it brings in results can easily surpass 12 months, even if you already have some experience.

What is your monthly budget for real estate lead generation?

Knowing this information and the average real estate lead costs will help determine whether you can generate the necessary monthly real estate leads to reach your annual net commission goal. 

It also informs whether the time you want to reach this goal is viable in the first place.

What is your daily or monthly “sweat-equity” budget in hours for lead generation methods that are “free” but cost your time?

Suppose you don’t have a large monthly budget or none at all. 

In that case, the answer to this question also determines whether you can generate the number of monthly or annual leads in the desired time you want. 

It will also show whether your net commission goal is viable in your desired time.

Do you need more buyer or seller leads or equal of both (this depends on your real estate niche (my article), provided you focus on one)?

The answer to this question determines which marketing channels you should use to target the particular buyer and/or seller prospects. 

You may already know this if you focus on a real estate niche. It also depends if you have a seller or buyers’ market.

What real estate marketing channels for lead generation are available?

This is where the content and articles you may have read come in with the different real estate lead generation ideas they float around. 

So you want to know which real estate marketing channels are available in the first place. 

But not only is this information important, which leads me to the next question you want to ask yourself…

What is the typical awareness level of prospects in these channels?

Customer awareness determines how close a potential lead of a marketing channel is to a real estate transaction. 

So you want to determine where most of the audience’s awareness levels stand.

Of course, you can slightly influence this by using the proper marketing message or sales copy. 

For example, this is easier in search PPC advertising or content marketing targeting the right search intent than on social media platforms.

The lower the customer awareness level, the farther away a prospect is from a real estate transaction. 

Suppose a marketing channel consists primarily of unaware prospects. 

In that case, it likely will conflict with a shorter period in which you want to reach your net commission goal, thus often turning it into an unviable marketing channel.

You can also read my article here for background information on lead types and customer awareness.

What is the average lead time for real estate lead generation of available marketing channels?

The average lead time for a campaign on a particular marketing channel depends on how fast you can iterate a new campaign based on the first feedback and data you get back.

This iteration speed depends on the following:

• Your monthly budget
• How well can you track the marketing performance indicators (my article), such as CTR, CVR, etc.?
• How well you can optimize and improve these marketing performance indicators by improving ad creatives, ad copy, and more.
• How fast can you technically implement these improvements?
• Your experience level or the experience level of the person managing the campaigns (you may have a steep learning curve first).

Again, the lead time is the slowest for content marketing since the pieces of content need to be produced first and then require additional time to rank high enough before you can get feedback regarding conversions. 

So for the estimated average lead time, you need to factor in the time to rank plus the time to produce all required content.

What are your experience and skill level in the different real estate lead generation methods and marketing channels?

This question is related to the one before.

Suppose you are already experienced in one or more marketing channels. 

In that case, it can shorten the average lead time. 

Without experience, it extends until you see real estate lead generation results. 

What is the average cost per lead per marketing channel?

Suppose you know the real estate lead cost information. 

In that case, you can estimate if you can generate the necessary number of real estate leads to reach your net commission goal (here is my article about the different real estate lead costs).

This enables you to exclude specific channels that are not (yet) viable for your monthly budget. 

So you don’t start with something you shouldn’t have started in the first place.

Once your goals, conditions, and constraints are defined and aligned, excluding certain property marketing channels for your real estate lead generation will be much easier.

Sounds like a lot of work before you even get started with a real estate lead generation campaign? It is.

But it’s worthwhile and can save you from wasting a lot of time and money you may put into something that you shouldn’t have started in the first place.

Using this approach will also reveal to you whether your net commission goals are realistic in the time you want to reach them or at all.

Of course, the selection of proper real estate marketing channels will be significantly more extensive the more realistic your net commission goals are, the more monthly budget, and experience you bring to the table, the better your real estate niche and target prospects are defined.

The Ultimate Real Estate Lead Gen & Performance Suite I recently created can help you align all these factors to find a proper real estate marketing channel quickly. 

There Are Only Four Marketing Channels for Real Estate Lead Generation (No Need to Overcomplicate Things)

Now let’s continue with what others use as their primary content: the real estate marketing channels for real estate lead generation available.

And surprise, as I have already discussed in this article, there are actually only five with their respective subcategories.

1) Outbound Real Estate Lead Generation (paid and “free”) 

Digital:

• Text message prospecting
• Push notification ads
• PPC advertising on social media (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, YouTube Ads, Waze Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.)
• PPC advertising on search engines (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo Ads, etc.)
• Native ads

Offline:

• Cold calling
• Calling expired listings (a subcategory of cold calling)
• Cold calling FSBOs
• Real estate direct mailing
• Radio ads
• Local TV commercials
• Print ads
• Door Knocking

So digital and offline outbound real estate lead generation is characterized by being more proactive and in the prospect’s face.

This can sometimes feel interruptive.

However, it is also more controllable, akin to the girl or guy with the megaphone shouting the marketing message at you.

When I say “free” concerning outbound lead generation, I mean it has a low monetary cost, but this doesn’t account for the time and effort required. 

The good news is that you can control the results of outbound lead generation to a certain extent by putting in the necessary effort.

2) Real Estate Lead Generation via Database Marketing

• Past client direct mailing
• Past client marketing
• Past client retargeting via ads on search and social media
• Email marketing
• Sphere of influence marketing

Technically, this isn’t actual real estate lead generation. Instead, it involves converting cold leads you have already generated or past clients into warm or hot ones once more.

This is provided you use a database or customer relationship management system. 

The good news is that results can be easily controlled in this process since you are working with leads and clients with whom you have already connected. 

Over time, you will likely gain experience in knowing which efforts will yield specific outcomes, making the process more efficient and effective.

3) Inbound Real Estate Lead Generation (paid and “free”)

Digital:

• Content marketing on your website (publishing blog articles, videos, downloadable whitepapers, free giveaways, etc.)
• Content marketing on social media (posting on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.)
• Answering questions on social media, forums, Quora, etc.
• Lead magnets (often combined with email marketing and nurturing campaigns)
• On-page SEO
• Webinars (with strategic partners)
• Guest-posting (however, not Google’s favorite anymore)

Offline:

• Publishing content in larger publication channels (local and national newspapers, magazines, etc.)
• Organizing a housewarming party
• Organizing an open house event
• Organizing educational events

Inbound lead generation is a more subtle approach, allowing prospects to find you rather than actively searching for them. 

This means that it is less controllable than outbound lead generation. 

Compared to outbound real estate lead generation, inbound lead generation could be seen as the feminine aspect or the honeypot that attracts prospects to you.

As a general observation, whenever you enter the world of digital real estate lead generation outbound or inbound, you will be better off long-term when you also have your own website (my article). 

Why?

It will…

• Increase your visibility
• Improve your credibility (necessary for persuasion and thus lead conversions)
• Increase your efficiency to streamline your workflow by automating tasks like appointment scheduling or lead nurturing.
• Give you independence from social media platforms (what happens if Facebook, Instagram, etc., shut down your account tomorrow with all your hard, built-up following?)

4) Real Estate Referral Marketing for Lead Generation

• Partnering with retirement home projects
• Partnering with probate attorneys
• Partnering with divorce attorneys
• Strategically get referred to others by satisfied past clients
• Using referral real estate lead companies
• Participate as a guest in an open house
• Going to non-real estate events to network
• Become a member of the local chamber of commerce

Regarding real estate referral marketing for lead generation, the results can be even more unpredictable than inbound lead generation. 

Why?

You rely on partners, past clients, or acquaintances to refer you to potential new leads. 

As a result, your level of control over the outcome is diminished, and success is heavily reliant on the referrals you receive from others.

Bonus: Real Estate Lead Generation Done-for-You Companies

Strictly speaking, I wouldn’t classify real estate lead generation done-for-you companies as directly relevant to the question “How to generate real estate leads” since the question is related to you doing the lead generation. 

However, if you were less rigid, it could still be your way of generating real estate leads.

These lead generation services operate on a pay-per-lead basis or a referral fee at closing, offering either exclusive or non-exclusive real estate leads. 

However, the level of control over the results of these services is similar to real estate referral marketing since you are relying on the service providers’ performance. 

It’s important to note that some of these providers may label their services as lead generation.

Still, they provide you with contact scraping functionality to collect potential buyers’ or sellers’ contact information, which you can then target for lead generation purposes. 

For this bonus section, I focus on done-for-you lead generation services that go beyond contact scraping.

Here are the companies you pay upfront:

• BoldLeads
• Zurple
• Offrs
• Firepoint
• RealGeeks
• Ylopo
• Market leader
• Cinc
• Chime
• Brivity
• REfindly

For the ones below, you pay a referral fee (you can read about a deeper analysis of them in my article here:

• Realtor.com
• Zillow Flex
• HomeLight
• AgentHarvest
• Navy Federal – RealtyPlus
• Clever
• Upnest
• Agent Pronto
• Agent FixUp

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

254 Real Estate Content Ideas for Social Media, Articles, and Videos

Quite a few realtors have trouble with real estate posts and content ideas. 

And you might wonder why.

To have a good and successful content marketing campaign, you need to create content and posts regularly in the long run.

It means you need to develop different ideas for social media posts, articles, videos, or other forms of content that you decide to focus on.

Many run out of ideas along the way. At some point, they stop, making all the previous time and work invested almost useless.

Today, I will give you a long list of 254 real estate content ideas so that you will never run out of content ideas again.

The aim is to help you generate better-quality leads.

Take Advantage of Repurposing You Real Estate Content

The format of real estate content doesn’t matter, be it a simple social media post, video, podcast, written article, or infographic.

It will mainly start with a text.

The most versatile to me is creating articles, which you can reuse for all the other formats and channels.

I assume you don’t want to lose yourself and stay resourceful.

So, you might want to focus only on one format at first according to your strengths, skills, constraints, and of course, where it best can reach your target audience.

Even if you focus on video, you would first write some script or bullet point list to prepare each video.

So, that’s why I find articles the best basis for all the other formats.

You can repurpose parts of written articles as social media posts, videos, and emails for nurturing campaigns, podcasts, and infographics and tailor the content to the content marketing channel you plan to use.

I prepared an illustration for you below to better understand what I mean.

28 Evergreen Real Estate Content Types

In this section, I will give 28 evergreen content types not exclusively applicable to real estate. 

They are evergreen and can be used across different industries, channels, and formats.

So you could make videos, articles, infographics, social media posts, you name it from all of them.

Many of them can also be combined.

• The List Post: The article you are reading is mainly a list post. It usually has some number in the headline (e.g., “100 Ways of Not Closing a Real Estate Deal”, etc.).
• The Definition Article (e.g., “What Does ‘Going into Escrow’ Mean?)
• A Technical Blueprint: Teaches a type of system (e.g., “A Blueprint to Stage Your Property For Serious Buyers, Not Tire-Kickers”)
• Theory or Argument (e.g., “What Is Wrong with Most First Home Buyers These Days”)
• Lead Resource: It is very often a list article but consists of a helpful collection of links (e.g., “100 Useful Marketing Tracking Apps You Shouldn’t Miss Out On”)
• How-to Article/ Guidance (e.g., “How to Find Pre-Foreclosure Homes”)
• Round-up Post: This one can be helpful for link building. You choose a topic and link to many established websites/blogs relevant to it, citing them in the post. (e.g., “What 23 Real Estate Professionals From New York Can Tell You About Finding A Cheap Apartment”)
• Generous Post: These articles are usually way longer than usual and could make a booklet. They might consist of a complete guide to hosting an open house event (e.g., “The Ultimate Guide to A Successful Open House Event)
• Too Good To Be True Article: This article usually destroys some myths. (e.g., “Too Good To Be True? Is there such as thing as passive real estate investing?”)
• Self-Revelation: This can already be understood from the name because this one gets more personal and private. You might admit some of the flaws or mistakes you made in your business in the past. (e.g., “Why real estate destroyed my marriage, but gave me a new one.”)
• Overview (e.g., “A 30,000 Feet View on The Miami Real Estate Market”)
• News Hijacking: Not the best evergreen content, but you can get short-term traction. You basically use a current news event and frame your content with it. (e.g., “What the Most Recent Space X Accident Has To Do With Finding Motivated Sellers.”)
• Cheat Sheet Article: You ideally get this content on one page. It is perfectly suitable to include an infographic. (e.g., “All the Ways To Find Buyer Leads On One Page”)
• Entertaining Article: Here, you can be generous with humor and story-telling. (e.g., “How My Wife Went into Labor, While I Almost Got Killed During my First Real Estate Deal.”)
• Use Case: You describe a specific situation or process of your target persona (e.g., “How Retail Buyers Go from Web-Search To Closing”)
• Comparing X with Y (e.g., “Should You Invest in an Apartment Downtown or in a Mobile Home?”)
• Controversial (e.g., “Why Real Estate Agents Will Be Obsolete by The Year 2030”)
• Motivational: This is the Tony Robbins or network marketing style of the post in the spirit of “you can make it.” (e.g., “Don’t give up, you can buy a house, even with bad credit.”)
• Research Article: Ideally suitable for reaching out to thought leaders or larger websites/blogs. You use different sources to write an article about a specific topic. (e.g., “What the Top 10 Brokerage Firms in San Francisco Have to Say About the Dangers Of The Next Housing Bubble and Increasing Tax Rates In California.”)
• What-if Article (e.g., “What If You Could Flip A House Without Having a Real Estate License?”)
• A Parody: This one could be a bit more difficult to write. It’s an imitation of someone. This person you imitate could be a famous writer or another famous person, etc. (e.g., “How Hemingway Would Have Written the Description of this 10 Bedroom Palace in the Colorado Mountains”)
• FAQ: These could be frequently asked questions from your target audience, people of your neighborhood, etc. (e.g., “The 10 Most Important Questions We Receive from Motivated Sellers”)
• Interviews: You interview one or several people in your industry and/or your target audience about a particular topic. (e.g., “We interviewed 20 Home Inspectors from Miami Beach – This Is What They Have To Say About The Next Hurricane Season”)
• Questions you should ask when (e.g., “Questions You Should Ask Yourself When Receiving Offers from Real Estate Investors.”)
• Project Article: This article lets your audience accompany you during a more extended project (e.g., “My Experience Finding My First Deal – Part One Market Research”)
• Open Question (e.g., “Why Many Sellers and Realtors Don’t Understand Creative Real Estate Investing.”)
• Debate/ Existing Debate (e.g., “Yes, You Can Have A Real Estate Investing Business Without A Real Estate License!”)
• Article Series: This is usually a topic that shouldn’t be written in one article because it’s enormous. (e.g., How to Have A Successful Facebook Ad Campaign as a Real Estate Agent – Part 1″)

10 Evergreen Topic Clusters & Content Pillars for Real Estate

• Location
• Target Audience (e.g., Sellers, Buyers)
• Present Market
• Future Market
• Property Features & Upgrades
• Property Maintenance
• You/Your Business
• Your Offers/ Promotional (e.g., Listings, Deals)
• Tools and Technology
• Events

How You Can Ten-X The Number of Real Estate Content Ideas By a Simple Trick

Why do you think I covered the evergreen content types and the real estate-specific topic clusters?

Because you can play “real estate content bingo” with them.

What’s that?

Well, you can combine either within the list and, by such, create content ideas, and/or you can combine between them.

I will give an example…

Let’s take “location” and “present market” from the 10 evergreen topic clusters.

Combining them can lead you to the content idea of an article about the present market situation in your location/neighborhood.

Or let’s use another combination from the earlier list of evergreen content types: “List Post” and “Motivational.”

Here you could get to the real estate content idea of making a motivational list post, such as, for example, “X Reasons, Why You Can Do it and Afford a House,” and then you make a list post with motivational arguments in favor of making a house purchase feasible.

And as the last example, let’s make a combination between the two lists.

We use “FAQ” from the content type list and “Property Features and Upgrades” from the real estate topic cluster & pillar list.

The content idea you could come up with from this combination could be “9 Important Questions and Answers Before You Consider Upgrading Your Kitchen….”

As you can imagine, combining the elements within and between the two lists can help you generate thousands of different real estate content ideas.

To give you some additional help, I coded a simple script that randomly combines the contents of both lists.

Just click on the button “Generate Real Estate Content Topics” below, and the script starts to combine.

Since it’s fully random and not all list elements are necessarily combinable and make sense (about 10%), you may sometimes get weird combinations.

In that case, just click the button again until you get something that may help you with your real estate content ideation.

In addition, you could also use the same principle and use it for a Chat GPT prompt.

Let’s Come Up With 254 Concrete Real Estate Content Ideas

Most real estate professionals can use my list of 254 real estate content ideas (e.g., real estate agents, developers, investors).

Some titles might not relate directly to your real estate business type, but you customize them according to your needs.

The ideas are based on the 10 evergreen topic clusters & content pillars from above.

1) Your Location, Your Neighborhood

• The value of a property is affected by the proximity to local amenities.
• Stories and myths about your neighborhood
• Stories about local and/or the fastest-growing businesses
• Typical housing styles and architecture in your area
• What historic building can be found in your neighborhood
• Exciting pictures of your area and the stories behind them
• Pictures of walkable areas and the stories behind them
• Events and festivals in your area
• Events you have already attended
• Present your city council (ideal for interview-style posts)
• New Building Projects and Developments
• The parking and public transportation situation
• The best and worst schools
• Different churches
• Daycare providers
• Best places and restaurants to eat (cheapest vs. most expensive ones)
• Nightlife and entertainment options
• Places for live music
• Nice and cozy coffee shops
• The best ice cream shops in your town, city, or neighborhood
• Best places to shop
• The best antique shops
• Your comment about local news, public policy (warning politics could make it tricky to stay diplomatic), and/or hotly debated issues
• Current environmental issues
• Nice parks
• Different artists and art galleries
• The crime situation
• Special events for children
• Local zoos
• Golf Courses
• Nearby weekend retreats
• Your comment or reviews on local real estate-related topics
• Real estate and market trends in your area
• Celebrity gossip in your area (maybe someone bought nearby)
• Most expensive properties in your area (if you are a realtor, not necessarily listed by you)
• A list of properties for a small budget in your neighborhood
• The most modern houses
• Property Taxes in your area
• Job Options
• Commute times from your neighborhood and how to get to the job hot spots
• The homeowner association situation
• Fitness providers (gyms, etc.)
• Yoga Studios
• Hiking trails and group activities
• Collect the best blog posts from others about your town, city, or neighborhood.
• Make a collection of the best websites for your local market (not limited to real estate topics)
• Make a list of contact information for the most critical decision-makers in your area.
• Make a collection of recommended real estate pros in your area (e.g., agents, brokers, estate attorneys, appraisers, developers, wholesalers, property management firms, etc.)
• Your personal story about why you like your neighborhood, town, or city
• Testimonials and stories about why past clients chose your area
• A collection of local charities
• If you have one, tell the story of a well-known company in your area.
• A list of famous or your favorite local authors
• The best dry cleaners
• All local tourist topics (e.g., the loveliest rivers and swimming areas)
• A collection of summer camps
• Best burgers, Chinese and Italian restaurants (restaurants by food)
• Where to find the best happy hours in your area
• Top dentists
• The best barbershops for men
• Top spa and wellness centers
• Recommended beauty centers or plastic surgery providers
• The best short-term or vacation rentals in your area (e.g., Airbnb listings)
• The most exciting museums in your area
• A collection of highly recommended interior designers or residential painters
• A collection of highly recommended moving companies
• A list of emergency contacts

2) Your Target Audience (Sellers and Buyers)

For Sellers (retail & investors):

• The worst home improvements for sellers
• Things that kill the buying motivation
• The most common and biggest mistakes when selling
• Required documents for a mortgage
• The selling process
• Selling with words
• Costs of home staging
• Home staging checklist (DIY)
• Curb appeal guidance
• How to evict tenants from hell
• Pricing tips and guidelines
• Best time to sell
• Selling a foreclosure
• Selling a multi-family unit.
• Selling townhouses
• Open house events
• Getting the most out of selling your property
• Intriguing stories about the home for sale
• Home inspection guide/ checklist

For Buyers (retail & investors):

• Questions to ask yourself to determine if you are ready to buy
• Buying new construction
• Making the switch from house hunter to a homeowner
• The buying process
• The closing process
• Negotiating Tips
• Investing in real estate
• Regrets of first-time homebuyers
• The dream of owning a home (motivational)
• Organizing your moving
• Moving with pets
• Moving with kids
• Benefits of owning a home
• How to do a thorough walkthrough (checklist)
• Finding the right loan
• Saving for a down payment
• Save money as a renter.
• Rent to own
• Creative real estate investing strategies
• Stress-free home buying
• Specific demographic needs (seniors, pet-friendly, students, first-timers, baby boomers, snowbirds, newlyweds, new parents)
• Identifying great investment properties
• Buying a foreclosure
• Guidance for FSBOs
• Renting vs. buying
• Relocation resource list
• Reasons for not becoming a homeowner
• Passive real estate investing vs. active investing (creative real estate investing)

For Both:

• Common questions from buyers and sellers
• Common questions from investors
• Stats about a neighborhood important to sellers and buyers

3) Present Market/ Industry

• Present interest rate trends
• Show typical financing pitfalls
• General market trends
• General financing trends
• Current economic projections
• Dreams vs. reality in real estate
• Timelines for home selling and buying
• The current mortgage approval process
• Tiny homes
• Worn-out words in real estate
• Overview of major players
• Technical real estate terms
• How credit score works in real estate
• Current home inspection standards
• Most essential stakeholders in the buying process
• The most come mortgage types
• Escrow process standards
• From offer to closing best practices
• The realtor market and how to choose the right one
• Market research to determine the value of a property
• Interview other agents about the market situation
• Market statistics for your neighborhood
• Pitfalls of real estate sales
• Comment on current real estate industry news
• Interest rates
• The newest scams (equity stripping, investment scams, mortgage frauds)
• Detecting overpriced homes
• Real estate companies
• Recent real estate-related books
• New real estate laws
• Building trends
• Newest kitchen design trends
• A broad overview of real estate providers
• Current refinancing market situation
• Your local market vs. the national market
• Present different real estate industry thought leaders.
• Disagree with a thought leader.
• Interviews with real estate conference attendees
• Redefine the buying or selling process in your perfect world.
• Analyze and recommend your competition.
• Old vs. new ways of doing business in real estate
• Real estate tax tips
• An overview of innovative real estate pros (e.g., agents, brokers, investors, developers, appraisers, escrow companies, etc.)
• A quarterly report of the current market situation

4) The Future Market & Trends

• Make predictions of where you see things in 5, 10, or 20 years.
• How will technology affect real estate in the future?
• Use current trends to extrapolate the future real estate market.

