06 Oct Organize Your Sphere of Influence for Real Estate Referrals

Getting all your real estate contacts in order is the first crucial step toward consistently reaching your entire sphere of influence. Whether you’re a new or seasoned agent, your referral business is a vital portion of your pipeline.

You can only connect with your current clients, past clients, referral sources, and prospects if you have an organized central database of your contacts.

How Can Your Sphere of Influence Help You In Real Estate?

Your sphere of influence is a network of people you know on one level or another. Try grouping your real estate referrals into three categories: first-tier, second-tier, and third tier. Your first-tier connections are those you know personally, such as a spouse or family member. A second-tier connection could be a colleague, and a third-tier connection might be a neighbor or acquaintance.

Why are these people important to your real estate business? Because they all offer some kind of opportunity for you. Someone in your sphere of influence could be moving or know someone who is moving. Your network offers an infinite amount of real estate referral business.

Who’s In Your Sphere of Influence?

• Close family members
• Close friends
• Extended family
• Colleagues
• Neighbors
• Acquaintances
• Your children’s teachers
• Your spouse’s friends

Most agents know how important their sphere of influence is, but few are using it to its full advantage.

How to Organize Your Sphere of Influence to Get More Real Estate Referrals

The simplest way to get your contacts organized is to merge them all into a spreadsheet. Then you can start organizing by what level of connection they are to you: “client,” “prospect” and “referral source” may be a useful way to initially identify individuals. It is also important to include all contact information you have for each person in your spheres of influence, such as email addresses, complete physical addresses, and home, office, and cell phone numbers.

As time moves on, you may also decide to tag individuals with additional demographic information based on whether or not they are vacation home buyers, senior citizens, residents of certain trendy districts or neighborhoods, event attendees, or other information that will help you group segments of your contact list together.

The Best Ways to Connect with Your Sphere of Influence

The initial outreach can seem a bit daunting, but there are simple email marketing tools you can use to get started. One of the best ways to stay top of mind with home-buyers is through consistently reaching out with an email newsletter campaign. Providing e-newsletters featuring great content about real estate news and trends will give you an edge with home-buyers. Plus, some platforms (like HomeActions™) will even help build your real estate marketing database for you.

How To Ask for Referrals

When you ask someone in your sphere of influence for a referral, mention a recent article in your email newsletter about home prices, for example, and ask your contact if they know anyone who is moving and might be interested in current low home prices in your area. Always be on the lookout for ways to create new opportunities with the people you meet.

Visit HomeActions.net, and let us help you get organized with a real estate marketing database that we’ll build for you!