The world of real estate is hard to break into, whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned agent. With a saturated sales-driven market, it can be easy to spread yourself thin, unless you take the right steps.

As a real estate agent working in a new era, it is your job to keep up with the trends. The best digital marketing strategies will help you build your sphere of influence to get you closer to your modern-day clientele.

How to Find Real Estate Clients

While specializing in a specific real estate niche, creating a database of contacts, and talking to prospective real estate clients will help put you on track, in-person networking will not be enough to sustain your small business. The only way that you can truly build success for your business will be to bring your network online to penetrate a larger market.

Additionally, by moving your networking online, you can gain a better foothold in the real estate field and increase your own competitive edge. This will help you to better run your business and become more successful compared to your competitors.

Forty-four percent of buyers look for properties online, and your competitors might already be taking advantage of this data. Using yourself and your brand as the bait, it is time to fish the larger pond that is online real estate.

Word of Mouth

When you’re first trying to learn how to find real estate clients, the first skill you will rely upon will be in-person networking. You will want to find referrals and networking opportunities from the people you know in the real estate industry or friends and family members who know someone in the real estate market.

Word of mouth can be a great way to find real estate clients but it isn’t nearly as effective as other sources. One of the many reasons why it can be ineffective is that people may not remember your contact details and those referrals will fall through the cracks.

Buy or Find Leads

Leads are lists of potential and current homeowners that you can contact by making phone calls to see if they want to do business with you. Buying leads can be a good strategy but it should only be used as a supplement. With a large number of agents bidding on the same leads, this strategy isn’t unique anymore and can lead to wasted time.

It is important to recognize that buying leads may get you the phone number of many potential clients in real estate, it isn’t nearly as good as the organic lead generation that can be accomplished through digitally marketing yourself with a website.

Use Social Media

Another way to find real estate buyers and sellers is by marketing yourself and your business with social media. Social media can be part of a long term marketing strategy as part of your successful real estate career. Social media can be a great way to not only sell a property but to also find new leads.

Instagram, for example, is visited daily by 59 percent of millennials, the largest group of first-time home buyers. With social media platforms, you can have meaningful interactions with your audience, advertise your properties for sale, and establish your online presence and set yourself up as an expert.

Get Local Press

If you’re looking for a way to find new real estate clients, it can be a good idea to get some local press. The local press allows you to market your brand effectively and is a great way to have potential clients reach out to you. Many people find someone that was either in their local newspaper or on their favorite local television station to be trustworthy.

The best thing to do with the local press you’ve received is to include it in your marketing materials, like your real estate business’ website. When you include your local press information on your website, it can help you to gain attention from many new clients who will have seen you give your expert opinion in local newspapers and on local television stations.

Build A Website

The best advice for how to find real estate clients is to build a website for your business. Did you know that 90 percent of homebuyers look to the internet as part of their first step in searching for a home? Think about the commissions you could gain by using the internet as part of the way that you market your real estate business.

The difference between making over $150,000 a year and struggling to make ends meet as a Realtor can be a website. According to the National Association of Realtors, 82 percent of agents that make over $150,000 a year have a website. When you have a professional real estate website, you allow yourself to be seen by the millions of potential clients searching for homes every day.

Why Build a Website for Your Real Estate Business

In our modern world, first impressions tend to be created online and a professional website is your ticket to making a good first impression. While you may be thinking that there’s no need to build a website because you have all the other lead generation tools in your back pocket, there are many reasons why you need a website for your real estate business.

1. A Real Estate Website Improves Branding

As a Realtor, your personal brand is important. While many brokerage firms may provide you with your own unique webpage, this will only help you as long as you are with that firm. If you ever decide to switch firms or branch out on your own, you will lose all the hard work you may have put into building up the visibility of your page.

As a Realtor, your main goal should be to stand out from your competition. Having your own website helps you to brand yourself better and put the spotlight on your accomplishments as opposed to the collective accomplishments of your realty brokerage.

While it may be tempting to choose a drag and drop website, it is best to have a custom-built website as this will help you to further improve the way you brand yourself. While these drag-and-drop websites like Wix may be cheap, but you’ll look like everyone else. If you really want to make money as a Realtor, make sure you have a custom website for your business.

2. Use Your Real Estate Website to Create a Virtual Business Card

As a Realtor, you may have gotten into the habit of giving out your business card when you interact with others on a professional and sometimes even a personal level. If you don’t have a website, one important point of contact is missing from your business card.

Additionally, while a business card may look professional, your website is what will stick in the mind of most of your customers. According to statistics, 88 percent of all business cards are thrown out within a week.

A website; however, will always remain there on the internet and when those clients who had your business card go looking for you, they will be more likely to look to see if they saved your website on their phone or computer browser. Besides, with a website, they can just do a quick google search for your name and find you.