5) Property Features & Upgrades

• Home improvements that effectively increase the value of a property
• Ideal color pallets according to the area of a house
• Ways to retain value in a remodeling project
• A list of appliances and how long they last
• A cost overview of a home improvement project
• A list or collection of the most popular home design styles
• A value analysis of outdoor upgrades
• An overview of decorating ideas
• How to rehabilitate a home
• A furniture guide according to different housing styles
• A pool guide with different styles
• How to get the most out of a house with great views
• A list of ideas for unique features
• A guide on kitchen improvements with costs, materials, and time frame
• A list of well-known and popular interior decorators in your market

6) Property Maintenance & Holding

• Best ways to save energy (broad)
• Best ways to save energy and reduce heating and cooling costs
• How to care for the lawn
• How to prepare a house for winter
• Pest control in summer
• Ways to maintain Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) in a preventative way
• Cleaning guide for gutters
• How to prepare the lawnmower for winter
• Pitfalls of different homeowner insurance types
• A landscaping guide (do’s and don’ts)
• Getting a property ready for a natural disaster
• Spring cleaning tips
• A painting guide with a focus on high quality
• Keeping a good relationship with neighbors
• Managing bad neighbors
• Increasing the safety of a property
• Property tax loopholes or tips for reducing property taxes
• An overview of renovation providers
• Worst things to renovate (the least bang for the buck)

7) You/Your Business (Behind the Scenes)

• Compare using real estate agents with the for-sale-by-owner approach.
• Compare selling to an investor with using a realtor.
• Benefits of using a real estate agent to sell a property
• Explain your type of deals, closing costs, etc.
• The process of flipping a house
• Should you use a real estate pro to stage a home or do it yourself? (depending on your business, you favor one side over the other)
• How to stage a home on a budget
• Pros and Cons of looking for properties online vs. in person
• A personal story about your pet, hobby, or family
• An exciting story about a deal you made
• An exciting story about a lender who did a great job
• An exciting story about an easy-going and fun to work with a client
• What it is like to be a realtor, investor, developer, real estate attorney, etc.
• Write about the reason why people should work with you.
• Present testimonials from happy clients
• What you love about your business
• Your secret business ritual, systems, and tools that saved your life in the past.
• If you have a great team, write about the great work they do
• If you have an excellent track record of making deals, selling homes, and so on, write about it, bragging a little bit.
• Tell a story about your code of ethics and how you arrived at them.
• Lessons learned from 10 favorite customers and/or 10 most demanding customers.
• Make staff testimonials and interviews and ask them why they like to work with you and how you create value for your customers.
• Show how your business creates value for your clients.
• Write about your favorite music, movies, etc.
• Present new hires and the reason why you chose them

8) Your Offers/Listings/Deals (Promotional Content)

• Tell them about new listings, deals, etc.
• Make a list of recent sales.
• An overview of open house events
• Tell them about price reductions.
• Publish the most beautiful properties on the market.
• Lofts, the most expensive homes, the cheapest condos
• Present the most spectacular pools.
• Present the best waterfront properties in your area within a specific price range.
• Make a list of properties with the best views.
• Make a list of your current rent-to-own, wholesale deals, etc., under contract.
• Fixer-upper properties you have
• The most prominent houses in your area
• Create behind-the-scenes content when a professional video tour of your best listings is created.
• A post about the properties that haven’t sold yet and why it’s taking so long
• Make a list of all open house events in your market.

9) Tools and Technology

• A collection of all the real estate apps you use and/or you would recommend to your target group.
• The best apps that help to sell a property
• The best market analysis tools
• A list of software you can’t live without
• The effects of technology on the buying and selling process
• The application of virtual assistance to finding, selling, or buying properties

10) Events

• Each event you organize or participate in is a good source for creating content.
• Write about open houses you hosted or participated in
• Tell your target audience about block parties.
• Experiences about meet and greets with brokers.
• Lessons learned from real estate seminars.
• Reports about question and answers sessions of industry experts
• Conferences
• Any public meetings you attended in the past

Now you have a long list of 254 real estate content ideas.

With this many ideas, you should theoretically have material you can use to produce content once a week for almost six years or twice a week for three years.

And you could take this list even up a notch and try to combine the ideas. Not every combination will make sense, but a decent amount will.

Once you have enough long-form content (e.g., articles) produced, don’t forget to repurpose the content to different additional content marketing channels, such as social media, where your target audience most likely hangs out.

In the context of posting distills of your articles on social media, you may also want to consider scheduling the posts in advance, so you can work more efficiently by batching this task.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

How to Write a Killer Follow-Up Email for Real Estate

Do you not use follow-up emails or any other type of follow-up in your real estate business? 

If yes, you will leave much money on the table and unnecessarily increase your costs per lead and customer.

This is just one aspect of using follow-up emails for real estate. 

And one thing is the apparent benefits of using them, but the other is how to write them.

Writing a follow-up email for real estate is just another field of copywriting, the art of selling with words.

Therefore, this article will cover what approach you can take to use copywriting for that, thus covering…

• 25 reasons why you want to send follow-up emails to your real estate leads [backed by studies and statistics]
• 13 factors that make or break great follow-up emails for real estate
• Writing a subject line for real estate follow-up emails that your prospects can’t ignore… ignore this at your own peril!
• Copywriting techniques to move the communication from email to phone or a personal meeting
• 13 additional scenarios for shorter real estate follow-up email sequences

23 Reasons Why You Want to Send Follow-Up Emails to Your Real Estate Leads [Backed by Studies and Statistics]

Before I dive deeper into how you can write killer follow-up emails to your generated real estate leads, you may want to first know what all the fuss is about.

So, why do you want to make this effort and send follow-up emails in the first place?

To answer this question, I researched several statistics and studies about follow-up emails and what they can do for your marketing performance.

I looked mainly at how these types of emails can influence different marketing key performance indicators and what techniques and tactics make them perform better.

5 Statistics About General Benefits of Email Follow Ups

You may not even need to check statistics to conclude that you will likely benefit from writing and sending follow-up emails to your real estate leads.

How so?

At least one benefit you can conclude by using email marketing and follow-ups is that you can reduce your costs per customer.

Suppose you pay $20 per lead and need 20 leads to convert them into one customer without doing any email marketing, including follow-ups. 

In that case, that’s $400 per customer.

Instead, when you do email marketing and send follow-up emails, you increase your chances of converting more of those leads into customers.

If it’s only one more you convert, you have just halved your costs per customer.

Nevertheless, let’s dive into additional statistics to back up the benefits of sending follow-up emails to your real estate leads.

According to this provider specializing in cold-email campaigns, you can increase email response rates by 90% if you follow up three or more times compared to just one source).  

You may get an average 9% reply rate without follow-up emails.

Just one follow-up email can bump this up to 13%.

Generally, email marketing also has a two times higher return than cold calling (source).

Moreover, it can double your ROI compared to cold calling (source).

18 Performance Statistics About Email Marketing and Follow Ups

So, up to now, it may be clearer that there are benefits in following up and especially following up via email with your real estate leads.

But how do we ideally and effectively follow up with real estate leads via email, and what should we consider when writing such emails?

The following statistics will shine a light or two on that, so we can arrive at conclusions that inform the best practices of writing killer follow-up emails for real estate.

I am sure you know those people that shout by texting in all caps (don’t be that person).

Well, if you do that with your email subject line, it will cost you dearly and impact your response rate, and not in a good way.

You can expect a decrease in the response rate of 30% (source).

Staying with the critical element of email subject lines…

If you want the most effective one, it should be personalized to the recipient’s interests, engage curiosity, and include promotional offers (source).

Related to personalization is also the use of the recipient’s first name in the subject line.

If you do this, you can increase the opening rate by 29.3% (source).

It’s true for copywriting in general, and it applies to email writing for marketing purposes (which is actually copywriting applied to email marketing).

You want to write in a way that the text is easy to read and understand.

According to this source, you will get a 36% higher chance of a reply if you write on a third-grade reading level.

You can increase your odds of getting a reply by 50% when you use 1-3 questions in your emails compared to not using any (source).

By the way, this is also a good practice in general when writing sales copy to keep the reader and potential lead engaged.

Also relevant for writing effective real estate follow-up emails is subscriber segmentation to tailor your persuasive message better to the prospects’ individual needs.

Therefore, it’s no wonder that according to this source, the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%).

According to this source, segmentation can lead to a 760% increase in revenue and a 50% increase in your CTR (source).

The segmentation and personalization part is still a field with many opportunities and getting you a competitive edge. 

How so?

Only 4% of marketers (I can imagine that even fewer real estate pros do that) use personalized targeting.

And it’s only slightly more (13% to 31%) segment their audiences, while the majority (53%) do no segmentation at all (source).

As always in lead generation and marketing in general, being able to test campaigns is one important cornerstone to steadily improve your effectiveness and, thus, your ROI.

So, it’s again no wonder that according to this source, QA, A/B, and spam testing can lead to a 28% higher return.

By doing A/B tests, you can see what sales copy performs best and worst and adapt and improve your writing accordingly.

Almost half of the emails were opened on mobile devices in 2022 (source).

So, you can imagine what it will do to your response rate should you not optimize your emails for mobiles.

You may be surprised to learn that, in fact, almost 20% of email campaigns are actually not optimized for mobiles (source).

Let’s talk about the ideal sales cadence of six touches within three weeks.

So, your email follow-ups should be spaced out three or four days apart, according to this source.

If you wait longer than 5 days with your follow-up, you decrease your chances of reaching a lead by over 10 times.

You can also increase your persuasive power when writing your follow-up emails using the word “video .”(Don’t just use the term; in that case, actually include a video).

This will likely increase the open rates by 19%, the CTR by 65%, and decrease the unsubscribe rates by 26%, according to this source.

One thing is using great sales copy in writing your real estate follow-up emails, but another is the right timing.

You can have the best-written follow-up real estate email but won’t reap many benefits if you send it at the wrong time, such as during weekends, for example.

This source says these emails get the worst open and click-through rates.

So, what are the best days and times to send emails so your copy will have the best impact by reaching the highest number of recipients?

The best time to send these emails is during the week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, between 11 am and 12 pm (source).

Besides the copywriting techniques and skills you want to apply to writing real estate follow-up emails, there is something else you can do to increase the open rate by 56% (source).

You want to use GIFs, emojis, and stickers, but only if the subscribers or leads you email to are mainly Millennials.

Having a segmented email list will make your life easier to use this tactic in a laser-focused way (here, you can see the importance of segmenting your email list again).

With baby boomers, you want to use this tactic sparingly because only a minority (37%) like seeing GIFs, emojis, and stickers (source).

13 Factors that Make or Break Great Follow-Up Emails for Real Estate

There are 12 general factors and a lead-specific factor making or breaking a great follow-up email for real estate.

Let’s get first into the general factors, which are:

• The subject line
• The opening line
• The body of the email
• The closing line and call to action
• The tone and professionalism of the email
• The formatting and layout of the email
• Personalization to the recipient
• The length of the email
• The frequency of follow-up emails
• Including relevant content and/or resources
• Using the proper email signatures and correct contact information
• Checking for errors and proofreading

When you look a bit closer at these factors, you will realize that more than half are related to copywriting (here is my article on real estate copywriting for additional reading).

And not all of these factors have the same weight or importance.

As in a sales letter or other sales copy, the headline is one of the most important elements.

The same is true for the subject lines of emails.

And you already learned how important subject lines are from the above statistics.

So, the subject line can be considered the headline or the title.

The different emails you send in a series of follow-up emails can be considered as different sections of a sales letter, or you can use all elements of a sales letter in one email.

The latter is not as recommended as the first since you don’t want to come across as too “salesy” right from the get-go.

So, it is better to distribute these sales copy elements across several emails.

Let’s use one of the many copywriting formulas, such as AIDA, as an example.

You always want to include the attention part (the first “A”), such as in the subject line. That’s the headline in a sales letter.

But then you can send several emails just with content that raises the interest (the “I” in AIDA) of the respective leads you follow up with.

This can be just helpful, relevant content you could repurpose from the content you may already produce for your website.

After a while, you may come closer to more “salesy” real estate follow-up emails using content or copy that triggers your leads’ desires (the “D”) in AIDA.

The last “A” in AIDA is the call to action, which you may then include in all of the rather desire-triggering emails at the end (e.g., “Schedule a Call Now”).

Besides the above factors that can make or break a great follow-up email for real estate, there is also one essential factor related to the things you need to have in place before even writing a single word.

Here, we enter the world of copywriting and its preparation phase again.

It’s the target group and, more specifically, the type of real estate lead you want to send your follow-up emails to bring the written conversation via email to a call or a personal meeting (approaching a sale/contract signing, etc.).

And the type of real estate leads you send your follow-up emails to depends on the lead generation campaign you run.

In other words, the goals, including the target audience of your real estate lead generation campaign, inform how you need to write your follow-up emails.

Therefore, the copy of your follow-up emails needs to be tailored to the awareness levels of the real estate leads you likely have in your email list, as shown in the infographic below.

Writing a Subject Line for Real Estate Follow-Up Emails That Your Leads Can’t Ignore… Ignore This at Your Own Peril!

As you could already read in the statistics above, you want to write a subject line that is…

• Personalized to the recipient’s interests
• Engage curiosity
• Uses the recipient’s first name

The same statistics also mention using a promotional offer.

But here, I have a slightly different opinion because not every follow-up email, especially the first ones, should promote something directly.

Since writing (follow-up) emails is just another field of copywriting and subject lines correspond with the headline in a sales letter, we can use different headline formulas for the subject lines.

A simple trick is to just write out different headlines first and then convert them into subject lines with the above three criteria for the best impact.

Moreover, you may already have headlines available if you do content marketing with blog articles.

Let’s use an example. 

Suppose the real estate lead campaign you run targets home sellers, most of whom are baby boomers.

On your blog, you already have several articles with the following topics targeting the same home sellers:

• Home improvements that effectively increase the value of a property
• Ideal color pallets according to the area of a house
• Ways to retain value in a remodeling project
• A list of appliances and how long they last

By the way, the topic ideas come from my real estate content marketing article.

The above could already be used as headlines for different blog articles, but they are still pretty weak persuading-wise.

Let’s turn them into more persuasive headlines before converting them into subject lines.

To do that, we use a straightforward headline formula: End Result + Customer Wants + Specific Period of Time + Address the Objections.

Not all elements of this formula must be used, though that would be ideal.

Now, we convert the rather lame headlines from above into more persuasive ones.

• Increase the Value of Your Property with These 7 Surprisingly Cheap Home Improvements in Just One Weekend
• These 13 Hacks Retain the Value of Your Remodeling Project Without Breaking the Bank
• Never Get Surprised by Suddenly Dying Appliances Again with this Overview of Operating Lives

Two of the three criteria for email subject lines are already met: personalization to the recipient’s interests, which are the interests of potential sellers.

They also engage curiosity, at least more than the rather boring topic descriptions above.

The only thing that is still missing is using the recipient’s first name.

This now leads to the following subject lines:

• John, with these 7 surprisingly cheap home improvements, you can increase the value of your property in just one weekend…
• Ana, with these 13 hacks, you can retain the value of your remodeling project without breaking the bank…
• Bill, you will never get surprised by suddenly dying appliances again when you have this overview of different operating lives…

Copywriting Techniques to Move the Communication from Email to Phone or a Personal Meeting

When we talk about persuasion and copywriting techniques to move the communication from your follow-up emails to a phone or a personal meeting, in the context of copywriting, we talk about the closing part of sales copy.

To answer the question of what can be done to bring this communication to a phone or personal meeting is to know what can be done in copywriting and apply this to your follow-up emails.

So, in copywriting, there are the following things you can do:

• Restate the unique value you can provide to the potential sellers in your email list), your offer, and the benefits you bring to the table.
• Restate your USP (unique selling proposition) and, thus, how you are different from your competition.
• Lead them to take action by explaining further how they can schedule a call or personal meeting with you and what will happen then.
• Make your offer seem like a good value by price anchoring, such as, for example, ‘home staging is included.’
• Add an additional and/or unexpected benefit as a bonus (e.g., securing their desired second home before the prospect’s house is sold).
• Create a sense of urgency (e.g., ‘don’t wait too long,’ ‘the market can turn into a buyers market any moment now,’ etc.)

13 Additional Scenarios for Shorter Real Estate Follow-Up Email Sequences

Until now, I covered the longer real estate email follow-ups more often applied to nurturing campaigns after you a new lead enters your list or database.

For the sake of completion and approaching the end of this article, there are typical scenarios in which you may need to manually send a shorter real estate follow-up sequence.

These are the scenarios for which you may also need to write these emails:

• A client is interested in a property but has yet to make an offer.
• A client with interest in a property but has yet to schedule a showing.
• After the showing with a client who has yet to make an offer.
• A client has made an offer on a property but has yet to move further on closing the deal.
• After a client has closed on a property, you must find out if there are additional questions or needs.
• A cold client who has yet to reply to past emails or phone calls.
• A client asked for further information about a property.
• A client who is behind on completing the needed paperwork for closing.
• A client who needed information on mortgage lenders or home inspection companies.
• After a client asked about the availability of properties in a specific area or price range.
• After a client requests additional information about the status of a particular property.
• A client has not communicated a budget or price range after showing interest in a property.
• After a client makes a post-closing walk-through of a property.

As you can see, many different real estate scenarios and many more merit follow-up emails and follow-ups.

Since there are so many, it is not necessarily the best idea to have a one-size fits all template for all of them.

However, over time, you may find a pattern of repeatedly sending follow-up emails.

In that case, preparing a template may not be a bad idea. So you can copy and paste it.

You may also add clients you need to follow up manually via email to your automated nurturing campaign list (also follow-ups) that receive your follow-up or nurturing emails over a longer period.

However, in that matter, you want to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. 

Implicitly or explicitly, you will always need permission to do that.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Does Email Marketing Work for Real Estate?

Sooner or later, you may stumble across email marketing, helping to convert seller or buyer leads into customers and potential transactions and reducing your cost of sales.

You may have already read or heard that it is an essential tool for different marketing strategies and tactics. 

Actually, almost no real estate funnel doesn’t use it in some shape or form.

But then you may wonder whether it actually works for real estate in the first place.

The short answer is that it can work, provided you get several success factors right, two of them being segmenting your email list and being aware of your lists’ need awareness.

Hence, you get the messaging market fit right with the most suitable sales copy.

But there are many more factors you need to consider, which I will cover in today’s article.

So, please, keep reading.

What Is Email Marketing (for Real Estate) and How Can It Reduce Your Cost per Sale?

When I first heard about email marketing, I thought it would be a lead-generation strategy that uses email addresses to generate leads.

Of course, at that time, I didn’t know yet that you needed contact information in the first place to send an email.

So, to think that it’s a lead generation strategy is wrong.

Instead, you can consider it a digital marketing strategy to follow up and nurture leads you have already generated by other means.

Actually, the term “email marketing” is a bit misleading.

Strictly speaking, I would instead call it “email sales” because it is one of the elements of a sales funnel where you use many more elements of copywriting (selling in words) to persuade a prospect to transact with you.

Ideally, you don’t manually run email marketing campaigns from your Gmail account but use different software.

In this article, I already covered the different software providers there are. 

They can help you individualize and automate many aspects of email marketing.

The sales cycle in real estate is much longer than in other industries or for other less complex and less expensive products.

Therefore, email marketing is particularly important to reduce costs per sale, increase your return on ad spend, and keep prospects engaged and your brand and what you have to offer in their minds.

It is almost always essential to a real estate sales funnel.

But how does email marketing reduce the cost per sale?

It’s actually easy to explain. 

Suppose you have a real estate website and want to generate seller leads.

Now, there are several scenarios of how you can go about that.

In the first scenario, you may have a contact form where potential sellers can contact you.

