Digital Marketing for Realtors?

Realtors were quick to adopt IM years ago. I agree some do not use the net to its fullest potential but that is changing with virtual 'tours', etc.

If you use the forum search you'll find several threads about real estate and online marketing. Most have something in common with your statement above....

...they are new to real estate and looking for ways to make money OFF other
realtors. They want to do that without the years of building up clientele - or having the social contacts - top agents have accumulated..

There is good money to make - I put two sons through college as a RE agent and broker. Whether you can provide 'consulting' will depend on state law in the U.S. When I was an agent my pet peeve was all the salesmen who came through the door thinking of real estate professionals as a 'group' to sell to. They were almost always disappointed.

Good luck to your wife - it can be a fun job but it's a lot of work and, if you do well, a lot of hours. The internet can help pull in clients and advertise properties - but in the end it's a person to person job to earn commissions.

That's great for her! RE buyers can be extremely loyal if they identify with you as an agent. She'll have a ready made clientele.

As a fairly new agent way back when I sold a low cost house to a young South Korean family. It was a lot of work but I liked them and loved their kids who acted as interpreters for us. Over the next few years they sent me an avalanche of business from the Korean community. I had never seen that level of loyalty in business - impressive people.

I was a very successful Realtor from 2000 until 2008 doing 90% of my marketing online. I called it fishing upstream. I put myself in the mind of someone from out of town looking at real estate in my town. I was the only agent in my area that did zero newspaper ads.
So to answer your question, YES! there are many ways to leverage warrior tactics in your real estate business.

A digital marketing for businesses like Phlanx can help.

I Little bit agree for your opinion. finding inquiry of real estate sector is very easy but conversion rate of inquiry is very low. because customer need to verifying all possible confirmation before investing their money.

Realtors are a great group to market, this is the process I recommend:

* Go to google and seach and write the term you are interested to rank for.
* Copy the first results
* Verify what backlinks they are working for them ( I use http://www.linksspy.com to do this, but you can use other tools)
* If they are getting their backlinks from resource lists, then you can contact the owners of those pages and they will add you as well since you are a competitor.
* Or you can see where they are buying their bakclinks from.
* Or you can see if they are using a PBN and evaluate if you want to enter the competition and how much will cost you to rank.

I've helped realtors buy and sell homes with the use of internet marketing through my agency. You'll see that the best way to market right now for real estate is with a synergy of video marketing, SEO, Facebook ads, website funnels, email marketing.

If you don't have a large budget, I suggest starting strong with your video marketing. Get a nice base of informative videos on YouTube pertaining to the local area. Then, put your brand on the map in relevant areas for real estate like Zillow, advertise lightly on those sites. As the months go by, you'll get good traction because when people see your ads or other marketing materials (like fliers), they'll look you up, and they'll find the videos you made on YouTube, proving you have knowledge and are an expert. This is definitely a great way to start with a low budget and low risk - as you'll have no testimonials from actual clients yet.

That being said, I had my clients reach out to their mortgage lenders, title office reps, fellow realtors to get video testimonials from them in the beginning when they had none. Not posing as clients of course. But explaining what the good things are about working with you. (I suppose this whole time I'm saying "you" as in I'm talking to your wife lol.)

Hope that helps.

After a stint in real estate, I realized how competitive the space really is. New agents have to overcome incumbents that know everyone and their mothers in a community. However, these incumbents have a big weakness in that they don't change their process because their idea is that they are the best and don't need to change. I encourage you to look into different digital marketing ideas. If I could give you one piece of actionable advice, it would be to collect every single email you can get your hands on. Most industries have a hard time starting their email lists, but real estate is one that has huge potential for list building and profitability from it.

Tip #1. Open houses often have sign-in sheets. Hot lead emails.
Tip #2. Put lists through an email verifier.
Tip #3. Send out updates on the area's sales with blurbs on houses. Become aware.
Tip #4. Advertise expired listings for free and get buyer lead. Approach sellers.
Tip #5. Network and make sure you grab business cards. Instant list building.

Does anyone have success stories for Real Estate list building?

I actually found my realtor through an AdWords ad around 10 years ago...

I searched my city plus realtor and that same guy help me buy my first condo. True story.

Yes, Digital Marketing can help in your realtors business because It includes SEO, SMO & PPC techniques.

You can use an AdWords campaign to drive targeted local traffic to your real estate website.

As a real estate agency/agent, all you have to offer your clients is your marketing. The whole real estate industry revolves around the marketing of the willing sellers' property to attract qualified buyers.

I personally have leveraged radio, television and internet marketing to generate property sales, and buy investment properties, as a real estate investor.

I worked for a Luxury Real Estate company for 3 years doing SEO, and I can tell you that staying at the top for Real Estate is not an easy task when the big three Zillow, Realtor.com, and Trulia dominate.

They have an advantage over most local companies because of the sheer size of their websites, they have the IDX feed for most of the US. We remained competitive by competing at the local luxury level, focusing on long tail keywords instead of "generic town" home for sale.

This could be a great industry to get into... There are a couple companies focused on it that are gouging their customers and not really doing much but regurgitating the same website over and over.

I actually spent the last month trying to find a luxury company in my area who wanted to step up to the plate and I couldn't find one willing to spend the money it would take to get there.

If anyone reading this is in South Florida and wants to dominate the market for Luxury Real Estate, shoot me a message. We could totally take it over....