3. A Real Estate Website Will Help Increase Your Sales

If you have a website, you will have a place to show off videos of the properties you are selling. With 73 percent of all homeowners saying that they would prefer to list their home with a real estate agent that uses video, you need to have a website to show off the homes you are trying to sell.

Not only can you use your website to show off videos of your properties, you absolutely must have a website if you want to run Google Ads. While you may be able to use a Google My Business account to run a Google Ad, you’ll be better off with a website.

With more than 40 percent of all clicks going to a Google search ad, you absolutely need to have a comprehensive website to attract these motivated searchers. That’s right, people that click on an ad are 50 percent more likely to actually make a purchase.

4. A Realty Website is Useful for Referrals

Maybe you sold a home to someone earlier this year and now their friends want to buy a new home too. If you have a website for your Realty business, referrals will be easier to manage. As part of a virtual thank you package, you can send your former clients a special link to your website to give to their friends.

With special links, you can make it seem as though you remember each of your clients well. The link can be part of a CRM or customer relationship management system that you can integrate into your website if you have a custom-built Realtor website.

Using a CRM can help you in many ways but the most valuable way that a website-integrated Real Estate CRM can help you is by allowing you to know where your referrals came from. With all this information, you will look like an expert amongst experts, which is exactly what will help you to stand out from all the other real estate agents and help you do more business.

5. Use Your Realtor Website to Leverage Your Knowledge and Skill

It can be hard, especially as a new agent, to gain traction in the market. Even with a lot of positive reviews, homeowners can be hesitant to do business with you. However, if you include a blog on your real estate website, you can show potential clients looking for advice before they actually are ready to purchase or sell a home, to see you as an expert Realtor.

While many people do decide to do business with a real estate agent after a cursory search, many potential homebuyers and sellers are unsure of the process and will want to learn more before they embark on the journey. Remember, selling and buying a home is one of the most important decisions most people will ever have to make, giving them more information is a valuable prospect.

Blogs are seen as the fifth most trustworthy source for information online. If you want to be seen as trustworthy to potential real estate clients, it is important to have a blog and establish yourself as a source of knowledge that can help them on their journey.

6. Use Your Real Estate Website to Capture New Leads

If you have performed proper SEO or search engine optimization on your custom-built Realtor website, many people who have never heard of you will find you through the search engine results pages or SERPs. With all these new and unique visitors you have a new way to capture new leads for your real estate business.

If you have a custom website for your Realty business, you can include forms that connect directly with your CRM system for improved customer service. You can easily start to work with these new potential clients with ease. Furthermore, because a website is always on, you have a way to capture new leads even in the middle of the night.

7. Your Real Estate Website Helps You Target Online Traffic

As we discussed, if you have a website you can use Google Ads, but you don’t have to rely on Google Ads to find new clients for your Realty business. You can better target your market’s portion of the 3.5 Billion people using Google to search daily for a Realtor.

If you have a mobile-responsive, SEO-friendly, and well-designed website, as can be created when you get a custom-built real estate website, you will find that many people in your area, who aren’t in your network can now find you.

With over 33,000 US searches conducted monthly (according to SEMrush’s Keyword Overview Tool) for the keywords “real estate agent near me” there are thousands of people looking for you online at any moment. If you want to easily connect with these people, you’ll need a real estate website.

8. Include Your Website on Your Social Media Accounts

You can drive traffic back to your website by linking it to your social media accounts, you can even add a button, also known as a call to action, to direct your followers to your website.

As a real estate agent, your website serves as your virtual head office and the core of your online presence. Center your marketing and link all other social pages and local directories there so customers expecting your online presence can look you up in one place.

9. Keep In Contact with Leads with Your Realty Website

You can use email marketing platforms to help you keep in contact with current, former, and prospective clients. Email marketing requires you to have your website’s visitors sign up to receive your newsletter and it can be a great way to keep clients up-to-date on new listings, new blog posts, and homes that have just sold.

Email marketing using your custom-built website is easy to integrate and can be very lucrative for your business. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, including building your website, you stand to gain $42 dollars. Email marketing through your website is a simple and effective way to help you gain and keep your real estate clients.

Your clients will be happy to see your newsletters. It will help them to see new properties that are on the market and for those homeowners looking to sell, it will help them to see that you are working hard at selling their home.

10. Use Your Realtor Website to Showcase Past Successes

Another excellent use for your website is to help you show off your past successes. It can help you to gain not only those clients looking to sell their homes, but can also help you attract new homebuyers.

You can create a page on your custom-built website that showcases the homes that you have sold and helped customers to buy. Future and current clients will see these past successes as evidence that you are great at your job. It will help you to increase their opinion of you as an authority.

It can be difficult to find new real estate clients but with a custom-built website, it will be like having a personal assistant working for you 24-hours a day. Your website will market your business, collect your leads, and help you to sell new homes without you having to lift a finger. All you have to do is contact Orange County web development agency, Idea Maker and you’ll be poised for success in the real estate market.