With something like a lead magnet, you may have a higher conversion rate, but still, some prospects may contact you despite the fact.

So, they contact you, and since you likely had costs involved in driving traffic to your website (producing articles, paying Google Ads, etc.), you can calculate what you paid per generated lead. 

This lead may have cost you $30.

With your monthly budget, you may generate 15 leads that way.

But after they contact you, and you send your first reply and maybe also call them, only one makes an appointment with you and signs a listing contract.

So you paid (15x$30) $450 per sale (the sale being the signature of a listing contract).

Now, let’s look at a better scenario.

This time, you are still not using a lead magnet that may have generated more leads for the same monthly marketing budget. 

However, you are still generating the same 15 leads as above.

But instead of just making the first contact, you have an automated email marketing or nurturing campaign that sends these new leads helpful information tailored to their needs.

Now you may still get only one signature in the same month, but thanks to the nurturing email marketing campaign, you get two more appointments from the same 15 generated leads.

In that case, you paid a lot less for one “sale” (contract signature), which is $150 ($450 divided by 3 signed contacts).

You may now see how a good email marketing campaign in real estate can significantly increase your return on investment or, for a better word, return on ad spend.

In the next section, I will cover the factors that increase your chances of real estate email marketing success.

7 Essential Factors Making an Email Marketing Campaign Work for Real Estate

To determine whether email marketing works for real estate, let’s see if we can quantify the word “working” a bit more – in other words, what accomplished goal in email marketing would count as “it works.”

This goal should be setting appointments with seller or buyer leads you generated through various lead generation methods.

Now, we need to answer the question: what moves sellers or buyer leads to say “yes” to an appointment with you through your email marketing campaigns?

And here are the six direct factors:

1) The Segmentation of Your Email List at Least into Buyers and Sellers

So you can better tailor your email sales copy (your messaging) to a specific segment. (I know buyers can be sellers and vice versa, but at a particular moment, they tend to be more of one than the other).

2) Message Market Fit

This means the quality of your email sales copy (e.g., sending helpful first-time home buyer information to a list predominantly of sellers… not good).

This also ties into segmenting your email list from the previous point and the type of leads you generate (read my article about that here).

3) Your Email Sequence

If you only send hard sells (e.g., just listed 123 Mainstreet, etc.), you may start to annoy the prospects you have in your list.

There must be a balance of helpful content, soft-sell emails, and hard-sells.

4) The Sales Copy of Your Subject Lines 

As you will later see in the statistics, a great subject line has a tremendous effect on the open rates and, thus, on the click rates.

5) Regular Split Testing

The regular split testing is essential to steadily improve the key performance indicators in 6).

6) Tracking of Key Performance Indicators

The tracking of key performance indicators will reflect the impact of factors 1) to 4), such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and bounce rates. 

In this context, you may also want to read my article on key marketing performance indicators here.

7) Indirect Technical Factors

Some indirect technical factors will influence how easily you can make an email marketing campaign for real estate work.

They are mostly related to the software you will use and are essential criteria for selecting a suitable software provider, as already analyzed in this article.

They are the following:

• The automation capacity (e.g., autoresponder functionality, automated list segmentation based on behavior triggers, and RSS feeds).
• Responsive/mobile-friendly email designs
• Performance analytics to be able to track key performance indicators mentioned above
• A/B or split testing capabilities
• A user-friendly email editor (e.g., drag-and-drop builder)
• A user-friendly campaign builder
• Webinar tools or webinar compatibility
• A sound opt-in and opt-out process (e.g., the option to use a double opt-in email validation)
• Contact management and segmentation options
• Personalization capacity
• Hygiene processes by the provider to ensure deliverability (e.g., whitelisting, threat-free, etc.)
• Security of user data
• The option to scale up and send emails to more subscribers. You don’t want to be forced to change providers once you hit a subscriber limit.
• Social media capacity
• Access for a developer (application programming interface) for HTML emails
• Third-party integration abilities (e.g., to connect it with your customer relationship management software)
• Personalization capacities
• Lead scoring or tagging (e.g., you can segment contacts and leads further)

What to Deduct from Email Marketing Performance Statistics for Success Factors

Let’s now look at different email marketing performance statistics.

Many already confirm most of the six direct factors to make an email marketing campaign for real estate work.

But they also go beyond that, as you will soon see. 

After that, we can deduce and make a final conclusion on what you need to do so that it will work for your real estate business.

Above, I mentioned deliverability as one of the technical factors, which is an issue because 16% of emails never reach the inbox (source).

That email marketing generally can work proves that 47% of marketers say email marketing is the most effective marketing channel.

This is followed by 39% for social media, 33% for SEO, and 33% for content marketing (source).

Remember when I discussed the importance of email list segmentation?

You can achieve a 760% increase in revenue when you use segmentation in your campaigns, according to the marketers of this source, and a 50% higher CTR (source).

Additionally, segmentation, personalization, and triggered emails are rated as the top three email marketing tactics (source).

And you can get a competitive edge if you do those mentioned above since only 4% of marketers use highly-personalized targeting.

Only 13% segment their audiences, and only 31% do basic segmentation.

More than half (53%) do no segmentation (source). 

So you can safely assume that real estate pros do even less of that.

Another factor that increases CTR by 65% is when you include a video in your initial email (source).

Only using the word “video” has already a beneficial effect on open rates (they increase by 19%), CTR (they increase by 65%), and unsubscribe rates (they reduce by 26%) (source).

Are you thinking of sending emails during the weekend because you may assume your prospects are more likely to be at home and have enough time for that? 

Don’t.

Why?

Especially during weekends, you get the worst open and click-through rates (source).

This means you are left with sending them during the week, but when?

According to this source, you may want to send them at 11 am and 12 pm to get the highest CTR.

Can we break this down even more for specific days? You bet.

So, you don’t want to send them on any day of the week at 11 am and 12 pm, but preferably on Tuesdays and Thursdays (source).

Remember the indirect technical factors from above?

The one I mentioned was mobile-friendly emails. 

So since 46% of all email opens come from mobile (source), this is also something you want to consider.

Is your primary target group of real estate prospects Millennials (primarily first-time home buyers)? 

In that case, you should include GIFs, emojis, and stickers in the emails.

But do this sparingly with baby boomers representing more sellers than buyers.

Only 37% of people over 65 like seeing that (source).

However, you can increase the email open rate by 56% by including an emoji in the subject line (source).

That email marketing isn’t dead confirms that 72% of customers prefer email as the main communication channel (source). 

They influence the purchase decision of 59% of the respondents mentioned in this source (source).

Conclusion

Can we now conclude that email marketing works for real estate?

From the above, you may have already guessed that the answer is not generic since many factors are involved.

Do you consider “working” as generating appointments with potential sellers or buyers?

Email marketing can work for real estate, provided you get several things right…

• Segment your email list and send personalized emails and automatically triggered emails.
• Be aware of your lists’ need awareness to get the messaging market fit right with the most suitable sales copy.
• Design an email sequence that balances hard, soft, and emails without a sales message.
• Have an enticing subject line with a good sales copy (read my article on real estate sales copy here), ideally combining it with an emoji to increase the open rate.
• Track key performance indicators such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and bounce rates.
• Continuously run split tests to improve key performance indicators.
• Include a video in your initial email for higher CTRs.
• Consider including video more often since using the word “video” already benefits open rates.
• Send your emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 am and 12 pm during the week for better open rates.
• Use mobile-friendly emails.
• For millennials, include more GIFs, emojis, and stickers in the email body, but not so much for boomers.

If you do all that, you increase your chances drastically of making email marketing work for real estate.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Do Facebook Ads Work for Real Estate [Are They Worth It]?

This article will buck the trend about Facebook Ads for real estate.

For a long time, I have been observing and reading all the great things about real estate leads from Facebook and how popular this platform is for real estate professionals.

For the sake of completion, I covered it in several articles like this, this, and this.

The short answer to whether Facebook ads work for real estate:

Yes, Facebook Ads work for real estate, provided you…

• Are aware that most prospects on this platform have problems and needs they are unaware of (buying or selling is likely something they may do in 6-12 months).
• Find workarounds for the special ad category.
• Have a nurturing and follow-up system in place.
• Know how to deal with ad fatigue.
• Don’t use Facebook’s own lead generation forms.
• Are aware that the majority of users are not in the age groups of sellers.
• Have a backup platform in place if your account gets disabled for no reason.

So, you can generate real estate leads from this platform, and it can be worth it, provided you get these things right before, during, and after launching your lead gen campaign.

However, I don’t like presenting Facebook real estate lead generation as easy and generally as an economically-sound option.

For various reasons, it’s often presented as the “be-all and end-all.”

But just because something is popular doesn’t mean it works from the get-go.

Besides, we often don’t even know what “it works” means anyways. Because it’s not clearly defined.

Some articles cover whether Facebook ads work, then say it works, but do not mention how it does regarding marketing performance indicators.

This article will be different.

I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook ads (well, with all social media).

So, I hope it will be beneficial for painting a clear and honest picture of the real situation with Facebook ads for real estate and whether they are worth it.

User Behavior Demographics on Facebook and How It Is Relevant for Real Estate Lead Generation… Think Curious Gossiping People at a Cocktail Party

Let’s start with a story. It’s a story about Chana.

Chana is 35 years old and an avid fan of Tolkien’s books (e.g., Lord of the Rings).

And a rather unhealthy morning routine she has after snoozing four alarms is checking her Facebook feed on her phone first thing.

Actually, that’s not the only time she checks her feed. 

On average, she checks it several times daily and spends 57 minutes on Facebook.

Much of what she consumes is news her friends and the people she follows share.

So, while she is checking her news feed and watching several in-feed videos, usually without leaving comments, today is different.

She suddenly stumbles upon a video about the new series “Rings of Power.” 

She discovers there is already a lively debate going on in the comments.

There seem to be two factions of Tolkien fans.

One faction complains passionately about the bad screenwriting the series has shown, and another doesn’t care too much about it.

Since she is not spontaneous and has already been checking her feed for a fair amount of time, she suppresses her impulse to comment.

She decides to return later to enter the discussion defending the faction that likes the series so far.

Although she should get going and get some breakfast, she decides to do a little more scrolling and suddenly sees a post (maybe your ad).

“It’s probably advertising,” she thinks. The ad says, “Name the price of your home.”

Entirely irrelevant to her present life situation, she doesn’t have to think much about it (she is far from owning a home) and just leaves Facebook.

The End.

Chana’s story is a short snippet of her life and is relatively shallow.

The only thing that border lined a struggle was suppressing her impulse to comment.

But let’s prevent this article from becoming a novel chronicling her struggle to win the argument with the adversaries who don’t like “Rings of Power” and why she needs too many alarms in the morning.

So, I didn’t develop the plot, Chana’s character, and her hurdles further.

But there is something we can take from this little user story. 

It’s based on the following user behavior statistics about Facebook:

The largest user group is in the age range between 25 and 44 (that’s 44.6%). 

Since this is not the typical age group of sellers, chances are understandably lower to generate seller leads via Facebook Ads (source).

Something not to neglect, however, is that the fastest growing demographic is aged 65 and older (so not all is lost regarding generating seller leads via Facebook) (source).

Like Chana, a large majority (70%) visits Facebook daily and spend 33 minutes across devices and 57 minutes via mobile phones on the website (source).

What does the majority (two-thirds of adults) consume? 

News (only in their bubble, of course, because of Facebook’s algorithm).

And where is this content coming from? It comes from friends and people who followed (54.4%) (source).

The preferred content format consumed is Facebook in-feed videos (51% of users).

Let’s also briefly examine the performance of businesses running ads to get the whole picture.

Ads have become more expensive since businesses now pay 122% more per ad unit than a year ago (this stat is from 2021) (source).

Suppose I understand the statistics correctly, according to this source. 

In that case, 40% of surveyed companies (a minority from where I am coming from) believe using Facebook Ads is effective.

But the data is a bit contradicting overall.

Contrarily, this relatively objective source mentions that Facebook would provide the highest return on investment of all paid channels for most companies.

Considering the above statistic about the mobile phone use of Facebook, it’s no surprise that mobile ad placements outperform desktop by over 45% (source).

Starting with a mobile placement is also what I recommended in my article “The Facebook Marketing Strategy Guide for Real Estate.”

In my article about real estate prospecting conversion rates, I mentioned a 10.68% real estate lead conversion rate from Facebook Ads.

The 10.68% look good on the surface. 

But as the above statistics already show, there is a lot you can do wrong.

So, when you are too pushy and try to sell a product directly, as this source indicates, you can expect lower 0.1 to 0.2% conversion rates.

This may happen when you run Facebook ad campaigns the same way as direct mailing campaigns or lead generation campaigns more suitable to prospects with a higher product and service awareness.

Now that I’ve buried you in statistics, what can we do with them?

We can better assess what you are dealing with when you consider generating real estate leads on Facebook.

Perry Marshall writes in “80/20 Sales and Marketing” (I read it once yearly) that Facebook is like a cocktail party and Google is like Yelp.

So, when you run ads on Facebook, it’s like the guy selling flowers, interrupting a group of people at a cocktail party, and gossiping about the latest events.

They are unaware of the problem they may have the night before their wedding anniversary.

Suppose the flower salesman knew that the people at the cocktail party would all have their wedding anniversary the next day (pretty unlikely) and usually forget this day.

In that case, the situation would be much more favorable. 

This flower salesman could make the people aware of them having problems.

In contrast, Google users already know they have a problem, need, or at least a question.

Let’s stay with the flowers.

Quite embarrassed, a user would remember the wedding anniversary just the day before and look hastily for a flower delivery service or something like that.

The infographic below will illustrate the contrast between Facebook and Google users’ product and service awareness.

I will also use the infographic of the different product and service awareness levels I used in this article.

What I think is essential to remember is that when you enter the game of running Facebook ads for real estate, you enter the content marketing game.

And this happens on all social media channels.

Thus, running ads needs to be approached like content marketing. 

So, you target people who are usually unaware of a need or problem.

Yes, leads may be cheaper, but as I worked out in this article, the cost per qualified lead may be higher.

This is also why many perceive real estate leads from Facebook as bad quality.

When you expect higher problem-aware leads from Facebook, then yes, what you get is likely bad quality.

They are primarily leads that need to be worked on to increase their problem and need awareness, and that’s done with follow-up systems.

When you know the level of need and problem awareness Facebook users usually have, it’s to be expected. Then it just is what it is.

A Word or Two About Traffic & Lead Quality… Facebook vs. Google Ads

Now, we can explain why Facebook’s traffic quality is not on par with Google’s.

The users of both websites are just on a different problem and need awareness level.

The higher the awareness level, the higher the traffic and lead quality, the higher the costs per lead, and thus the competing advertisers.

But, in turn, it also often means lower costs per qualified lead.

You may pay less per lead initially when the problem and need awareness are low. 

Still, you also have to factor in the costs to bring the lead up in their awareness level via nurturing and follow-ups.

But there is another technical issue at Facebook’s lead capturing level that can deteriorate the lead quality.

To better understand, let me explain a logically transparent concept from the world of CRO (conversion rate optimization).

You may know them.

I think about long lead capture forms often found on insurance and financial service providers’ websites.

When you are only semi-interested in their services, you rather click away than spend your valuable time filling these long forms out.

These hurdles and hoops to jump through in the conversion rate optimization world are often called friction.

And the higher the friction, the lower the lead conversion rate, and vice versa.

So, it’s no wonder many CRO sources recommend reducing this friction to increase the generated leads.

What happens when you use Facebook’s lead or the automatic messenger lead capture campaigns where users can fill out a form with just one click and instantly be converted into your lead, never leaving the platform?

Exactly, you reduce friction and can usually generate more leads.

Sounds nice at first.

But these prospects will not leave Facebook, and the platform can show them more ads. 

So, it benefits Facebook, and not necessarily the advertiser.

You will lose the opportunity for them to visit your landing page, which you could control and tweak.

As a consequence, the leads generated will often be of lower quality.

Doing this right is art and science at the same time.

You want to find an equilibrium (with enough testing) between enough friction to generate a decent amount of leads while avoiding lowering their quality too much.

This leads me to…

4 Sneaky Tactics to Increase Facebook’s Real Estate Lead Quality and Outwit the Data-Grabbing

So, in general, you want to reduce your reliance on social media platforms such as Facebook regarding lead generation directly on their platform.

Instead, you want to get them to your website.

Conversion rate optimization strategies and tactics will have almost no limits. 

To name a few, you could change…

• Your copy
• Form elements
• Colors
• Overall design

You can also better expose the visitors from Facebook to your brand, and they can browse your website, read articles or consume other content.

So here are three sneaky tactics to increase Facebook’s real estate lead quality and outwit the data-grabbing.

• In general, host the starting points of your sales funnels on your website (e.g., polls, calculators, etc.)
• Don’t use automated lead generation campaigns; capture the leads in your forms.
• If you can’t forgo the use of these campaigns, where leads can be generated automatically with a click of a button, try to get them to opt into your email list with the help of an enticing lead magnet.
• Bring Facebook traffic via ads to high-quality content, but have a Facebook Pixel installed, so you can retarget the visitors with a lead magnet to opt into your email list.

This is a bit like thinking around corners.

But something else exists on the targeting level that’s not ideal for running Facebook ads.

The Next Bummer for Real Estate Pros… Facebook’s Real Estate Ads Policy (Since 2020)

Facebook’s Real Estate Ads Policy (the Special Ad Category) is the next hurdle where things can go wrong when running Facebook ads for real estate.

I have already had more than five different Facebook ad accounts. 

And for no reason, they can be disabled. You never know when and why it’s coming.

Not the best place to be when you want to rely on a steady stream of real estate leads.

Just look at the various search suggestions regarding this topic below and the many results catering to the issue of getting a Facebook ad account back.

It’s a common problem, even if you do everything right. 

That’s for Facebook’s general ads policies that, similar to Google’s various algorithm updates, are a bit like Voodoo.

Now for Facebook’s Real Estate Ads Policy (Special Ad Category):

This update was done in 2020.

And when you want to create a new ad on Facebook and it is related to housing, credit, or employment, you need to put it in the Special Ad Category.

What does this mean?

In one sentence: You get to use the castrated version of Facebook Ads, heavily limiting your options of granularly targeting your prospects.

You will not be able to target…

• Race
• Gender
• Age
• Geographic targeting by postal or zip code
• Interest targeting related to religion, gender, or ethnicity

And you cannot exclude audiences based on lookalike audiences and interests.

Now, I may get into controversial waters…

While I am against discrimination in general, Facebook probably overdid this, at least by excluding age and exact geographic targeting by postal or zip code.

So you can’t target specific age groups due to this special ad category anymore. 

Therefore, you will always risk that Facebook will serve your ads to age groups unlikely to be ideal leads.

And since the majority of users are in the age groups between 25 and 44, it will be especially challenging to generate seller leads.

Therefore, you will find more often service providers offering to generate buyer leads.

There are some workarounds for that (but still, they are workarounds), such as…

• Targeting specific locations (no zip codes) with an extended radius.
• Targeting interests that correlate with the prospects you want to reach.
• Uploading an email list of prospects (e.g., from data providers) and creating a lookalike audience.

Another bummer unrelated to the special ads category is the nature of running Facebook ads long-term.

After a few weeks, the effectiveness will also decrease because of the ad fatigue I covered in this article.

This doesn’t happen that way with Google ads.

Yes, you will have to tweak the campaign initially until it becomes profitable, but once you do, you can run it for much longer.

So, yes, you can run real estate ads on Facebook. 

Still, again, you will be limited in taking advantage of the usually nice and granular targeting features it offers in other industries.

A Real Estate Facebook Ads Case Study from a Struggling Real Estate Investor Who Tried Really Hard

I will end this article with a small case study of a struggling real estate investor (also relevant for realtors) who tried pretty hard to make a Facebook ads campaign work for himself.

You can find it here.

When you read it, you will see how easy it is to get things wrong by having wrong expectations.

Again, Facebook lead generation is getting into content marketing and mainly targeting prospects unaware of their problems and needs needing long-term nurturing with a follow-up system.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

5 Types of Real Estate Leads and The One Mistake Most Make

Imagine there was a world with only one type of real estate lead.

You run a real estate lead generation campaign, get all the contact information, and then call the prospect.

The prospect immediately answers the phone, and you can send over a listing agreement after a few minutes without meeting them.

You get it back signed after a few minutes and sell the property after one week.

That can happen…in Narnia.

The reality outside Narnia is that most prospects are not ready to make a decision on the first call.

Why is it so? 

There are different types of real estate leads.

And in this article, I will cover that in detail.

• What real estate leads are (if you are interested in the basic definition)
• How real estate agents get leads…and the one mistake often made
• How the real estate leads’ product and service awareness levels and customer journey intertwine just fine
• What you can learn from the customer journey for different types of real estate leads
• How to determine the real estate lead type [cold or hot]
• The chances of a real estate lead gen method getting you hot or cold leads

What Are Real Estate Leads?

Leads in sales are people or entities that show interest in your products or services due to referrals and different marketing and lead generation campaigns.

Consequently, real estate leads are people of various degrees active in the real estate market, mostly buyers and sellers showing interest in your products or service.

So they are real estate sales contacts that may become your seller or buyer clients.