If anybody is interested in International Property Marketing. Qlistings will have a service over the next few months to empower agents to market their properties globally.

Its aimed at agents who have properties like holiday homes, vacation and investment properties which would be of interest to international customers.

I have had many Realtor clients over decades in online and offline media. In my experience, most Realtors face so much competition from other Realtors that they have to stay extremely disciplined about their costs.

As a result, many of them do their own online marketing or prefer to buy package solutions that they can handle themselves or with the help of an assistant (if they can afford one).

I'm not a Realtor, but my advice as a media person to anyone who wants to become a Realtor is that they should identify a niche and market as tightly as possible to that niche, such as zip code targeting with Google AdWords. Targeting dominates all media these days.

Thanks so much for the continued responses guys. There is a lot of useful information for me to digest in here.

I want my wife to dominate the Brazilians looking to relocate niche. I'm in Orlando, and we've had an explosion of Brazilians moving here to flee the horrible economy over there. Wife is Brazilian so she's perfectly set up to exploit that niche.

Problem we're dealing with now though is that she's not a realtor yet, and she needs to get experience. So we're not sure how to time it. Hoping she can work under a major realty firm to get experience under her belt, and do her own marketing on the side at the same time. That would be ideal.

Realtors usually target a specific area, or a few zip codes. Targeted keywords will help. If they are a part of a huge firm they probably don't need to pay for marketing themselves.

I see many people looking for realtors in local Facebook groups. She might want to start her own Facebook business page and start building a following.

Rose

Hello all!

I am "Hisma's" wife. He jumped here to ask all these questions when I started my class. Now that I have finished my class, passed the State Exam, and chose a broker to work for I am following this thread.

Thank you all for your tips.

I am definitely going to use all the social media tools. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter... all that I have in hand. As a new agent, I know I am going to work to have my name there. I am not afraid of working, and I am very happy that my success really depends on me.

Getting stuck into social media seems like a good plan, especially if you expect one of your strengths will be the ability to connect to and network with a particular community (the Brasilian one).

I would do some research into using Facebook ads, as I understand that done right they can be a very effective lead generation strategy. Same platform but of course a different approach to the Fbook social networking one.

This makes sense to you. And to me. And to many other sensible people. But you would be amazed at the number of hustlers around here who believe that because they recognize terms like "Facebook" and "Google" they are smarter than the rubes who aren't into IM as a biz-opp.

This is a model that has worked very well for others in many industries. Two examples come to mind. Joe Polish and carpet cleaners, and Rory Fatt with mom-and-pop restaurants. It could work very well for you and your wife, too.

I'm over on the Gulf coast, and I see several successful sellers using the ability to speak another language (Spanish, German, Russian, etc) as a competitive advantage. Your wife takes that one step further by actually coming from the culture of her clients.

Embrace new ways of doing things. Back when I sold my last house to move to Florida, I created a web site to showcase the house, using the address as the URL. When I did it, I couldn't find anyone else doing it. Now, it's common.

Today, things like video walkthroughs (not just a virtual tour) with commentary, or having a drone show aerial pictures/video of the property might be something to experiment with.

I'd also recommend locking down her name as a domain. Many of the successful agents in my area have multiple web addresses, usually both an agency/broker url and a personal one. If her broker doesn't allow personal websites for promotion, she can use it to blog about her chosen area, the community at large, etc. Even better if she can do it bilingually. (Do Brazilians speak Spanish? Someone told me once that they spoke Portuguese.)

Good luck to you both.

Instagram Instagram Instagram. If you're a realtor without a kick-ass Instagram you need to get one immediately, the platform was practically built for proffessions like realtors where images are important. I recently talked to a realtor who tripled his business when he shifted focus from google ads to Instagram. Even people like Fredrik Eklund mention how big of a deal Instagram is to his business.

If you ever have any questions about Instagram or social media don't hesitate to shoot me a pm, I'll make sure to reply whenever I'm available.

Thanks for the continued responses guys! I never expected to get this much feedback.

So far we bought a domain that we'll use as a personal website. We may have broken one of the cardinal rules, as it's not a ".com", but I just love how the custom tld matches up w/ the domain name. The domain name is literally the name of our target neighborhood. The neighborhood name is fairly long (10 characters), so we decided on <neighborhoodname>.properties. It flows well and is unambiguous, imo.

Now to start learning how to leverage fb & instagram to promote properties. Wife has already started making videos, and they're all dual language. We're in brazil and passing out flyers (provided by the broker), but to me it feels like a waste of time unless we can target actual potential investors.

What I'm finding so far is the broker my wife is working with is really good (they do 3D walkthroughs etc), but for the most part they don't know a lick about digital marketing. Still seems the industry as a whole is behind the times (in her training they suggested going door-to-door to solicit business is still worth attempting).

That's probably because it's the same as it would be for Internet Marketing, but just for realtor's:

Targeted Facebook Ads (or other traffic source) -> Squeeze page/Lead page about houses in the area -> send potential customers offers.

Also, there is quite a bit of info on how to use IM for realtors, and tons of squeeze page templates are realtor specific.

this niche is very very competitive.

I live in the pacific NW and all the techies are millionaires.
ok what gets their attention ?
you have to offer something * extra * that others are not.
the virtual 3d models of homes and robots are in.

gone are the days " oh you are from xxx and I will buy from you ".
my brother is in luxury real estate in Hawaii;
Hawaii has become the playground of billionaires.

so we are thinking outside of the box always. following. thank you.