How Do Real Estate Agents Get Leads…And the One Mistake Often Made

Social media has become the go-to platform for many real estate agents to generate leads.

But they are all over the place and use different types of paid and unpaid outbound marketing, paid and unpaid inbound marketing methods, their database (past clients), and industry-adjacent referral partners.

Outbound marketing is another word for push marketing.

It’s when the sales message about your product or service is “pushed” on targeted prospects (e.g., cold calling).

So you actively search and find prospects and then initiate contact.

You can find an overview of many different types of prospecting methods clearly falling into the category of outbound or push real estate marketing in my article, “All You Need to Know About Real Estate Prospecting Rates. “

Inbound marketing is the other way around, also called pull marketing. 

Some call it attraction marketing, too.

Here the prospects are attracted to your sales message.

You primarily achieve this via content marketing in different formats (e.g., articles, videos, etc.) distributed on various platforms (e.g., your website, social media platforms, etc.).

Two of my articles that address this are “254 Real Estate Content Ideas & Samples [How-To Included]“, “Real Estate Content Marketing – Is It Low Cost?“and “How to Crush It with Real Estate Referrals for More Profits. “

Many real estate agents, and other real estate professionals, make one mistake, however; approaching different lead generation methods.

This problem is not only limited to the real estate industry.

This likely happens in different industries and people in sales positions, having to generate and then work with leads turning out to be of lower quality.

It is, focusing too much on generating as many leads as possible, neglecting where they are now on their customer journey and regarding the different levels of product and service awareness.

How the Real Estate Leads’ Product and Service Awareness Levels and Customer Journey Intertwine Just Fine

Let’s recap the customer journey shortly, which I covered in my article “254 Real Estate Content Ideas & Samples [How-To Included]”.

The customer journey is the different stages a potential customer interacts with a business or brand, including after a transaction has concluded.

Actually, that’s why sales funnels exist.

In my opinion, the best-converting sales funnel is the funnel closest aligned with the customer journey of an ideal client, considering the different levels of product and service awareness.

Even better, you can build a customer journey by finding your target real estate clients’ different product and service awareness levels.

I will explain this using the example of probate seller leads (also read my article on this topic here.

First, let’s get to the different product and service awareness levels…

1) Unaware: 

The potential property heirs don’t know yet that without estate planning, the house they may inherit may go through a probate process.

2) Problem/Need Aware: 

They learned by watching a video from a real estate professional specializing in probates (maybe yours when you do content marketing) that their parents won’t avoid a probate process.

So they identified a potential problem concerning selling an inherited house without court involvement.

3) Solution Aware: 

Since they didn’t like what they learned, they researched and found different attorneys specializing in probates.

However, they also kept your video about estate planning in mind that you did with a probate attorney.

They know now that estate planning is likely the best way to handle their situation.

4) Product Aware: 

They revisit your website, but this time they find an interview-style article where you cover the estate planning topic with the probate attorney you partnered with.

It includes an area where you can schedule an appointment with the probate attorney for a free initial consultation. 

They decide to make an appointment.

5) Most Aware: 

The appointment with the probate attorney went well, and he spoke well of your real estate services and your specialty in probate real estate.

Half a year later, the last remaining parent sadly passed away, and since you handled the sale of the inherited property well and according to the estate plan, they started to speak well of you and refer you to friends.

So the clients now know your services/ or products well.

Now, how does this intertwine with the customer journey?

To convert product and service awareness levels into the customer journey, we only need to switch the perspective to individual interaction and communication levels.

So you ask the question: how will the ideal real estate prospects interact and communicate with my business at the different levels of awareness?

You may also want to break it down to an individual client avatar level. So, let’s just call the avatar for the customer journey Paul.

Paul is in his mid-fifties and lives out of state. So do his siblings.

A few years back, they had already lost their mother, and now, unfortunately, their father is ill too. Doctors give him one year max.

Sad and stressful emotions let Paul think of having to deal with everything that comes with that, including the house sale.

But since his father has a will, everything should be fine. So he thinks.

Since he is looking for emotional support on different internet forums, 

YouTube’s algorithm must have caught on to that (thank you, browser cookies). Out of nowhere, a video about estate planning pops up.

It is a webinar of two people, a probate attorney and a real estate agent specializing in probates.

He watches it until the end and bookmarks the realtors and the attorney’s website. He learns about a problem that he didn’t even think he had.

His father’s will is not enough to avoid a time-consuming probate process.

Via email, he also shares the video with his siblings, who don’t know about the potential problem.

Although the two professionals make a good impression in the video, he thinks looking for additional information and solutions would be good.

So he switches from YouTube to Google Search and types in “estate planning attorneys in Alabama.”

Several search results pop up with different attorney offices and articles other attorneys and law college professors will appreciate, but too many technical and confusing terms for him.

So he visits the realtor’s website he saw a while back in the video with the hope that they are also operating in Alabama.

At least some good news. Both professionals do as he realizes when checking the contact page.

On the realtor’s website blog, Paul finds another article.

It’s an interview with the same probate attorney he saw in the YouTube video.

This time both go deeper into the nitty and gritty of estate planning.

The information provided convinces him to use the appointment scheduling form he finds at the end of the article to get a first free consultation with the probate attorney.

The consultation is done via a Zoom Conference call, and the attorney explains what his father could do to avoid a probate process.

Fast forward six months.

The estate planning did go well, but Paul is now grieving his father’s passing. 

He is thankful they could still do the estate planning right on time, though.

Since the moment has come to sell the father’s house, the probate attorney mentions the probate-specialized realtor (maybe you) again. So Paul contacts them via email to set a listing appointment.

To avoid an overly extensive article, I will stop here and omit working into the most aware level of the customer journey. 

But I hope you get the idea.

Remember, the customer journey can and should reveal the different stages of potential customers interacting with you (the business) until and after a transaction concludes.

And that’s what happened here. I bolded the parts where these stages and interactions reveal themselves.

What You Can Learn from the Customer Journey for Different Types of Real Estate Leads

Why did I visit product and service awareness levels and build a customer journey?

And how does this have anything to do with cold and hot real estate leads?

You could observe the transformation of Paul from a cold to a potential hot seller lead in both.

In an earlier section, I mentioned that when you focus too much on lead quantity in your lead generation endeavors, you can easily neglect where the people (leads) you target are on their customer journey.

So, before you target a type of real estate lead, you may want to take a step back and consider whether the type of seller or buyer you target is at the beginning (meaning cold) or approaching the end (meaning hot) of their customer journey.

By the way, this ties right into real estate niches and which ones you focus on, as discussed in my article “Real Estate Niches, and How to Get a Profitable One.”

Generally, the closer they are to the beginning of their customer journey, the more you will need to nurture them via a follow-up system. 

The farther away a possible transaction with you is in the future.

The more they approach the end of their customer journey, the hotter these leads are.

To better illustrate this, I have designed this into an infographic which you can find below.

There are three things you can get out of this infographic when you look at it from a different perspective:

1. You can use it to determine whether a real estate lead is cold or hot
2. The chances of a real estate lead gen method generating hot or cold real estate leads
3. An evergreen real estate lead cycle type to get further lead-generation ideas

How to Determine the Real Estate Lead Type [Cold or Hot?]

No matter what real estate lead generation method you choose and focus on, at some point in time, you will have to talk with a prospect via phone, Facetime, personal meetings, etc.

This is why qualification questions exist, to filter out the bad apples.

They try to help you determine whether there is a need, the time frame (urgency) if the prospect has the money/ is willing to pay you, and whether they are the decision-makers (the ability to make a commitment).

As you can see in the above infographic, at least by checking on their needs/ wants and urgency, you can learn whether your generated real estate leads are ice-cold or warm.

To illustrate this, I also added an arrow on the infographic.

The Chances of a Real Estate Lead Gen Method Getting You Hot or Cold Real Estate Leads

Suppose you do unpaid (time-consuming) inbound marketing and post general helpful content about your local neighborhood on social media.

What do you think are the odds that you will generate warm leads compared to when you do outbound marketing calling expired listings?

The chances are higher to get at least warm leads further down the product and service awareness levels by calling expired listings.

In contrast, more people will likely say: “Selling/buying hasn’t come to my mind yet, but it’s interesting information.”

It happens when you use untargeted social media postings of helpful general content about your neighborhood.

From this situation, we can extract a rule of thumb.

The more focused you can get with your lead generation method (outbound or inbound), targeting sellers or buyers aware of solutions for their problems and needs, the higher the chances they will be warm.

Therefore, real estate leads generated by search ads (e.g., Google) compared to social media (e.g., Facebook) are usually relatively better regarding quality.

Logically, someone searching already for a solution to a need or problem is already aware of it and thus further down in the awareness levels.

In contrast, someone “doom-scrolling” or “cat-scrolling” in their social media feeds may or may not be aware of having a problem or need when interrupted by your ad.

As a little recap for inbound and outbound marketing and lead generation methods, I have added a short overview linking to several of my articles.

Paid and Unpaid Outbound Real Estate Marketing/ Lead Generation:

• Cold calling
• Calling expired listings, divorces, probates, FSBOs
• Real estate direct mailing
• Text message prospecting
• Radio ads
• Local TV commercials
• Push notification ads
• PPC on social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Waze, etc.)
• PPC on search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.)
• Native ads

Paid and Unpaid Inbound Real Estate Marketing/ Lead Generation:

• Content marketing on social media (YouTube, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, TikTok, etc.)
• Content marketing on your website (blog articles, videos, downloadable whitepapers, free giveaways, etc.)
• Lead magnets in combination with email marketing (nurturing campaigns)
• Asking and answering questions on social media, forums, etc.
• Content marketing in larger publication channels (magazines, local newspapers, etc.)
• On-page SEO
• Guest-posting
• Webinars (with strategic partners)

Real Estate Referral Marketing (Strategic Partners):

• Partnering with divorce attorneys
• Partnering with probate attorneys
• Partnering with retirement home projects

Database marketing:

• Email advertising
• Past client direct mailing
• Past client retargeting via search and social ads
• Past client marketing
• Referral marketing

Getting back to the rule of thumb.

It also underlines the importance of focusing on a real estate niche.

You can better learn the individual customer journey of your ideal client. This will improve your targeting and your real estate sales copy.

It also shows that working with done-for-you lead generation companies is risky.

You can’t know how they generate leads and product and service awareness levels of prospects they focus on with their campaigns.

I leave you with an infographic that shows something I call the “evergreen real estate lead type cycle.”

It may help you find other ideas for different real estate customer journeys.

As you can see, it all circles around life changes.

And when you start to brainstorm different life changes (e.g., divorce, death, birth, career failure, career success, etc.) you may find additional real estate niches and starting points on the customer journey, and thus real estate lead generation targeting options.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

How to Write an Expired Listing Letter [So It Converts]

Unfortunately, there are not many property sellers in a sellers’ market.

This is nice for the sellers but can lead to unreasonable sellers and low inventory.

So, in a sellers’ market, the main challenge for real estate professionals such as realtors, brokers, and agents is to generate seller leads.

And when there is a buyers’ market, the tide turns, and the main challenge is generating buyer leads.

One way to generate seller leads via direct mailing is by sending letters for an expired listing.

This article is a pretty long guide covering many different aspects of writing a letter for an expired listing that can convert.

So I discuss…

…what an expired listing letter is
…why listings expire and why it is essential to know this in the first place
…whether there is a best expired listing letter you can find just by searching the Internet
…how you can change the real estate sales copy of an expired listing letter sample for the better
…7 steps to write an expired listing letter from scratch and what new agents need to take into account
…how many letters will you need to send
…how you can make expired listing letters work
…how to write a short expired listing letter
…how new agents should write these letters

Since this is a longer one, you may want to first get a cup of your favorite beverage before you start reading.

What Is an Expired Listing Letter?

An expired listing letter is usually a real estate mailer that is part of a direct mailing campaign specifically targeting property owners that haven’t sold their home by the end of the period stipulated in a listing contract between a seller and a real estate agent.

The most common length of a property listing contract is 90 days, but this can be even shorter or much longer.

So, after the listing expires, the seller can keep working with the current agent and relist it or change the agent or agency.

Whether the seller stays with the current agency or makes a new listing contract with another agency, a new listing is created on the MLS.

When real estate agents run expired listing letter marketing campaigns, the main goal is to persuade the seller to relist the property with them and no other agents, including their former one.

This goal differs when a real estate investor does a campaign like that.

Instead, it is to convince the seller to make a deal with them.

This deal can be in the context of a creative real estate, wholesaling deal, or otherwise (e.g., rent to own, wholesale deal, owner financing, etc.).

Why Do Listings Expire and Why It Is Essential to Know This?

Imagine meeting with a homeowner – the would-be seller – and after having done a home valuation for him and consulted with him about the best price he should offer his home for on the market, he would immediately say, “yes, let’s do this.”

It would be a nice world, wouldn’t it?

But as it is unlikely to come across an all-you-can-drink situation in one of the many international airports (unless you are a guest in one of the VIP lounges), this is not what happens in reality.

Sellers that are unreasonable to work with and overpricing are some of the reasons a property listing can expire, the latter being often the number one reason.

It happens when you, as the realtor, suggest a particular asking price, which is not high enough for the seller (which seems to occur in the current market conditions more often), and to get the listing contract, you agree to offer it at this price.

But there are many other reasons why listings expire, such as:

• Lost buyers because of the process of getting lender approval
• Suboptimal promotion and marketing for the property from the former realtor
• A property that wasn’t kept in great condition by the owner
• A home that wasn’t depersonalized so buyer prospects could see themselves living in that home

Ignoring the fact that it is often also (partially) the seller’s mistake or wrongdoing, as a consequence, they often use the realtor as the scapegoat and may not have been big fans of realtors in the first place, thinking that all real estate agents are the same anyways.

On top of being stressed about selling their home, they may get discouraged and disappointed after the property listing expires.

Another belief you may have encountered is sellers thinking their home is special, which often ties into them staying firm on their poppy dreams regarding pricing.

In a sense, yes, of course, their home is unique because they have associated memories and feelings.

However, this is more often an obstacle than a help regarding pricing and smooth collaboration between sellers and realtors.

They will also need answers and wonder why their property hasn’t been sold (looking for their fair share of wrongdoing as the last step).

The latter is just normal human behavior and nothing to worry about, and no one likes to admit having made a mistake or two.

Additionally, the seller may have “dangerous” superficial knowledge and understanding of the market.

Still, since it’s “dangerous” half-knowledge, they are likely not educated enough, let alone have enough marketing skills.

On a side note: in today’s information age and the various existing property selling platforms and alternative online brokerage solutions, you will find more sellers than before that have alternatives to the standard real estate agent than a few years ago.

But still, marketing, sales, negotiation skills, and the legal aspects can’t just be learned overnight.

Nevertheless, this often can lead to them thinking of being able to sell their property themselves at a lower price.

Many sellers who experience their home becoming an expired listing still want to sell. So, there is still some form of motivation to sell there (maybe not the desperate one).

Now, why did I tell you all that?

Maybe without you realizing it, we already did the major part of preparing the real estate sales copy for expired listing letters.

How so?

As I already worked out in-depth in my article “Sales Copy for Real Estate – The Ultimate Guide for Better Conversions,“ one of the first steps is to put yourself in the shoes of the target prospects to learn about their needs, wants, desires, problems, pains, and emotions.

Why Use Copywriting Principles in an Expired Listing Letter?

You will need to be significantly more persuasive and convincing, especially when you target sellers who were “victims” of an expired listing from another agent, than with sellers who haven’t had this disappointing experience.

So, the main goal for the real estate sales copy for such an expired listing letter is to convince the seller prospect that you, among all the other realtors and especially the “bad” one that “messed” it up, are the one that finally gets their property sold.

You basically play the archetypal role of the prince that saves the princess from the terrible dragon in the cave.

Not sure what the dragon in this scenario is, and it might be the placeholder for the “bad realtor of the past” or the “bad market,” but, of course, never the seller’s behavior.

That’s impossible.

So, in addition to the usual “seller pains” to sell a home, such as stress, time constraints, limited planning due to showings, etc., you will need to take these additional “expired listing pains” into account in your real estate sales copy.

We will learn how to do that in one of the following sections.

Is There a Best Expired Listing Letter You Can Find Just by Searching?

Many real estate professionals are looking for the “best” expired listing letter, but many don’t know what they mean by “best.”

In the context of expired listing letters, “best” means likely efficient (doing things right) to achieve the goal of getting a real estate listing contract or, in the case of a real estate investor, making a deal with the seller.

Since my focus is slightly more on realtors, it would be the real estate listing contract.

Efficient is when the expired listing letter converts as many seller prospects into seller leads and then, depending on your verbal sales and persuasion skills, converts them further into seller clients that sign a contract with you.

Do you think that the “best” expired listing letter in terms of being highly converting can be found by just searching on the Internet?

Or let me ask you differently.

Suppose you can find the “best” expired listing letter in terms of highly converting online.

Do you think it stays that way?

I asked you these two questions because it won’t stay that way even when you readily find this letter.

Why?

Because other real estate professionals will also find this letter.

And then, when many use the same expired listing letter template or sample, it will not stand out anymore. And one thing about good sales copy is to stand out.

It will only increase the “noise,” and seller prospects may think when receiving this letter: “Oh, one of those again. I got five of these yesterday already.”

This leads me to another preparation step for real estate sales copy: your positioning.

You want to know your unique selling proposition, answering the question: what is the one thing that makes you stand out and better than the competition?

And in the case of seller prospects of expired listings, what makes you better than your competition regarding helping the seller this time to sell their home?

So, if you just search and find expired listing letters that call themselves in the title “best” and then copy and paste them without any modifications or unique twists, you will not stand out and, thus, not communicate your USP to the seller prospect.

And as a consequence, since many others may do the same, it will not be the “best” anymore because it will not convert as well as it could.

You can use expired listing letter templates and samples for inspiration and improve them to increase your chances of better conversions.

This is what we will do in the next section. 

Expired Listing Letter Templates and Samples – Improving the Sales Copy for Better Conversions

In the former sections, I’ve already insinuated that when you write expired listing letters, you actually write a form of real estate sales copy (read my article on that topic here).

And as you can read in this article, you can use several sales copy formulas to improve the persuasive effect of your real estate copy.

Next, I will analyze one expired listing letter template or sample regarding how well copywriting principles were applied.

So, let’s start.

Expired Listing Letter Template/ Sample

“Dear [Name],

I noticed that you have previously placed your home on the market and that your listing expired without a successful sale. I would like to take a moment to introduce myself, as I would very much like to see that turned around for you.

As a [Realtor/Agent/Broker], I am very familiar with your area. I have completed many successful sales in the vicinity of your home and feel certain that I can help you accomplish your goals regarding the sale of your property.

Of course, we all know that a successful sale requires a successful plan. I have a well-established base in your area and am prepared to sit down with you and share some things your previous agent may have missed.

Selling your home is one of the most important financial decisions you can make. Normally, one’s home is their most valuable asset. There are key ingredients in devising a marketing strategy that will help ensure that you receive the full financial potential available to you through the sale of your home. In addition, that same well-planned strategy can minimize the amount of time your home is on the market. The first key ingredient is to select the right [Realtor/Agent/Broker].

I would love to have the opportunity to sit down with you to present a marketing plan that I know will produce great results for you. Please contact me on my cell phone [PHONE]. Having viewed your previous listing and your property, I am certain that you will be satisfied with the outcome of our meeting.

Sincerely,

[NAME]
[TITLE]”

(source)

First, I will list essential sales copy elements that we are looking after so we have something to compare the above letter sample with.

For that, I will use elements you can also find in the copywriting cheat sheet you can get as part of my “Real Estate Marketing Power Bundle” when you subscribe to the Hacking Real Estate Marketing Insiders Newsletter below.

So, here are the questions regarding the elements you want to compare this text with:

• How well are the expired listing seller’s needs, pains, problems, wants, and/ or desires addressed?
• How well are the benefits (not features) of the real estate service the realtor offers communicated?
• How well does the real estate professional position herself or himself amongst their competitors or former agent (the “bad” one that led to the expired listing)? Is their USP communicated?
• Is a personalized call to action associated with solving the problem, need, pain, etc.?
• Was one of the many copywriting formulas applied in some way or form, such as AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action), PAS (problem, agitate, solve), etc.?
• (Optional to additionally fine-tune the sales copy/ the icing on the cake): Were additional persuasive elements used (e.g., a guarantee, reciprocity, believability, credibility, etc.)?

The first impression I get from the copy is that it is not easily readable.

You want to write as if a third-grader or Homer Simpson is reading the text, and early on, the author is writing about him or herself using a lot of “I” and not that much “you.”

The first sentence already starts with “I.”

That’s for the general first impression, but let’s get into the copywriting elements.

As for addressing the seller’s needs, pains, problems, wants, and/or desires, a little bit is addressed, but not as much as it could.

In the first sentence, the author mentions that the listing expired without a successful sale. Still, the associated pain could have been more agitated, as suggested in the copywriting formula PAS (pain, agitate, solve).

Another problem or pain that is rather indirectly mentioned is that the former agent may have missed “some things.”

Here, the author missed the opportunity to position himself as the “prince on the white horse” that comes to the rescue.

One of the seller’s needs, such as getting the best price possible and having the home on the market for the least amount of time possible, is only mentioned in passing without getting more concrete and being assertive.

“…ensure that you receive the full financial potential available to you through the sale of your home. In addition, that same well-planned strategy can minimize the amount of time your home is on the market.”

Now, what about the communication of the benefits?

Unfortunately, it was done poorly and was pretty vague.

Just a short reminder, to find benefits or convert features into benefits, you want to ask the question “so what?” and/or “what’s in it for [target prospect]?”.

Most of the time, features were used.

The only moment the author comes close to a benefit is when it is mentioned that she/he has completed many successful sales in the seller’s vicinity, and their marketing strategy produces great results.

But overall, it is written pretty vaguely.

If I had the author in front of me, I would ask the following to improve this part of the expired listing letter:

• How many successful sales at market value or above have you completed in the seller’s area in which period? (e.g., during the last 12 months, we helped 20 sellers get the full market price within 30 days for each listing).
• What goals can you help the seller accomplish? (e.g., “The vast majority of our seller clients sell their homes 5% above market price within 60 days, etc.”
• “There are key ingredients in devising a marketing strategy that will help ensure that you receive the full financial potential available to you through the sale of your home.” Whose key ingredients are you referring to? Yours? While this is not bad in an article, this part is written a bit impartially as if this was nothing the realtor herself or himself is offering.
• “…sit down with you to present a marketing plan that I know will produce great results for you.” What results?

The thing is, even the improved examples in the brackets are not benefits.

How so?

Suppose you see a hammer in a DIY store that is offered with a rubber grip. The grip is the feature.

But when you ask “so what” or what’s in it for the buyers when using this hammer with a rubber grip, you likely answer: “so, that the hammer can be used more safely without flying out of the hand and ending up in your best friend’s leg.”

In my dissection, I improved it with “The vast majority of our seller clients sell 5% above market price within 60 days.”.

But, so what?

So, the seller has enough funding to get rid of the mortgage, can buy the second home he already made an offer on fast enough, etc.

You get to the real benefits when you know the real reasons behind the sellers wanting to sell.

And these reasons can go several layers deep.

Next, how does the author position himself among the competition using a USP?

Well, the only part of the copy that resembles something a bit like positioning is in this sentence: “share some things your previous agent may have missed.”

Unfortunately, this is a missed opportunity to communicate how this realtor will be different and maybe what the previous agent may have missed.

Was a personalized call to action used aligned with the problem, pain, need, etc., that the realtor will solve with her or his service?

Nope.

This is the call to action: “Please contact me on my cell phone [PHONE].”

A better one could have been. “Want to start moving to your second home in 60 days or less?

Then call me today at 123-123-1234.”

Was one of the many copywriting formulas applied in some way or form, such as AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action), PAS (problem, agitate, solve), etc.?

Unfortunately, not that I am aware of.

Maybe some fragments of ACCA were used, but I suggest not consciously.

ACCA means: Raising awareness regarding the prospect’s problem, comprehending the problem by explaining it, raising conviction to solve it, and calling the prospect to action.

What about additional persuasive elements (e.g., a guarantee, reciprocity, believability, credibility, etc.)?

Maybe a light version of one persuasive element was used, that of believability, when the author used this phrase: “I have completed many successful sales in the vicinity of your home.”

Now I will try to turn the current listing letter template/sample version into one with more sales copy elements but without removing too much from the original.

I will use a combination of the copywriting formulas AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) and PAS (problem, agitate, solve).

We have already done most of the preparation work in the section above, “Why Do Listings Expire and Why It is Essential to Know?”

To summarize the needs, pains, problems, wants, and/or desires of the expired listing seller:

• Lost buyers because of the process of getting lender approval
• Suboptimal promotion and marketing for the property from the former realtor (problem of choosing the right realtor)
• Pricing the home correctly
• Maintaining a home show-ready (property that wasn’t kept in great condition by the owner)
• The home that wasn’t depersonalized so buyer prospects could see themselves living in that home (owner is living in it)
• Discouragement and disappointment (wrong expectations)
• Need for answers for not having sold
• Still want to sell
• The usual “seller pains” to selling a home such as stress, time constraints, and limited planning due to showings

Improved Version of the Listing Letter Template/ Sample

“Dear [Name],

(ATTENTION, PROBLEM)
Did you know that you could have already been sipping Martinis by the pool of your new home, moved to this new place you had in mind, or said goodbye to your mortgage by now?

(AGITATE THE PROBLEM)
The sad thing is you aren’t doing that because your listing expired without a successful sale, and now instead of a Martini, you may rather need chocolate to fight the discouragement and disappointment.

(SOME MORE PROBLEM AGITATION)
The worst part is that if you now choose the wrong realtor again, it will get exponentially more challenging to sell your home in a timely manner.

(SOLVE)
But as the saying goes, the first best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best is now.

Who is this tree? We are.

So no matter what happened in the end (maybe your past realtor wasn’t as good in digital marketing and home valuations as we are in your neighborhood→USP/positioning), you can still turn this around.

Guess how many sellers of your neighborhood could either get rid of their mortgage, move within 60 days to their second home, or just do whatever they liked with the earned cash from their home sale in the last 12 months with our help? (communication of benefits and persuasive element of credibility/proof)

It was 50, to be exact.

How were we able to do that?

We have a well-established and well-oiled home valuation and, more importantly, a well-oiled marketing machine that brings in highly-qualified pre-approved buyers that can move quickly like clockwork. (some more credibility and proof)

While other realtors in your neighborhood are still looking for the power button of their computers, we speak digital marketing all over. (USP/positioning)

Ready to move in 60 days and try something that works for a change? Call us today at 123-123-1234″. (personalized call to action)

Although I tried hard to stay close to the original, this new sales copy for the expired listing letter example is almost unrecognizable.

But I hope you can see what I did with it.

I put some short descriptions of each copywriting element in round brackets.

By the way, if a seller had a gun to my head and I had to pick one of the ready-made expired listing letter samples you can find online, it would be sample number 6 I found on this website.

7 Steps to Write an Expired Listing Letter from Scratch

As you could learn above, to write an expired listing letter from scratch, you apply the same copywriting principles you always have to apply regarding sales copy.

To summarize the steps a bit, I prepared a small list below.

• Determine the goal of the sales copy for your expired listing letter (e.g., an appointment)
• Research and collect the seller’s needs, wants, desires, problems, pains, and emotions.
• Work out the benefits you can offer to the expired listing seller.
• Know your USP and how you differ from your competition in solving the target prospects (expired listing sellers) needs, problems, wants, etc.
• Use one of the many copywriting formulas (you can get a large collection in my copywriting cheat sheet for real estate above) to write the actual copy for the expired listing letter, such as PAS and/or AIDA.
• Use persuasive elements to fine-tune the copy (e.g., show credibility, differentiators, believability, optimism.
• Additionally, you can also anticipate potential objections and handle them right in the letter, such as these:
  • The seller not being a big fan of realtors and thinking they are all the same.
  • The seller believing he had enough marketing skills and market knowledge
  • The seller believing they can sell their property themselves easily

How to Write a Short Expired Listing Letter

You write a short expired listing letter the same as a longer one; the difference is you have to condense it to the most important sales copy elements without a trade-off for persuasive power.

The short version of the one I wrote above would be the following:

“Did you know that you could have already been sipping Martinis by the pool of your new home, moved to this new place you had in mind, or said goodbye to your mortgage by now? However, your listing expired without a successful sale. (problem, agitate)

Since we helped more than 50 sellers in your neighborhood in the last 12 months to get rid of their mortgage or move to their second home within 60 days, we can also help you turn this around. (solve)

While other realtors in your neighborhood are still looking for the power button of their computers, we speak digital marketing all over. (USP/positioning)

Ready to move in 60 days and try something that works for a change? Call us today at 123-123-1234″. (personalized call to action)

How New Agents Should Write Expired Listing Letters – 4 Things They Need to Take into Account

Writing an expired listing letter when you are a new agent is much trickier.

Generally, you will be at a disadvantage because of a lack of a track record; thus, the seller prospect will have a higher level of doubt.

So, you wouldn’t be able to use a phrase like this:

“Since we helped more than 50 sellers in your neighborhood in the last 12 months to get rid of their mortgage or move to their second home within 60 days we can help you turn this around, too.”

So, how could this disadvantage be mitigated with the right real estate copy in an expired listing letter?

There are several persuasive elements and psychological tricks you could apply.

1) Credibility by Osmosis and Borrowed Credibility

A typical example is the person in a white coat selling toothpaste, looking like a doctor.

Unconsciously by association, potential consumers will perceive the product as more trustworthy.

An example in real estate could be a photo of yourself you took a while back with Grant Cardone or another real estate authority figure.

So, you may want to consider what persons and organizations in your industry may have a reputation that could endorse you.

By doing that, some of their credibility could be transferred to you.

Think about which people and organizations in your industry have a reputation that carries sufficient respect.

If you got them to endorse your business, product, or service, you could capitalize on the transfer of credibility it would create.

A weaker form could be a well-known logo you use on the letter.

2) Authority via Quotes and Statistics

This is the little brother of point 1) above. You could also use quotes that align with your sales message.

In your case, that could be that you are new to the game but work three times as hard as the established realtor.

The same is true regarding relevant statistics from trustworthy sources that you can align with your sales copy.

3) Guarantees

You could offer a guarantee to reduce the perceived risk of working with someone new.

This is a classic risk reversal method.

For example, you could offer that if you don’t get the home sold within 30 days, you won’t charge a commission after this period or just charge a symbolic flat fee commission of $1 (if it is legally not possible to not charge a commission).

4) Liking and Anticipating the Doubt by Being Honest

Being straightforward and honest about being new to the game could cause the sellers to like you.

The liking factor is also a persuasive element that can move the needle in the right direction.

So, as an additional objection handler, you could mention that an allegedly well-established realtor didn’t sell the home, so why not try someone new with a fresh perspective on things?

When to Write Handwritten Letters to Expired Listings

I would prefer the handwritten one if you can choose between running an expired listing letter campaign in print or handwritten.

Why?

First, a handwritten mailer has a much higher open rate than a printed one. To be exact, it’s 98%, according to this source.

Second, you will stand out more because as time passes, fewer and fewer people receive handwritten letters (source).

The downside is that if you have to send hundreds, you have a problem and might need a hand massage after a while.

Doing this on scale on your own could become a full-time job.

So, if you can use a service like this (only postcards), this, and this one to outsource the writing, running such a campaign on scale would be a more realistic option.

How Many Expired Listing Letters to Send? – Crunching Some Performance Numbers

Suppose you want to get three new listing contracts from sellers of expired listings per month.

Assuming an average closing rate of 27%, you would need 11 monthly seller appointments (3 divided by 27%).

In my article about real estate prospecting conversion rates, I worked out that in direct mail (expired listing letters belong to the category of direct mail), you can expect, on average, a lead to an appointment conversion rate of 6.6%.

You must send your expired listing letters to at least 183 sellers.

At least with this provider, you will likely pay $4.50 per letter (including stamp costs).

This would mean monthly marketing costs of $823.50 ($4.50 x 183) and a cost per sale or, for a better word, per listing contract of $274.50 ($823.50 divided by 3).

Remember that the 27% average closing rate could be higher if you have great verbal sales and persuasion skills.

Of course, the average 6.6% lead-to-appointment conversion rate will likely be higher when you use handwritten letters and a good sales copy.

This, in turn, would lower your costs per appointment and thus listing contracts.

How to Make Expired Listing Letters Work

I want to leave some final words about how you can make expired listing letters work.

To increase your chances, you may also consider not just sending one expired listing letter per seller but several techniques you would also use in an auto-responder email campaign.

Why?

Because according to the numbers I covered already in my article about real estate follow-ups, you will need more than one touch point to stay in the seller’s mind.

But you may also test two approaches: one with just one letter and a superb sales copy with a handwritten letter, and, a bit later, you run another campaign with several touchpoints.

In both cases, you want to track the performance to compare your return on investment.

But in the case of a campaign with several touchpoints, in my article “How to Follow Up with Potential Home Buyers Like a Boss” (also relevant for sellers), I discussed that you need between 6-8 touchpoints to generate a viable lead.

The basic principle with email marketing auto-responders and also a sequence of physical mailers is that what you may have written before in just one piece of sales copy you can now extend over several pieces of mail and include and alternate it with just valuable content for the seller.

You can borrow ideas from my article “254 Real Estate Content Ideas & Samples [How-To Included]“for content.

There could be several combinations of value added (only valuable content without any sales copy), soft-sale added (some value, but also sales copy), and hard-sale added (only sales copy) letters.

You could start sending the letters on the first day the listing expires and each day for the following six to eight days.

Another idea to increase the chances of success is to use other tactics to stand out besides handwritten letters, such as using larger envelopes.

And as already mentioned, you want to keep track of the performance of your expired listing letter campaign by using a dedicated phone number and/or a dedicated landing page where sellers can contact you.

By doing that, you know where an incoming seller lead came from.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Please Add More House Symbols to Your Real Estate Logo

Because when you include more house symbols in your real estate logo, you will have one that no one else has.

It can easily be distinguished from your competition, and you are good to go.

So, adding house symbols or graphics to your real estate logo is a good thing, isn’t it? Well, no, and I will stop my sarcasm right here and now.

I have yet to meet a potential real estate buyer or seller that wakes up one morning, opens their wallet, takes out ten realtor business cards, and says:

“Wow, look at them, how nice they are and how distinguishable they are.

Hey, this one even has three house symbols in the logo. I will call them right away. With so many house symbols, you can’t go wrong…”

You may have noticed that I am a bit on a rant about this topic, but I promise I won’t keep being that way for the rest of the article. Well, maybe a bit for fun, but without losing objectivity.

So, in this article, you will learn about…

…the job a [real estate] logo actually has to do
…real estate logo examples
…how to make a real estate logo
…the best real estate logo colors
…what to consider when making a luxury real estate logo
…a list of 17 AI-powered real estate logo generators

What Is the Job of a [Real Estate] Logo in General?

A [Real Estate] logo aims to help customers recognize your brand.

In this context, the ideal situation is that when a customer sees your logo, a particular hopefully positive emotion or several positive emotions associated with your brand are triggered.

You could consider a logo like a bell in Pavlov’s experiment with the dog that always heard a bell while getting food and, after some time, associated the bell with food.

And the food didn’t necessarily have to be there anymore to get him salivating.

Real estate customers obviously aren’t dogs, but humans can be similarly programmed in many ways.

So, when done right, a logo can do the job of the “bell” of Pavlov’s experiment. But who or what is the food part?

As I already discussed in my critical article about real estate branding here, that’s the job of branding.

To trigger a positive emotion (“dog food”) with your real estate company through your logo (“the bell”), you first need to manage to create the dog food; I mean, offer something of value that can be associated with a positive feeling.

Once you know how you provide value, you want to know your customer’s feelings when considering your product or service.

Based on this information, you can create a [real estate] logo with particular colors, symbols, typography, and a tagline that aligns with these feelings.

When you don’t have this information, you rely too much on assumptions. You may create a mismatch between what your logo and tagline communicate and what customers think and feel about your real estate company’s products and services.

This is easier said than done because, in the beginning, you won’t have customers and thus can’t find out more about them.

So, if you really want and need a logo, you don’t have another option but base it on assumptions.

However, please don’t use more house symbols in your logo.

The following section will tell you why.

Real Estate Logo Examples

Before writing this article, I researched and checked different real estate logos and examples.

You can do it now or later, and believe me, now.

But when you enter “real estate logo examples” in Google, you will find the expected results.

I did this for you, and the below list will show you a collection of different real estate logo examples.

• 99Designs
• Hubspot
• Envato
• Pinterest

Now, I have a single question for you.

Would you say you saw a house symbol in the real estate logos in a majority or a minority of the cases?

Exactly, the majority.

I estimate that you find a house symbol in between eighty and ninety percent of the real estate logo examples.

Sometimes more blatantly obvious and sometimes more abstractly or strongly reduced.

Let’s do another experiment and check some of the leading real estate brokerage companies.

When you visit the websites of Remax, Century 21, Keller Williams, and Coldwell Banker, can you find a house illustration in their logos?

To be fair, Remax did reduce the house symbol to such a degree that you can find it only with a lot of fantasy.

But overall, none of the others have a house symbol in their logos.

Since these are already well-known brands, chances are that they already know their target group, what value they bring to the table, and what their typical customers feel when thinking of their companies.

So, they adapted their logos accordingly.

This reminds me of a situation I experienced in college.

One of the disciplines when I was in college, was design, and there were also MBA students in the same building.

For some projects, we always had to develop a logo, and during and after the brainstorming phase, we always had to toss out the logo ideas that were too obvious.

We also interacted with the MBA students and could sometimes see what kind of projects they were doing.

This also often included the design of a logo.

From what we saw, most of the logos were quite obvious.

Because of that, from time to time, we would make a bit of fun of them and call these obvious logos “MBA-Logos.”

This is the situation with most real estate logo examples you currently find.

This is also the type of logo you will get when you order them on Fiverr or use an artificial intelligence-based logo maker and stay with the obvious.

How to Make a Realtor Logo?

You can start making a realtor logo if you have more in-depth information about your customer’s feelings regarding your real estate business.

You have three options: making it yourself, using an AI-powered logo maker, an affordable service (e.g., Fiverr), or an expensive service (e.g., a graphic design agency).

As I already discussed in this article, at least in the beginning, if you don’t have much information about your clients or ideal clients, I wouldn’t bother making a realtor or real estate logo too much.

This article also mentions that you can create a brand even with bad branding (no logos, etc.) and still have reasonable conversion rates, provided your customers have a great experience with your products or services.

In that case, you may go just with your name.

After some time, when you know your USP (unique selling point) and interact more with clients, you can confidently make your company logo.

The Real Estate Logo Creation Process

No matter which options you select to make a realtor logo, almost always all or some of the steps of the following process are involved.

These are the steps:

1. Brand evaluation: who are your clients, how do they experience your products and services, what’s your USP, what’s your brand’s voice, etc.?
2. Industry research: what are the typical or ideal colors for the real estate industry and your clients (e.g., using neuromarketing)? What logotypes are overused (more houses, anyone?)?
3. Determine the places where the logo will be used
4. Logo concept brainstorming (sketching several first ideas)
5. Digitalize the sketched concepts
6. Get feedback on different designs.
7. Create the final logo

If you do it yourself, you can follow these steps, but they are also followed when you go with a more expensive real estate logo design service offered by graphic design agencies.

With the more expensive services, you also have better chances that the result won’t be one of the more obvious real estate logos.

Since the cheaper services or AI-powered logo tools usually don’t involve at least steps one to four, you will likely end up with the usual (more house symbols in the real estate logos).

You could compensate for this by doing steps one to four yourself and then outsourcing the final three steps even to someone on Fiverr.

This may be more difficult when working with AI-powered logo makers since you will have to look for combinations the AI will produce that approach the logo concept you have in mind or already on paper.

This may also happen with affordable freelancers that just use those AI logo tools to provide the designs and don’t do actual customized design work.

What Are the Best Real Estate Logo Colors?

In my article about the best colors for real estate signs, I mentioned a field called color psychology.

The knowledge about the effect of colors on the human psyche can be used to influence human behavior, perceptions, and emotions.

That’s precisely what we want to do with a [real estate] logo: trigger a certain feeling your customer has when experiencing your brand’s products or services.

As you may already know, no straightforward answer tells you “yellow” is the best color for real estate logos. But there is an answer range, at least.

If your real estate client thinks about your brand as a real estate agency or service known for finding properties for spontaneous buyer types, then red is likely the best bet.

Why? Because it attracts spontaneous buyer types. (source)

Below is a small list of different colors and their effects.

If you need to target men, you may want to use blue, black, and/or gray colors. You can target women better using red, pink, and purple. I know this all sounds cliché, but it seems to work.

You may want to use black, royal blue, red, and orange to attract impulsive buyers.

If your real estate business is more known to make transactions in the lower price ranges (maybe your real estate niche), you may want to go with a teal and navy blue logo.

If you are perceived as a more traditional real estate business, you may want to choose sky blue, rose, and pink (source).

And if your specialty is greenhouses and you are perceived as an eco-friendly real estate agency, you may want to go with green.

I think you’re starting to get the point.

It again comes back to how your customers perceive your products and services and what their experiences are with them.

Until you don’t know that you will fly blind and can only get lucky in choosing the right color for your real estate logo.

What to Consider When Making a Luxury Real Estate Logo

Suppose the experience of your real estate clients with your products or services could be summarized as being unique, exclusive, and safe or secure.

Now, when we look at the above table, we can already find the right real estate colors for the logo, which would be purple, brown, and/or black.

It could be just one or a combination of two or all three.

That’s for the luxury real estate logo color.

But there is more to consider.

One of design’s main principles is consistency so one message doesn’t contradict another.

This applies to indirect messages and to direct messages. Everything is communication.

A logo communicates something. Also, a color does typography, website layout, partners, etc.

It overlaps all parts of a business, from print material to websites, employees, etc.

So, when you are perceived as elegant and unique, you must communicate this via the color, the name itself, the typography you will use, and even how you or your team dresses.

A contradiction would be being perceived as safe and reliant but not using HTTPS for your website.

This is not design per se, but it’s also something you communicate indirectly.

Another example would be that you are perceived as providing elegant homes to your exclusive clients.

Still, you are using an overloaded real estate logo with 2-3 house symbols and the color orange somewhere.

Want to know about another contradiction?

That’s writing about logos and having a rather obvious logo myself. That’s interesting. Right?

The difference is that I was aware that any or even no logo would be okay when starting with this website.

Since I get to know my audience and potential clients better by the day, my logo is approaching a rebranding moment.

And the result of that will better align with my audience’s experience.

17 Real Estate Logo Makers and Generators [Free and Paid]

If you keep all the above in mind, you may also be safer when using [real estate] logo makers and generators.

Overall, I would recommend using them when you already have a plan and/or a concept for your logo, but not before that.

The danger of using them before you have a plan and concept for your real estate logo is that you will be guided by the many different logo variations these tools can produce and may get lost in the “logo world.”

When you have a concept and the requirements for your logo beforehand, you can better filter out the good from the bad.

On a side note, when dealing with AI-powered logo generators at some point in the process, it will ask you to select some logo examples for inspiration.

At least the better ones do that.

This is the opportunity to select logo examples that align with your overall logo concept.

When your real estate logo should be more elegant, only select elegant logos.

Some will also ask you about preferred colors.

This is another chance to push AI toward your logo design requirements and concept.

The machine learning algorithm will base the various combinations afterward on this selection.

Now, without further ado, you find below the free and paid [real estate] logo generators.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Proptech Real Estate – [Companies, Trends, and Examples]

Proptech in real estate has clearly been experiencing an upward trend over the last few years.

As a real estate agent, you may have used proptech solutions, Zillow, and some additional apps and tools being one of them.

Since this technological development is likely here to stay, I decided to write a more in-depth article about real estate proptech.

In this article, you will learn…

• What proptech real estate is
• What it means, what proptech software is, and what it does
• Why it is important
• How it changes real estate
• And the 54 real estate proptech companies for real estate agents and property managers that are available.

Proptech has and will directly affect your overall real estate marketing strategies. So my article will hopefully give you a good overview.

What Is Proptech Real Estate, and What Does It Mean?

“Proptech” is a short form of “property technology.”

Overall, “proptech” is a disruptive technology field aiming to make different business processes in real estate more effective and efficient and thus reduce costs for all market participants.

It is sometimes used interchangeably with terms such as Retech or Realtech.

I know that’s a pretty generic answer, so let’s dig a bit more into the meaning of it.

But actually, it’s nothing from another world.

In simple terms, it’s just part of a trend to apply digital technology (software, apps, websites, etc.) to different former less digital industries and areas to make them more digital and thus more efficient and effective.

If you apply technology to improve your sleep, you get “sleeptech,” if you apply it to banks, you get “banktech,” well, it’s actually called “fintech.”

In construction, when you use 3D printing to build homes, it is called “contech.”

When you apply tech to cities, you get “smart cities,” and to homes, you get “smart homes.”

Well, I think by now you get my drift. Just apply the term “smart” or “tech” somewhere in an already existing field, and you often get the proper term.

So, since it’s not called “realtech” (real estate technology) but “proptech” (property technology), we can assume that the main focus of the different software solutions relates to all types of business processes around properties.

I already strived on this topic in my two articles about real estate marketing tools and mobile apps for realtors.

Those two articles could rather fit in the category of “realtech.”

But in the article about apps, I also mentioned property and rental management apps, which also fall under “proptech.”

Buildium, one of the mentioned apps, helps property owners streamline business processes, such as property inspections, right from the app.

What Is Proptech Software?

Now that the term “proptech” is hopefully a bit more clarified, you may also be wondering what proptech software is all about.

Software overall is nothing else than a combination of commands, rules, and datasets to carry out specific tasks.

Proptech software is thus software that carries out specific tasks related to business processes around properties.

Let’s use the property management tool from above.

The algorithm (a set of predefined rules) could be that when new tenants move into an apartment, they get added to the tool with their contact data.

The predefined rule is that once new tenants get added, they get an automatically generated email that lets them know about important parking rules-related documents.

So, these predefined rules carry out the automatic task of letting the new tenants know about the rules of an apartment complex.

Why Is Proptech Important

This question has the underlying assumption that proptech is important. So let’s first see if it is important and then why this might be the case.

How can we confirm that the assumption of proptech being important is true?

We can check the statistics and market trends and see if we can find some sort of growth in the supply and demand of proptech solutions.

What are the statistics saying?

• In 62% of real estate businesses, you can already find a senior-level manager that is in charge of digital transformation (source)
• According to this source (source), Proptech gained more support funding each year before the pandemic hit.
• Since 2014 the investments attractiveness of the PropTech sector has shown a growth (compounded annual growth rate) of 45% (source)
• There is an increased demand for virtual home tours, which can also be considered as proptech (source)
• The majority of gen-z renters prefer smart-home tech over traditional amenities (source)

From the statistics, we can see growth in the market’s demand and supply side.

Investors are confident that supply will meet the demand.

If not, they wouldn’t invest. And from the demand side, we can also see an increase.

Thus, we can confidently conclude that the assumption that proptech is important is true.

Now, why is proptech important?

It involves economic principles and, most importantly, maximizing profits.

When you, as a real estate business owner or real estate agent, want to achieve the maximum returns with limited resources and output, proptech can be of help.

Why? 

Because it increases efficiency in your business processes and reduces costs.

For example, if you use an app for open houses that can capture leads and send follow-up messages automatically, you will save time by not doing all that manually.

This frees up time that you can invest in other areas of your business, or you just grow faster since you can handle more leads in the same amount of time.

That’s why proptech is important.

Unfortunately, it also creates pressure on those market participants that don’t want to use or apply proptech.

Because the ones using it will have the edge over those not using it, so there is a real danger that the non-users may fall back behind.

It’s similar to a farmer who wants to remain in the past and plow the field with the help of cows and a farmer who switched to a tractor.

To stay competitive, the farmer with the cows had to adapt and also use a tractor.

The competitive advantage you get by using tech in real estate or for properties also indirectly affects real estate marketing.

For example, you could position yourself as a proptech-friendly real estate agent and attract more gen-z tenants (in the case of your being an agent for rental properties).

Or using proptech or realtech can free up time for you to invest in more and/or better marketing methods.

How Proptech Is Changing Real Estate – Is It the Future?

The growth and the application of proptech in real estate are evident from what I covered above.

And as it always happens when tech is introduced in a field, it changes how market participants interact and behave, and this is no different in real estate.

The increasing number of proptech software supplies also does one important thing.

It gathers data. And more information and data lead to more market transparency.

This increased information leads to better-informed decisions that market participants can make.

The U.S. real estate market is already one, if not the most transparent real estate market in the world, and proptech will increase this transparency.

But this is not a one-way street.

Because it is already one of the world’s most transparent real estate markets, proptech startups can especially thrive in the U.S.

Therefore, one can also see the growth of proptech in other countries (e.g., the U.K., but it’s still far behind what is happening in the U.S.

An example here is Zillow, which can be considered a proptech company.

With the data Zillow has been gathering, all kinds of real estate market participants can now analyze different regional markets at a higher degree of transparency.

So again, more informed decisions can be made faster than before.

There will be a point when more and more users get used to proptech solutions and can’t imagine behaving differently than before anymore.

It’s a bit like Uber.

Depending on your city, you sometimes have to wait a long while just to get a taxi.

With Uber, more and more consumers expect to have a ride within minutes.

So the introduction of technology generally comes with a behavior change.

Another example is Fixflo, an app that helps report repairs easily for agents and tenants.

In the past, you would have had someone you trust come over to fix something, provided they were available.

With Fixflo, you can instantly access different providers and schedule and organize the required work from the app.

The chances of proptech going away anytime soon are slim because of the market demand, supply, and growth it has been experiencing (confirmed in the statistics). It is, therefore, likely the future for real estate.

As a real estate agent, you may now be worried that real estate agents and other professionals will be replaced at some point in the future.

I see this risk only in a limited form. Why?

Because even if, at some point, there are robots that can do everything a real estate agent can do, there will always be humans that would prefer to deal with a real human being.

There are also many skills that artificial intelligence won’t be able to replace, such as empathy (emotional intelligence), creativity, and judgment.

Many of these skills are necessary for sales, especially in sales of high-ticket items, such as houses and buildings.

What I rather see is some hybrid situation.

More real estate agents and other real estate professionals may make the most out of proptech to their advantage.

The ones that completely reject proptech may be replaced by agents taking full advantage of the technology.

But I don’t see a full-fledged robot take-over.

48 Proptech Startup Companies for Property Management & Real Estate Agents

While researching, I found a great source to find more proptech startup companies in different niches and verticals.

Therefore, if you want to spend hours researching more companies in other verticals and niches, I recommend this website with great search and filter options for targeted searches.

Although I see a thriving proptech startup growth mainly in the U.S., Israel, and the U.K., I included only proptech startups with at least global and/or U.S. operations in the table below.

They also had to have some relevance and value to real estate agents and other real estate professionals.

Proptech for Property Management – 5 Startup Companies

This section will provide you with five different mainly proptech startup companies for property management businesses I picked from the overview table above to further study them.

The use cases might be interesting exclusively to property management firms, realtors, and other real estate professionals.

You can learn more about the remaining ones by clicking the links in the table.

So, let’s get started.

1) Axonize

This proptech startup company was founded in 2016 with headquarters in Tel Aviv and operates in three cities (New York City, Tel Aviv, and Munich).

The software as a service aims to optimize energy consumption, reduce costs, enhance the well-being of tenants’ productivity, and optimize the use of the space of facilities.

Here, you can learn more about them.

2) home365

Home365 was also founded in 2016 and has headquarters in San Antonio, California.

The main value proposition of this proptech startup company is to remove risks and unknowns of rental property ownership and, at the same time, help generate predictable profits.

The company provides rental listings with vacancy insurance and tenant management at a fixed all-inclusive rate.

You can check out home365 here.

3) Daisy

This proptech startup company is still fairly fresh and was founded in 2020. They have their headquarters in New York but operate nationwide.

The core focus of their value proposition is on improving communication for buildings and, of course, all parties involved.

Some of Daisy’s features for property managers include:

• 24/7 chat support
• A dedicated resident app for your building
• Online voting
• Digital move in/ out process
• Real-time budget monitoring

You can learn more about them here.

4) SmartRent

Smart Rent is a proptech startup company founded in 2017 that has its operation area in the U.S.

It is basically a smart home automation management platform for property managers and tenants and helps you control all of the smart devices of different properties.

Suppose a property manager has different vacant units.

With SmartRent, you can then remotely control thermostats, lights, door locks, and many more smart devices.

You can check out SmartRent here.

5) Cozii

The last proptech company I picked is Cozii. They were founded in 2012, and its operation area is also the U.S.

The company aims to make renting more transparent, secure, and easier.

The platform provides landlords with online rental applications, secure tenant screening, tenant insurance, and simple-rent payments.

You can learn more about them here.

Proptech for Real Estate Agents – 4 Proptech Startup Companies

In this section, you will find my five picks of proptech startup companies for real estate agents of 30 I could identify during my research.

1) Kiko

Kiko is most suitable for real estate agents focused on property rentals. This proptech company was founded in 2019 and operates in the U.S. and Europe.

The company can help you run your own online platform for renting and managing your properties on your website.

You can check out Kiko here.

2) hauzd

The startup company hauzd operates in the 3D space and provides interactive sales tools for real estate brokers and developers, such as augmented reality solutions, 3D exterior and interior spaces, and 360° views.

The company was founded in 2015 and operates globally.

You can learn more about them here.

3) DealSumm

DealSumm, founded in 2013 and Silicon Valley-based, created a solution in the legal area of commercial real estate.

The company’s software can automatically extract the fine print, terms, and conditions hidden in a contract and thus provide a lot of time savings.

The software is powered by machine learning and natural language processing.

For example, it can calculate the financial conditions from different documents, such as a lease its amendments, and then summarize this information.

You can check out KikoDealSumm here.

4) UpNest

UpNest is a bit like Zillow, only without direct sellers (FSBOs), and is a real estate agent marketplace that connects agents representing sellers with home buyers.

It is likely a controversial platform for real estate agents since it is advertised to buyers as a commission-saving solution.

The savings are achieved by motivating competition between agents who must send their commission quotes to sellers before being hired.

Upnest was founded in 2013 and has its headquarters in Burlingame, California.

Here you can learn more about them.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

From Open House to Sold Sign: A Realtor’s Playbook

“Open houses only attract tire kickers and thieves.”

 “No, open houses are always successful and work every time.”

These are some opinions about them; as you can see, it’s another controversial topic as there are many in real estate marketing.

For some, they are successful, and for others, they aren’t. And depending on which side you are on, you will identify with certain opinions.

But what about more fact-based analytical data? Can you say they are generally successful? 

A well-organized and previously promoted open house event can give you a showing-to-sales conversion rate of 5% compared to a showing-to-sales conversion rate of 10% for individual showings.

They can be successful and attract serious buyers, but at the same time, they sell fewer properties and attract fewer serious buyers than other methods.

Open houses are prone to be used in different TV shows because they are events and are easier and less boring to film than individual showings.

So, motivated by such shows, you might consider doing one as a real estate professional or individual seller to increase your chances of a sale.

But looking at some facts and numbers, some pitfalls and fallacies are involved.

In this article, I will look deeper into real numbers, clarify the readily available anecdotal evidence found online, and cover how to do an open house.

What Is an Open House?

An open house is an offline marketing event where a seller or a realtor opens a property for sale to the public.

The aim is obviously to generate as many serious buyer leads as possible.

Everyone can just drop by at any time (not precisely any time, but during the open house time frame) and take a tour of the house.

This event is usually promoted beforehand, but signs are also placed in the neighborhood and at least on the property so drive-bys can notice it.

A well-prepared open house has additional elements to make a good impression, such as staged rooms, snacks, brochures, or other print material about the property for sale.

It often benefits real estate agents to get the word out about their business and make their seller clients happy. 

People visiting could become future clients for other business opportunities.

Is an Open House a Good Idea? [Anecdotal Evidence & Statistics]

Different real estate websites have different opinions about the effectiveness of open houses.

This one, for example, claims that it won’t do much if the home is not located in a trendy neighborhood with busy streets nearby.

Potential buyers passing by and taking a tour might return later to buy, but this could have happened even without an open house event.

Very often, the only participants of an open house will be people living close by and are likely “tire kickers” and just curious.

Another effect that probably reduces the positive impact of an open house is that most potential buyers work with a real estate agent and will do primarily private tours.

Another group of not-so-serious potential buyers is participating in open houses, namely the first-time home buyers.

They often use those events to get inspiration and see if a neighborhood suits them.

But this also means that the open house is unlikely to lead to a sale.

The least serious group of buyers, who don’t deserve to be called that way, is made of shady people or thieves who can take advantage of an open house situation and leave with the newest Alexa voice system under their shirt.

This website even goes so far as to call open houses a waste of time for the seller and unnecessary in the digital age.

In this new age where social distancing is or at least was widespread, the author might even have a point there.

He also confirms more or less the arguments mentioned above from the other website.

One of the coinciding arguments is that real estate agents benefit the most from open houses because they can generate further business but are not directly related to the sale of the particular property the open house event takes place for.

Zillow is more optimistic about open houses, trying to inject some statistics.

According to them, they work to underpin this statement because 72% of sellers in urban areas, 63% of sellers in suburban areas, and 47% of sellers in rural areas do open houses.

But this doesn’t prove they work, and the article later falls short in showing statistics about the effectiveness.

Here, the author only mentions that it’s hard to say what percentage of home sales can be traced back to an open house event and that many realtors agree that open houses are effective.

So, up to this point, I showed you only more or less anecdotal evidence and different opinions that lean toward open houses not being a good idea, effective, or not conclusive of being directly a causative agent of property sales.

One statistic I found during my research was by the National Association of Realtors.

According to their study published in 2019 as ‘National Association of REALTORS® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers,’ only 6% of buyers found the home they purchased following a yard sign or an open house sign (source).

For sale by owner, methods used to market homes were in 24% of the cases open house events, according to the same study.

According to an individual statistic published in the Realtor Magazine by a realtor couple, 20% of potential buyers looking for low- and mid-price points use open houses to decide which property to buy the next weekend.

And 30% of all potential buyers in the luxury property segment go to open houses to decide which house to buy the coming weekend.

Their statistics come from more than 1,000 houses sold and thousands of coaching calls conducted.

But what about actual sales conversion rates, so we have something to compare to online marketing methods?

It wasn’t easy, but I found some conversion numbers about open houses.

But take them with a grain of salt since the stats might not be that representative, and the author follows a particular strategy to organize such an event.

So, they are likely highly optimized and thus achieve above-average results.

On average, six people come to visit the property per open house.

After 90 days of 2 open houses per week, 72 leads could be generated.

The total number of generated potential deals after 90 days was 5.

Maintaining the average of 6 people (corresponding to online traffic) per house would mean 72 visitors after 90 days and a (foot) traffic-to-sales conversion rate of 7%.

After six months, a total of 14 potential deals could be generated.

A total of 6x4x6=144 visitors would mean a (foot)-traffic-to sales-conversion rate of 9.7%.

Provided the same number of open houses per week was maintained, it is claimed that 288 leads and 29 potential deals could be generated after one year.

With two open houses and six visitors on average per week, this would be a total of 576 open house visitors and a (foot)-a traffic-to-sales-conversion rate of 5%.

So, you can see that the sales conversion rate averaged out over the year and probably comes closer to representative data.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t clear to me from the source if these deals actually closed because they were labeled as “potential” deals.

In the real estate industry, the traffic-to-lead conversion rate of Facebook Ads is 10.68%, and that of Google Ads is 3.9%.

Assuming you convert the generated leads with a closing rate of 27%  to sales, the traffic-to-sales conversion rates would be 2.88% for Facebook Ads and 1.053% for Google Ads.

This is a rough and undifferentiated estimation, and you actually should apply different lead-to-sales conversion rates for each marketing channel.

Why?

Because, for example, via Facebook Ads, on the one hand, you get better traffic-to-lead conversion rate than for Google Ads.

Still, leads often have a lower quality than those from Google Ads, where a potential lead is more often searching already for an existing need.

In the Google Ads scenario, the potential customer is in a more advanced customer journey stage.

I covered the customer journey in my real estate content marketing strategy article here.

So, let’s just settle with an average of the two numbers from above, which would be 1.9665%.

This number makes the open house (foot) traffic-to-sales conversion rate of 5% look pretty good.

So, up to this point, the traffic-to-sales conversion rates of open houses look pretty good compared to digital marketing methods, provided they are organized and carried out in ways that increase the chances of success.

At a second glance, this 5% is kind of misleading.

Why?

Because people coming to an open house, strictly speaking, can’t be considered ‘cold traffic’ and are already a bit further advanced in the sales funnel.

But the above digital marketing traffic to sales conversion rates refers to cold traffic.

In the next section, you will learn why this is when we dig deeper into how to do an open house event to have the highest chances of success.

How to Do an Open House

What Goes Into the Preparation of the Open House Pre-Launch?

On the one hand, you prepare a dedicated page on your website or another provider, such as leadpages, or where you have the basic property information and media, such as professional pictures and videos (including video tours).

It’s also a page where you capture leads confirming event participation.

Following up if some leads don’t show up is also important.

To be able to create high-quality media for advertising the event and have the property ready for the event itself, you will want to do the following:

For Advertising the Event (Pre-Launch):

• Have the most critical rooms staged
• Have professional pictures and videos taken (optionally 3D video tours)
• Create an event lead capture page

For the Event Itself (Launch):

• Open window coverings, blinds, drapes, and every lamp and overhead fixture turned on.
• Ensure no vehicles are in the driveway and ask neighbors to avoid parking in front of the house.
• Have some seasonal house photographs ready, showing how the property looks during different seasons of the year.
• Avoid air fresheners, but use flowers instead.
• Organize snacks and refreshments for the date of the event.
• Have print materials ready, such as brochures, four-color flyers, pamphlets, and brochures with information about financing options, inspection reports, evidence of major repairs, etc.
• Physical signs and the exact information about the location of the property so that people don’t have to drive around the neighborhood and look for your house as if it were a needle in a haystack

All the above points directly related to the actual event are not necessary for the pre-launch phase, but many of them help improve the online presence so you can better promote the event.

Advertise the Open House Event About 5-7 days Beforehand (Pre-Launch Advertising)

This is still the pre-launch phase.

Now is the moment to create buzz about the open house event in different steps.

You can get some inspiration for that by looking at a digital product launch’s approach, which consists of a so-called pre-launch sequence.

These are different pieces of content published on your website/blog, promoted to an email list you have already built, and/or separately advertised on pay-per-click advertising channels, such as Facebook Ads (ideal for promoting events).

The content for the sequence itself is basically a type of sales letter with different episodes related to each other.

The first pre-launch content can be education-based and related to the property.

You can get some inspiration about education-based content from my article about real estate content ideas.

You would show an opportunity for change or transformation in the digital product space.

When it comes to a property, this could be some benefit about the location, where you show, for example, a nearby hiking trail or some oasis of peace, a walkable neighborhood, etc.

The second piece of the pre-launch content is another education-based piece where the transformation is further shown.

Here, you would ideally show some local residents who can now enjoy a new lifestyle in this neighborhood, after a stressful lifestyle before having to drive for each little thing, but now can walk everywhere nearby.

What you use for this depends on the benefits the house might provide potential buyers.

The third piece of pre-launch content is a harder sale on the actual property and the open house event, where you can provide more concrete information about the property and the event itself.

These pieces of pre-launch content are ideally created in a video format because of all the conversion benefits video can give you (covered already in this article)

If this sounds like too much work, you could also just do the third piece of content and promote the event.

This can also be done in text format via email.

However, you will create more buzz and anticipation when using the other two pieces of the pre-launch sequence.

On Which Marketing Channels to Promote the Pre-Launch for Your Open House?

Most of the property listing websites are not suitable for optimal pre-launch promotion.

Here, you will just advertise the open house event with all the necessary information.

Property listings and similar pages you can use for that are, for example, the following ones:

• Your standard multiple-listing service websites
• Nextdoor, where the event can be posted on its event calendar
• Zillow
• Trulia
• Realtor.com

But, actually, the most suitable advertising channel to cover the pre-launch and launch phase, as already mentioned above, would be Facebook which is generally pre-destined for promoting events.

Now, we can take a better second glance at the supposedly 5% (foot) traffic-to-sales conversion rate.

To get a better picture, you must also factor in the traffic-to-lead conversion rate of Facebook event ads.

According to some answers on Quora, the average traffic conversion rate for Facebook events is 1%.

For regular Facebook ads, it’s 10.68%, and for the other property listing pages, the self-reported traffic to lead conversion rate ranges between 2% and 5%.

Now, things don’t look so rosy anymore when we consider conversion rates required to increase the chances of success of an open house, such as traffic to lead conversion rates of Facebook Ads and property listing websites.

The average of the above numbers from Facebook event Ads (1%), and the property listing pages (2% and 5%), is 2.66%

Applying the closing rate of 27%, you would have an actual cold-traffic-to-sales conversion rate of 0.72% for open houses.

How to Make the Open House Event Itself Memorable: 10 Ideas

There are things you should always do when hosting an open house event, let’s say the standard things.

And then, some things could enhance the event and make it more memorable.

Ordered from standard to more extravagant and memorable, here are ideas you can consider…

1) Greeting the Guests

This should come as no surprise. It makes a better impression and sets a more welcoming tone when you greet the participants or guests of the open house event you host.

You can introduce yourself by greeting them and telling them you are here to answer their questions.

When you offer refreshments and /or snacks, you can also mention where to find them and additional material about the property you have prepared.

2) Using Sign-In Apps to Track Your Lead Gen Performance

Without using a sign-in app for your open house, it will be difficult, if not almost impossible, to track new leads that were generated or the ones you already generated or had in your database that appeared at your event.

So it’s a good idea to use one.

It’s not just because of tracking your lead generation performance but also because of having the opportunity to follow up with participants afterward.

You could use one of the following apps for this:

• Spacio
• Curb Hero
• Open Home Pro

3) Having Handouts, Brochures, and Home Inspection Reports Ready

Now, is it also beneficial to have handouts, brochures, and home inspection reports ready during your open house?

Let’s take a closer look.

Handouts & Brochures:

• Information at a Glance: Brochures provide essential information about the property in a condensed and easy-to-read format. They’re like your property’s mini-resume, telling potential buyers exactly what they need to know.

• Memorable and Tangible: In the digital age, having something physical to hold can leave a deeper impression. It’s a physical reminder of the property long after the open house is in the past.

• Brand Building: Well-designed brochures reflect your professionalism and attention to detail, enhancing your brand image as a realtor.

• Bonus Info: Apart from the property details, brochures can also highlight the neighborhood and local amenities, giving potential buyers a better sense of the lifestyle the property could offer.

Home Inspection Reports:

• Transparency: A home inspection report shows that you have nothing to hide. It suggests to potential buyers that they can trust you and the property.

• Saving Time and Effort: Prospective buyers may appreciate the availability of a home inspection report, as it saves them the time and costs of getting one done themselves.

• Identifying Issues Early: If there are any issues, it’s better to know about them early. This allows you to address them before they become deal-breakers.

• Negotiation Advantage: If your property is in great shape, a home inspection can underscore this and potentially increase your negotiation power.

4) Live Stream Your Open House Event

I know…an open house event itself can be stressful in itself. 

Still, pulling it off and at least live stream parts of it can give you additional marketing and lead-generating benefits.

Which ones?

Wider Audience: 

You aren’t just limited to those who can physically attend. 

With a live stream, potential buyers from across the country or even across the globe can join in. 

It’s a game-changer for out-of-town clients or anyone with a tight schedule. 

You also want to mention this during your pre-launch advertising for the event.

Increased Visibility: 

Streaming your open house on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube exposes your property to significantly more people. 

This can lead to higher engagement and more potential leads.

Recordings of this you could also redistribute afterward so you create additional real estate content. 

Save Time and Resources: 

By live streaming, you’re essentially conducting multiple showings at once. 

This can be a huge time-saver for you and prospective buyers.

The video material you create you could also use afterward for inquiries from potential buyers you get or your property listing page.

Interactivity: 

Viewers can ask questions in real-time and get instant answers. 

This direct communication can help them gain a better understanding of the property. It can make the experience more personal and engaging.

You may also take advantage of entertaining situations, which can serve as social proof. How so?

For instance, when the viewers hear a physical participant confirm your replies by also commenting on it in the back or shortly into the camera. 

Replayability: 

The live stream can be saved and shared for those who couldn’t attend or want to revisit certain aspects of the property. 

This extends the lifespan of your open house beyond the event itself.

5) More Than Just Refreshments

Refreshments add a touch of hospitality and warmth to your open house.

It’s the little details like these that can make a great impression. 

But what should you serve? 

Here’s a list of suitable, crowd-pleasing refreshments for your next open house:

Coffee and Tea: Offering a range of hot drinks, including coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, is a great starting point. It’s comforting, familiar, and appreciated by almost everyone.

Water: Bottled water, both still and sparkling, should be readily available. You could even add a bit of pizzazz by offering infused water with lemon, cucumber, or mint.

Soft Drinks and Juices: A selection of soda, iced tea, or freshly squeezed juices could be a hit, especially on warmer days.

Small Bites: Think of bite-sized appetizers, like mini quiches, stuffed mushrooms, or cocktail sandwiches. Remember, they should be easy to eat while touring the property.

Cookies and Pastries: Sweet treats, like cookies, brownies, or mini muffins, are usually a hit. After all, who can resist the comforting smell of freshly baked cookies?

Fresh Fruit: A bowl of fresh, seasonal fruits can be refreshing and healthy.

Cheese and Crackers: A simple cheese and cracker platter can go a long way. Add some grapes for a classic touch.

But the headline was “more than just refreshments,” and here comes the extravagant tip: local flavor.

So you can also consider featuring catering from a beloved local eatery or desserts from a popular local bakery. It gives potential buyers a taste of the neighborhood.

6) Staging with a Twist

Now we get increasingly into the extravagant and memorable ideas you can do.

Instead of generic staging, think of creating lifestyle vignettes that inspire. 

A cozy reading nook, a gourmet kitchen setup, or a spa-like bath setup can stir potential buyers’ imaginations.

7) Live Q&A Sessions

When you offer a live Q&A session during your open house event, you basically have an interactive segment where potential buyers can ask questions about the property, and you provide answers in real-time. 

This would also be suited for live streaming, by the way.

It could be about the home’s features, history, neighborhood, expertise, or even the real estate market.

Why do it?

Interactive and Engaging: It makes your open house more interactive and engaging. It’s a dynamic way to keep visitors interested and involved.

Transparency and Trust: By addressing questions openly, you showcase your transparency, which can help build trust with potential buyers.

Immediate Clarification: Potential buyers can get a quick clarification on any doubts about the property.

Highlight Features: You can use the questions to highlight unique features of the property or neighborhood that may not be immediately obvious.

Show Your Expertise: It’s a platform to showcase your expertise in real estate, the local market, and the property.

8) Expert Opinion

Inviting an expert to your open house involves bringing in a third-party professional who can provide additional insights about the property or related aspects. 

This could be a home inspector, interior designer, local historian, mortgage broker, or construction professional.

Why do it?

Value-Added Experience: It provides a unique, value-added experience for your visitors. It’s not just an open house – it’s an educational event.

Credibility and Trust: Having an expert present lends additional credibility to your open house and builds trust with potential buyers.

Address Technical Questions: Experts can handle technical queries outside your area of expertise, like structural queries for a builder or financial questions for a mortgage broker.

Showcase Potential: An interior designer or architect, for instance, can help visitors visualize the potential of the space, including renovation ideas or decor suggestions.

Local Insights: A local historian could give potential buyers a unique insight into the neighborhood’s history and culture, increasing the property’s appeal.

It combines an open house and real estate cross-marketing.

9) Kid’s Corner

The Kid’s Corner is a designated space at your open house event where children can engage in activities supervised by a trusted adult.

At the same time, their parents tour the property without interruptions.

Why do it?

Parental Peace of Mind: Parents can focus on the property, knowing their children are safe and entertained. 

This can increase their stay time and their engagement with the property.

Shows Thoughtfulness: It demonstrates that you’ve considered all potential visitors to your open house, including families. 

This sends a strong, positive message about your approach as a realtor.

Highlights Family-Friendliness: If the property is ideal for families, a Kid’s Corner can subtly highlight this fact.

Reduces Boredom for Kids: A bored child can make their parents hurry during an open house visit. 

With fun activities to engage them, parents can take their time exploring.

10) How to Follow Up After the Open House Event Has Ended

Let’s say your open house was a great success. Now the work is over, isn’t it?

Well, not exactly…

You are now in the follow-up stage, almost as crucial as the event itself. 

This phase is about keeping the momentum going and nurturing those valuable connections you’ve made. 

So, let’s dive into how you can effectively follow up after your open house event.

Immediate Thank You Message

Send a brief thank you message within 24 hours to everyone who attended the open house.

It could be as simple as an email, a text message, or even a personalized handwritten note.

Personalized Follow-Up

For serious prospects, a more personalized follow-up is appropriate. 

Reference specific conversations you had or answer any questions they asked. 

This will show them you were attentive and invested in their needs.

Provide Additional Information

Did they ask about the school district? 

Or maybe they were curious about the neighborhood amenities? 

Send them the information they’re interested in, even if they didn’t explicitly ask for it during the open house.

Schedule a Second Visit

If a potential buyer shows serious interest, suggest a private second showing. 

This will allow them to explore the property in more detail and visualize it as their future home.

Stay in Touch

If a potential buyer isn’t quite ready to make an offer, that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. 

Keep them in your network and continue to nurture the relationship. 

Share relevant listings or market updates, invite them to your future open houses, or send them useful home-buying tips.

My article about following up with potential buyers may help in this context.

Leverage Social Media

Post a thank-you message on your social media platforms and share highlights from the open house.

This is another form of follow-up and promotion for future open houses.

Here you could also use video walk-throughs, the recorded live stream you may have done during the event, or an additional well-made property video telling the property’s story.

What about Private Showings?

Let’s compare the cold-traffic-to-sales conversion rate of 0.72% of open houses to private individual showings to get an even better picture.

According to the National Association of Realtors, a potential buyer visits, on average, ten houses before making a decision (source).

These are individual showings and no open houses.

The odds are 1:10 that the house you are showing would be the one the potential buyer would decide on.

When we translate this into a showing-to-sales ratio or showing-to-sales conversion rate, this would mean 10%.

Similar marketing activities would also be done with similar conversion rates.

So, we don’t necessarily have to compare these metrics, but we can compare the showing to sales conversion rates.

We learned that we get a 5% (foot) traffic to sales conversion rate or showing to sales conversion rate by an ideally prepared and promoted open house.

You can see already that individual showings have better conversion rates than open houses (10% vs. 5%).

Do Serious Buyers Go to Open Houses?

Getting to one of the last sections, let’s check if serious buyers really go to open houses.

You can already confirm that some serious buyers will go to open houses by the numbers I worked out above.

If not, there wouldn’t be a showing-to-sales conversion rate of 5% (provided a well-organized and marketed open house event has been done beforehand).

On the flip side, that also means that about 95% are not serious buyers, and there are likely more tire kickers going to open houses than participating in a property tour through a private individual showing.

Remember, private individual showings can have a showing-to-sales conversion rate of 10%, meaning that only 90% are tire kickers (5% less than in the case of open houses).

This kind of makes sense. Why?

Because it is easier to filter out curious people like drive-bys, inspiration seekers, competitors, and gossipy neighbors for a private individual showing than for open houses.

This is only provided the respective real estate professional does a good job qualifying buyer leads over the phone before scheduling an individual showing appointment.

The Pros and Cons of Open Houses and a Comparison with Individual Showings

I will end this article with a little pro and con list, and a comparison table that compares open houses with individual showings so you can decide if hosting an open house is the best idea for you.

Let’s start with the pros and cons.

The Pros:

• You can show a house to several individual buyers at the same time, and it can reduce the overhead that individual showings can create.
• It can be more appealing to first-time home buyers, not yet familiar with the buying process.
• You can get exposure and create buzz about the respective property listing.
• It is more laid back, and there is less pressure for the potential buyer to make a decision.
• You can collect additional feedback from the visitors about the property to improve the offer.
• 20% of potential buyers looking for low- and mid-price points use open houses.
• 30% of all potential buyers in the luxury property segment go to open houses.

The Cons:

• The chances of a sale are lower (5%) compared to individual showings (10%).
• It will attract more tire kickers and just curious people.
• It can even attract some thieves who like some of the items used to stage some rooms.
• It can be cumbersome to host an efficient open house (a lot of preparation and pre-launch advertising).
• Only 6% of buyers found the home they purchased an open house sign.
• Here you can find a great complementary pro and con list about open houses.

How Do Open Houses Look Like Compared to Individual Showings?

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Real Estate Lead Cost – Should Realtors Buy Leads?

If you are or are about to be a realtor, you probably would like to know more about real estate lead costs.

Depending on many variables and factors, primarily your real estate marketing channels, your sales skills (including copywriting), and thus the conversion rates, the real estate lead cost will range between $11.60 and $1,200 per lead.

Would you like to learn how I got to these numbers?

The rest of the article will discuss them in-depth and explain why the cost per lead may not be the best metric.

Why There Is No General Answer to Real Estate Lead Costs

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just tell you, ‘My dear real estate agent, you will always pay exactly $30 per lead and will always convert 10% into a sale of a nice $600,000 property no matter what.’?

That would be almost heaven, with no uncertainties, guesswork, or costly marketing tests and mistakes.

You would know that by spending $300, you would get precisely ten leads and make one sale, earning you $600,000 x 5%=$30,000 in real estate commissions.

This would mean $300 would earn you $30,000 and thus give you an ROI of 10,000% of your $300 marketing investment.

Unfortunately, reality (maybe that’s not the case in the real estate market in Narnia) is not that nice.

And besides, having such steady numbers would mean dealing with predictable robots or the Bork from Star Trek as market participants.

So firstly, it depends on the target group you want to market to (buyers or sellers)

The next variables that affect it are the marketing channels you use to reach them, your copywriting quality, and your offer, which leads to a specific conversion rate.

Marketing channels can be roughly divided into digital marketing and offline marketing.

Since I don’t know whether you target buyers or sellers, I will give you a rough overview of the available channels.

For paid offline marketing channels, the following are available:

• Magazines (print ads)
• Press releases
• Newspapers
• Television
• Radio ads
• Flyers
• Direct mailing
• Cold calling (in general)
• Cold calling (calling expired listings)
• Calling FSBOs

For digital marketing channels (mostly paid advertising), the following are available:

• Your own web presence with content marketing/ SEO (this can be a hybrid consisting of your own time investment and/or outsourced work) via Blogs, Podcasts, Vlogs, etc.
• Email advertising
• PPC advertising on social media, such as Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.
• PPC search advertising or search engine marketing (SEM), such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.
• Real Estate Listing Sites
• Done-for-you real estate lead generation services
• Text message prospecting
• Push notification ads
• Native ads

So let’s get closer to the actual numbers. How?

I will pick marketing channels with enough data about real estate lead costs. Where there is not, I will approach it with a short calculation based on logic.

Before we get into the different marketing channels, let’s establish a basis to calculate the costs per lead to better estimate channels where secondary data wasn’t available during my research.

Before We Can Calculate Some Real Estate Lead Costs, We Need Lead Conversion Rates

In my article about real estate prospecting conversion rates, I analyzed and included the new data from 2022, which we can also use here.

Ads in magazines fall under the print ads category.

I couldn’t find any reliable hard data about print ad conversion rates during my research.

This is likely because it’s not a type of advertising that can be as easily measured as digital advertising. This is even more true when it comes to press releases.

Additionally, most companies using these two methods won’t publicly make this data available.

So, in this case, we assume the generic conversion rate of 1-3% to calculate the cost per lead later on for both.

The data situation for newspaper advertising conversion rates is not much better. But I could find some data, even though it was not enough.

According to this source, the average conversion rate for newspaper ads is allegedly 44% (between 10 and 77%).

Yes, radio still exists too, and so do radio ads. In my article about prospecting conversion rates, I found out that they have a conversion rate of 14%.

According to this source, when it comes to flyers, the conversion rate is between 2% and 3%, so an average of 2.5%.

The situation is slightly better with direct mailing, where the conversion rate is 6.6%.

Regarding cold calling, you can expect a conversion rate of 2% (source).

There are more sources for content marketing, but I hoped to cross-reference more than five. According to this source, the conversion rate for content marketing is 2.9%.

I also discussed email advertising in my article about real estate prospecting, and there I mentioned a conversion rate of 1.4%.

No decently reliable data about conversion rates of real estate listing sites were available.

The same is true for the different marketing platforms that offer you done-for-you real estate lead generation, such as Zurple and the others I mentioned.

But that’s no biggy since data about the costs per lead are directly available, at least for the three major ones Zillow (Premium Agent), Trulia, and Realtor.com.

And related to the done-for-you services, costs per lead could be calculated based on the monthly costs and the number of leads you can expect to get from them.

According to this 2021 data, the conversion rates in the real estate field range from 3.9% on Google Ads (source) to 10.68% on Facebook Ads (source).

I must say, and excuse my French, but Twitter sucks a bit in terms of click-through rates. It’s between 0.45 (organic Tweets) and 0.86 (Ads)%.

In my article, I calculated that it’s even worse regarding Twitter Ad to landing page conversion rate, which is ~0.02%.

I already covered in this article why it’s not the best lead generation method.

Bing Ads look quite good compared to Google Search Ads. Specifically, within the real estate industry, you can expect a conversion rate of 5.13% (source).

Remember that the costs per click are often lower than on Google since the platform is not that well-known and in demand.

You can expect 15% for push notification ads, native ads a 0.3% to 22%, and text message prospecting at a 16% conversion rate, as already covered in this article.

Also, for all the data above, depending on the marketing channel, the target audience will be in a different product/service awareness stage, so you can’t compare the numbers directly.

This means that someone searching for real estate-related things on Google has already decided about their interest in real estate.

This is even clearer when someone types in the search phrase “houses for sale in XYZ.”

Whereas on Facebook, someone could just watch a cat video found on a friend’s wall and then get “interrupted” by a Facebook ad about real estate just because they liked a video about a nice home once.

The potential lead might still have more interest in buying a new cat house than an actual one.

All this will determine the quality of the lead you generate.

You could say the earlier the potential lead is in the product/service awareness stage, the lower the lead quality.

That’s why many people say you may get many leads on Facebook, but the lead quality is not the best.

For the overview table at the beginning of this article, I calculated the average lead-to-appointment conversion rates based on the available data.

And the overall average is 8.48%. But this number doesn’t say much. Because of the real estate lead costs, we will have to calculate individually for each marketing channel.

So, let’s do this next.

How Much Do Real Estate Leads Cost?

This section will finally cover how much real estate leads cost across different marketing channels available.

To make this section even more complete, I also included the data I collected and calculated in my article about real estate prospecting rates.

So I will either calculate the costs of the following real estate marketing channels based on the conversion rates and/ or use already existing data :

• Magazines (print ads)
• Press Releases
• Television ads
• Radio ads
• Flyers
• Direct mailing
• Cold calling
• Calling expired listings
• Calling FSBOs
• Content marketing/SEO
• Email marketing
• Zillow (Premier Agent)
• Trulia
• Realtors.com
• Facebook ads (social PPC advertising)
• LinkedIn ads (social PPC advertising)
• Twitter ads (social PPC advertising)
• Google ads (search PPC advertising)
• Bing ads (search PPC advertising)
• Push notifications
• Native ads
• Text message prospecting
• LeadPops (done for you real estate lead generation)
• Street Text (done for you real estate lead generation)
• Zurple (done for you real estate lead generation) 
• Ylopo (done for you real estate lead generation)
• Offrs (done for you real estate lead generation) 
• Chime for real estate (done for your real estate lead generation features) 

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Print, Radio, and TV Ads and Press Releases (Traditional Marketing)

Calculating the real estate lead costs for print, radio, and tv ads and press releases is challenging based on the available data.

Why?

Because different magazines, radio, and TV stations have different reaches and costs.

Luckily I found some secondary data during my research that had already determined the average costs per lead from print, radio, and tv ads and press releases.

Consider it a ballpark since it’s not data particular to the real estate industry.

According to this source, you can expect to pay between $37 and $1200 per lead for print and tv ads and $294 for press releases.

In my article about real estate prospecting rates, I already calculated the costs for radio ads based on data from other sources. You can expect to pay $75.12 per lead for these ads.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Flyers and Direct Mailing

These lead costs are easier to calculate since there is more control over the reach data. If you print and deliver 1000 flyers or direct mail, then your reach will usually be also 1000 (unless something goes wrong with the delivery).

You can read about direct mailing in this in-depth article.

The cost per lead for direct mailing resulted in $24.46.

I have not yet calculated the cost per lead for flyers, so I will do it now.

Since flyers have a conversion rate of 2.5%, you will need to deliver 40 flyers to generate one lead (1 divided by 2.5%).

To print 40 flyers, you will need to pay 4.3 cents per flyer (source). That is a total printing cost of $1.72.

But that’s unfortunately not yet your cost per lead. You will need to factor in the labor costs to deliver 40 flyers.

We can estimate that you can deliver 40 flyers in a crowded street within one hour.

Let’s assume a slightly above minimum wage of $10 per hour for someone handing out flyers and add on top a one-hour drive (half-hour to the place of delivery and half an hour back).

Now we are talking two hours of work which is $20 for labor costs.

We will neglect the design costs, but you might want to add them if you use a really professional design and a pro-copywriter for the flyer.

So the total costs are now $21.72 to generate one lead with flyers.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Cold Calling, Calling Expired Listings, and FSBOs

All three marketing methods can be put in the same category: cold calling.

And here, I already determined that the lead-to-appointment conversion rate is, on average, 2%, and the cost per lead is $86.40.

At first glance, you may think that it’s basically free since you just use your phone.

But you will need to make approximately 50 calls to make one conversion (1 divided by 2% conversion rate).

Assuming you can do 12 calls per hour, it would take slightly more than 4 hours.

An hourly rate of $21.60 would get you $86.40 to convert one lead into an appointment.

If you want to be really exact, you would need to factor in your monthly phone bill and calculate what you pay for your phone per hour and multiply that by 4.

Also, the time you need to collect the phone numbers you call from different sources or the cost per “skip traced” contact.

All that would need to be added to the $86.40.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Content Marketing

Although the concrete source of the data they attained from the web is unclear, according to this source, the average cost per lead of content marketing is $92.

However, the author seems to have worked with 5000 companies and may have gotten the data from there.

During my research, I couldn’t find the particular cost-per-lead data for real estate content marketing.

According to my experience, this number is likely lower.

Why? Let me explain.

The above source shows that the lead conversion rate for content marketing (blog articles) is 2.9%. Per lead, you would need 35 visits.

Suppose you get an average of 200 visits per blog post ranking on page one of Google.

You can get this result by conducting a good search and competition analysis and producing quality content.

To generate 17 leads per month, you would need 583 visits.

And to produce this number of visits, you need to write 30 articles assuming you get it right with the content quality, search, and competition analysis in 10% of the cases.

Assuming a time requirement per blog post of four hours would result in 120 total hours of your time to produce that content.

If you have an hourly rate of $21.60, the total cost would be $2,592.

Now we break the annual website hosting and domain expenses down to the per lead basis, and you can assume $166 per year.

So the monthly website hosting and domain costs per lead (assuming your goal is 17 leads) will be $0.83

Can you divide the $2,592 by 17 leads and add the $0.83 per lead (hosting and domain costs)?

You shouldn’t because this would assume the articles wouldn’t generate leads anymore after one month.

But we can assume that once it ranks, it could stay on the first page of Google for two years without making significant improvements.

So the actual cost per lead is $7.31. ($2,592 divided by 17 leads divided by 24 months plus $0.83).

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Email Marketing

Calculating the cost per lead for email marketing is a bit more tricky.

Why?

You also have to factor in that you usually do a lead nurturing campaign with several touchpoints once you get a new email address.

I already explained a more thorough calculation in this article.

The cost per lead for email marketing is $154.50 if you apply the maximum number of recommended touchpoints in an email nurturing campaign of eight.

Of course, it could be even half if you have 16 touchpoints. But for the sake of going with ideal numbers, let’s stay with eight touchpoints.

The Real Estate Leads Cost of Well-Known Real Estate Listing Platforms

These are the 13 well-known real estate listing platforms:

• Zillow
• Trulia
• LoopNet
• RealtyTrac
• Apartments.com
• Rent.com
• Movoto
• Apartment Guide
• HotPads
• ForRent.com
• Homes.com
• Redfin
• Compass

I picked the two major ones and calculated the average costs per lead.

Zillow (Premier Agent):

There wasn’t much to calculate since secondary data was available. The average cost per lead ranges between $20-$60 (an average of $40).

Trulia:

No secondary data was available for Trulia, so I needed to calculate the cost per lead.

The cost per month to list a rental property there is $29.

According to this source, they have 23 million visitors per month, and according to Trulia itself, over 1 million homes are listed.

So, a listing from you wouldn’t get 23 million visitors (that would be nice), but rather about 23 million divided by 1 million homes, which would be 23 visitors per month (assuming an equal share of the traffic).

Applying the 4% conversion rate above would mean barely one lead (0.92 leads) per month per listing.

Thus we can deduce that the cost per lead per property you list would be $29.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Facebook Ads and Google Ads

This one was also a bit easier to research.

This website and this one already have some good information about that, particularly for the real estate industry.

You pay $44.70 on Google Ads, and on Facebook Ads, you pay $16.52 per lead.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of LinkedIn Ads

I calculated the cost per lead of LinkedIn Ads already in my article.

Generally, you can get between a 5% and 15% conversion rate with LinkedIn traffic.

And you pay $105.20 per lead, while the lead quality is the highest compared to other social media platforms, as mentioned in the statistics in my article.

The Real Estate Lead Costs of TikTok Ads

The real estate lead costs of TikTok Ads are based on my estimation in my article “How to Use TikTok in Real Estate.”

Also, this estimation is based on the slightly better measurable TikTok ad type of “Invideo Ads” and a cost per a cost-per-mill impression basis (CPM) of roughly $1.82.

Since there is not much performance data about TikTok ads yet, I market the cost per lead in the overview table as “with reservation.”

According to my calculation, this cost per lead is $1.37, and the conversion rate is 6.65%.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Twitter Ads?

In this article, I already analyzed Twitter quite a lot regarding marketing performance for the real estate industry.

On average, you pay $0.38 per click for Twitter ads (source).

With an average landing page conversion rate in real estate of 2.6%, you would need 38 clicks to generate one lead (1 divided by 2.6%).

This would be a cost per lead of $14.63 (38 clicks x $0.38).

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Bing Ads

I have not yet analyzed Bing ads for real estate in my articles.

Although small compared to Google Ads, it can be a great additional marketing channel since it is often overlooked.

Most often, the costs per click are between 33% (source) and 60% (source) lower than on Google ads.

The average cost per click is $2.88, the average conversion rate is 5.13%, and the average cost per lead is $29.40 for the real estate industry (source).

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Push Notifications

I had reservations about the lead costs of push notifications in my article about prospecting rates since my calculation resulted in a cost per lead of a ridiculously low $0.70.

This might be true since the costs per click start at $0.1 per click (source).

Why did I have my reservations?

Because most of the data gathered for these costs come from campaigns in industries with lower price tag items.

I suspect that the costs may actually be 5 to 6 times higher for real estate. I would be pretty curious about the lead quality, then.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Native Ads

I consider the situation of native ads similar to the one with push notifications.

In the same article I mentioned above, I calculated the conversion rate and costs per lead.

The result was a cost per lead of $9.99 and the lowest conversion rate of 0.3% that I could apply.

These numbers should also be taken with one or two grains of salt since it’s not yet that common to advertise real estate via native ads that often.

It would also be interesting to know how the quality of leads would turn out here.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Text Message Marketing

With text message marketing, almost the same conditions apply to cold calling.

Most of the costs per lead depend on the hourly rate; you could also add your phone bill and the time cost to collect the phone numbers.

In the same article mentioned above, I calculated a cost per lead for text message marketing of $21.60 with a conversion rate of 16%.

The Real Estate Lead Cost of Done-for-You Real Estate Lead Generation Providers

I have already reviewed real estate marketing providers that, among other things, offer done-for-you real estate lead generation in different articles.

The mentioned providers are LeadPops, Street Text, Zurple, Ylopo, Offrs, and Chime.

Each of the links will take you to the respective review. In these articles, I calculated the following costs per real estate lead:

• LeadPops (lead generation on Facebook): $3.30 – $12.43
• LeadPops (lead generation on Google): $50 – $132
• Street Text: $75.24
• Zurple: $32.27
• Ylopo: $11.60-$14
• Offrs: $117.76
• Chime: $8.57 to $14

Is it a Good Idea to Focus on Costs per Lead?

At first, this might be a good idea.

But let’s take, for example, the average cost per lead from Facebook, which is between $46.53 and $77.48.

Do leads from Facebook have the same quality as leads from, let’s say, Google Ads that cost you $64.07?

I wouldn’t necessarily say so.

You have to work a lead from Facebook more often through a funnel to convert further into a customer who wants to do a showing than from a Google Ad if you target your audience with a buyer intent keyword such as ‘Houses for sale in New York.’

In the latter case, the potential customer is closer to ‘solution awareness‘ than the Facebook audience being more often in the ‘unawareness stage’ and interrupted by your campaign.

If you factor in the lead-to-closing ratio, it will paint a different picture.

The lead-to-closing ratio asks how many leads you need to close a real estate deal.

This data depends a lot on your sales skills.

What happens if you apply this to your marketing channels?

You may find out that a particular marketing channel that seems to have at first glance, high costs per lead turns out to be cheaper since the leads give you a better closing rate.

Should Realtors Buy Leads?

It’s not about the cost per lead but the quality of the lead or, even better, the lead-to-closing ratio, which heavily depends on your sales skills.

How does it help if you get a cost per lead down to, let’s say, 10 cents with a lead-to-closing ratio or closing rate of 0.002%?

You would basically have marketing costs of 10 cents divided by 0,002% equals $20,000 to close one deal with this ratio, or put in other words, a cost per sale of $20,000.

This would also mean that you had a sales problem.

With a $600,000 property giving you a full 5% commission, this would still mean a profit ($30,000-$20,000) of $10,000.

But things could get a bit ugly once you get into average housing prices and might even have to split a commission.

So in my humble opinion, the better question to ask would be:’ What’s the cost per sale for the marketing channels you use?

So should realtors buy leads?

Provided you have a well-oiled sales process and do not yet have your own working lead generation process, as a realtor, you may want to give it a try to buy leads for a limited time.

Remember, in (real estate) marketing, it’s all about testing.

Suppose you don’t yet have your own working lead generation process.

In that case, buying leads from different providers can be a great option to get real estate leads faster than going through the process of testing and improving real estate marketing campaigns across different channels for several months.

The important thing here is that you stay aware of the quality of the leads you are provided with, and they should at least be exclusive.

Before you conclude that the leads provided are bad quality, you may also want to take a critical look at your sales process, and whether it might be a sales problem you might have instead of being bad leads.

Therefore, your sales process and skills should be in good shape before testing this method, so you can exclude this factor right from the beginning as a possible cause for bad results.

If you can exclude sales as being the problem, I would move on to the next provider or real estate marketing method.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Track These 7 Most Important Real Estate Marketing KPIs and Win

Do you like to throw money at different marketing channels, don’t get any results and don’t know why you didn’t get the expected results?

Well, me neither.

But this happens when you have a list of different marketing channels you plan to use based on your real estate marketing plan but don’t track anything (real estate marketing KPIs).

And if something is not working as expected and you don’t see it as a testing experiment that takes a longer time, you just switch to the next one and then rinse and repeat.

By not tracking anything, I mean specific key performance indicators that will happen regularly.

That’s why this article will discuss the seven most important real estate marketing KPIs you can track and, by doing so, increase your chances of turning an unprofitable campaign profitable.

But it also will help you make better decisions so you can ditch a marketing channel that doesn’t make sense at all anymore, performance-wise.

What Are Real Estate Marketing KPIs and Their Benefits?

You may have heard the saying, “What you can’t measure can’t be managed.”

This quote comes from the management thinker Peter Drucker and there is a lot of truth to it.

It is where key performance indicators, “KPIs” for short, come in.

They are measurable values that can show you how well or not so well you are reaching a real estate business goal.

When it comes to marketing or real estate marketing, these values or metrics are related to the goals of a particular marketing campaign or several marketing campaigns for your real estate business.

Another one of their benefits is that they will help you iterate through and test different real estate marketing channels.

They help you find out which marketing channel to throw out and which to keep, focus on, or scale.

They are always important, but even more so when you start with a new real estate marketing channel and still have a long way of testing ahead of you.

Without them, you will fly blind and probably spend more money than you want to.

The 7 Most Important Real Estate Marketing KPIs to Track

There are many different KPIs in the world of business; the only type relevant for real estate marketing will be quantitative indicators.

These are indicators that can be represented with a number.

There are many others out there, and for the sake of a complete article, I will mention them shortly below.

These are the other types of key performance indicators there are besides the quantitative ones (discussed in this article):

• Leading indicators predicting the outcome of a process
• Input indicators that determine the number of resources necessary to generate an outcome
• Lagging indicators that help you find successes and failures after an event
• Output indicators that measure the results of certain process activities
• Directional indicators show you if an organization is getting better or not.
• Financial indicators
• Qualitative indicators that can’t be shown as a number.

Now, let’s come to the important marketing KPIs to track.

1) Real Estate Website Traffic Volume

This important marketing key performance indicator is a huge one in itself.

It’s one of the reasons Google Analytics exists.

There are many different subgroups of how you can track website traffic.

In my article about Google Analytics for real estate, I discussed how you could do that.

The amount of traffic you get to your real estate website is important to know.

Firstly, without traffic, you won’t be able to generate that many leads, at least in the digital world.

You will be able to see how your traffic is behaving and if it even arrives at the different contact forms you might have on your property listing pages or on different landing pages from where you want to generate your leads.

One of the important things to track here is the number of unique visitors, the page views, the devices (mobile or desktop) they use to visit your website, and especially where they come from.

The latter will give you clues on which marketing campaigns you run bring in the largest share of traffic (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, DirectMail, content marketing (SEO), etc.).

Or, if you realize that 80% of the traffic comes from mobile devices, but your real estate website uses IDX property pages with “mobile-unfriendly” iframes, you might leave money on the table by not improving this situation.

2) Click-Through Rates (CTR)

The click-through rate is an important key performance indicator to determine how well you persuade visitors to click on what you are offering.

This content can be made of ads you are running on different platforms, general content, different real estate website web pages, and search results you appear on in search engines such as Google.

It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks you get by the number of impressions (ads shown, organic rankings shown, etc.).

A high click-through rate in paid digital advertising usually means lower costs per click.

And in terms of Google organic rankings, it means that you have better chances to improve your rankings.

Why?

It’s an indirect ranking signal for Google (source).

You can also measure the CTRs of paid digital advertising campaigns against different averages in the industry to find out how well you are doing.

If, for example, your Facebook Ads get a CTR of 0.6%, you will learn that this is below the industry average.

The average CTR of real estate ads on Facebook is 0.98% (source).

3) Costs per Click (CPC)

The cost-per-click indicator is easy to understand, but it doesn’t give that much helpful information for decision-making.

You can track how a particular digital advertising campaign performs in terms of costs.

It shouldn’t be used alone to make decisions on which marketing channel to choose or to focus on.

The following indicators I will mention are way better for that.

But what you can see with it is if you manage to reduce your costs per click over time by increasing your click-through rates of a particular campaign.

4) Conversion Rates (Form, Listings, Landing Pages)

This marketing key performance indicator measures how many visitors complete your determined goal.

And the goals can be many and different.

It can be an email list sign-up, a contact to schedule a showing for a specific property, or a contact to schedule a pre-visit for a potential seller.

In e-commerce, it can also be a sale of a product that was done on a website.

The goal of a real estate website is usually to generate a buyer or seller lead by using some sort of contact form.

Conversion rates are calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of total ad or website interactions over a period of time.

For example, if you can see that your property listing page contact form was interacted with 200 times during one month and ten potential buyers contacted you from there, you have a conversion rate of 5% (10 divided by 200).

The conversion rate will also give clues about how well your offer is doing and meeting the needs of your potential clients.

For example, if you get a higher conversion rate on a certain property listing than on others, it indicates that it is likely the right fit for more people, and it might also be priced better.

In the context of paid traffic campaigns, you can also compare with that specific platform’s average industry conversion rates.

Google Ads, for example, gives you an average conversion rate of 2.47% in the real estate industry (source).

Knowing that number lets you see how well your campaign is doing or if there is room for improvement.

5) Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

I’ve often mentioned CPA as a key marketing performance indicator on my blog.

While click-through and conversion rates already give you valuable information that you might need to improve, the cost per acquisition can better measure what it actually costs to acquire a lead or a qualified client from a certain marketing channel.

Let’s take an example to show you the difference.

When you get 200 clicks to a landing page from paid LinkedIn ads, you may pay $5.26 per click, which means total cost of $1,052 to get these clicks.

From these clicks, 10% convert into 20 leads (10% conversion rate).

Your cost to acquire one lead would be $52.60 (cost per acquisition).

Let’s assume you also have another ad campaign running on Google Ads where you get 400 clicks to your landing page, pay $0.80 per click, and have a conversion rate of 5%.

If you compare both conversion rates directly without taking the cost per acquisition into consideration, you may prematurely conclude that LinkedIn is better.

But when we calculate the cost per acquisition for the second Google Ads campaign, we will get quite a different final conclusion.

The total cost to generate 400 clicks is $320.

We get the same amount of leads of 20 out of these clicks (5% conversion rate), and pay $16 per lead (acquisition cost).

So, when we use this performance indicator, we can see that the second marketing channel (Google Ads) is better in terms of costs per lead, even though the conversion rate is much worse.

6) Cost per Sale

The following key performance indicator for real estate marketing you may want to track is the cost per sale.

This one is not that easy to track since it involves your marketing campaign activities and your sales activities until you close a deal.

You can calculate it by adding the costs per acquisition and the costs involved in generating one sale or closing.

For example, if you need five qualified leads to generate one sale from the above LinkedIn ads example, you will have to multiply $52.60 (CPA) by 5, which is $263.

You may also have to add the costs involved in follow-up with the generated leads by using direct mail, making calls, or other follow-up activities that you will see fit.

Ignoring these additional costs, the cost per sale or cost per closing would be $263.

This performance indicator is even a bit more accurate and reliable than the cost per acquisition because it also gives you information about the quality of the leads.

Why is that?

You may need five qualified leads from LinkedIn and 20 from the Google Ads campaign, which would mean a cost per sale for the latter of 20x $16 (CPA from Google Ads above), which is $320.

All things being equal, in terms of follow-up and sales performance, it would mean that in the given examples, somehow, leads from LinkedIn have a higher quality and convert better into actual closings or sales.

The performance indicator could also be used to track different agents you work with that get their leads from the same lead sources.

And you can also calculate how much money you have to spend to reach a certain revenue goal and if it is feasible with the marketing channel you measure it with because some marketing channels won’t allow you to scale up without limits.

For example, in Google Ads, some local keywords just don’t bring enough monthly volume, and just throwing more money at it won’t make it go up.

In this case, you might know that you would either need to add another marketing channel, test with new additional keywords, or expand to other geographic areas.

7) Online and Offline Marketing ROI

Generally, the Marketing ROI (return on investment) is the gross profit minus the marketing investment divided by the marketing investment.

Here is the formula:

Marketing ROI = (Gross Profit – Marketing Investment) divided by Marketing Investment

This one is even the next level up from the priorly-mentioned cost per sale.

It answers not only the question of the cost to generate one sale or closing but also factors in the gross profit generated by a particular marketing campaign.

This information is good when you want a good first glance at which marketing campaigns are the most profitable ones.

But it won’t tell you much about what you might need to change to make a profitable one.

So, you won’t get much insight into the inner workings of a campaign than click-through rates, conversion rates, costs per acquisition, or costs per sale will give you.

It’s the best one to look at first to get a bird’s eye view as a CEO or CEO of a Brokerage firm.

And depending on these numbers, you want to have a closer look at other ones afterward so you know where and which elements you will need to improve (the copy, the offer, etc.) in a particular real estate marketing campaign.

Bonus: KPIs in Social Media Marketing for Real Estate

In social media, it’s much easier to fall for “vanity metrics”, such as shares and likes.

Especially “Likes” can only be vanity metrics if you don’t do anything else other than collecting likes in a Like-campaign on Facebook.

But if, for example, you use the same campaign that was a like campaign before and after collecting a number of them you switch to a lead campaign, you may get your conversion rates up because of the social proof you generated with the like campaign beforehand.

And a lot of shares can also get your costs per click and overall advertising costs down.