Are you up-to-date on housing news and trends of 2017 and 2018? Take the quiz below to test your knowledge. See if you can answer our bonus question at the end!
If you don’t have a real estate newsletter yet, check out the HomeActions automated e-newsletter for real estate agents. A newsletter is one of the most effective ways to stay top of mind with your real estate contacts.
Visit HomeActions.net today to start connecting on a regular basis with your real estate contacts and improving your real estate business.
We surveyed our readers to find out if they use a home security system
HomeActions newsletters are distributed by over 5,000 real estate professionals reaching over 3 million email newsletter readers every two weeks. This week, we’re polling our readers to find out if they use a home security system. Find out how they responded to our October 2018 survey.
Getting all your real estate contacts in order is a 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. Plus, you’ll need to be routinely communicating them.
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. Think of it like LinkedIn – you have first, second and third-tier connections.
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 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 Quickly Organize Your Sphere of Influence
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 “refferal source” may be a useful way to initially identify individuals. It is also important to include any all contact information you have for each person in your sphere of influence, such as email address, 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 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 creat 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!
Real estate agents know the value of putting on a stellar open house. But how do you ensure that people show up? One of the best marketing strategies to promote an open house is through social media.
You can easily create quality social media posts to get the word out just by following these guidelines.
1. Post on Multiple Platforms
As an agent, you should have multiple social media platforms. In particular, you should have business accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. When you begin a campaign to promote an open house through social media, you should be posting across all your platforms.
2. Pick Images That Will Make People Show Up
Take good photos of the house. The quality of the photos you post will determine whether people show up. Here are some factors to keep in mind when you’re choosing photos:
Use pictures that highlight curb appeal.
Use images that capture the home’s best features, like a newly renovated kitchen.
Capture impressive views to entice buyers.
Here are some things to avoid in listing photos:
Dark or just plain bad lighting.
Bad aspect ratio of the photo.
Don’t show off bad décor, messy rooms or property flaws.
3. Don’t Forget Pinterest
It’s a common misconception that Pinterest is only for crafting and recipes. Many people use it as a search engine for the things they are looking to purchase. If they type “colonial-style home” into the search bar, they know Pinterest-quality photos will appear.
You should use this platform to set up a board specifically for your listing photos. You can link back to your Pinterest board of professional-quality photos when you tweet or post about your open house.
4. Write an Engaging Message
Employ good copywriting practices when you write your social media posts. You don’t need to become a copywriting wiz, just follow these simple tips and your posts will be instantly more engaging and make people click through.
Avoid using too many adjectives, like beautiful, cozy home. Verbs speak louder. Try, “Check out this historical home featuring all the amenities that the modern homeowner seeks. Stop by this Saturday to take in the amazing views/architecture.”
Speak to personal experience. The best way to hook people is to trigger an emotional response. Write about universal experiences when house hunting. People like to be reminded of things they are familiar with.
5. Consider Your Landing Page
The landing page is where you will direct people in your social media posts. At the bottom of your post, there should be a clear link to a page that offers more information about your open house.
You can drive traffic to a Facebook event page, LinkedIn event page, Pinterest board, your website or a blog post. Wherever you lead traffic, make sure that page has all the details about your open house and great pictures.
6. Create a Posting Schedule
Create a posting schedule to promote your open house on social media. If you come up with a couple of messages for each social platform, organize them into an Excel sheet and put the dates and times of when they should be deployed.
For more information about optimal times of the day to schedule social posts, check out this infographic from HubSpot.
7. Put It in a Real Estate Email Newsletter
If you have a real estate newsletter that goes out to your sphere of influence, make sure to include a shout-out to your open house. Whatever messages you post on social media should be reinforced in your newsletter.
If you don’t have a real estate newsletter yet, check out the HomeActions automated e-newsletter for real estate agents. A newsletter is one of the most effective ways to stay top of mind with your real estate contacts. Check us out today!
Visit HomeActions.net today to start connecting on a regular basis with your real estate contacts and improving your real estate business.
Successful real estate agents know the importance of setting goals for themselves. Since real estate agents are in large part responsible for their yearly earnings, setting realistic goals is part of ensuring that they can bring home the bacon. If you want to increase your real estate sales, you have to learn the right way to set goals and the appropriate action steps to complete them.
One of the biggest reasons real estate agents don’t achieve what they set out to do is because their objectives are too broad and they don’t know how to follow through. We’re here to help you narrow the focus of your goals and make sure that you reach them.
Put Your Real Estate Goals in Writing
Get your goals out of your head and onto the page. Use a notebook or Word document to write them down so they are not just floating in space. Writing down your goals sets them in stone so that they’re tangible objectives to shoot for.
Keep your goals realistic by thinking only one or two years ahead at first. Instead of writing down, Run a successful real estate business, narrow your focus to something you can achieve in six months or a year – for instance, Increase sales by 40% by 2019.
Quantify Your Real Estate Goals
Part of setting clear goals is assigning a numeric value to them so you know exactly what you’re reaching for.
Let’s use the last example, Increase sales by 40% by 2019.
Assigning numeric values to your goals allows you to reach higher success levels. If you simply write down, increase sales, that could be as easy as gaining one more sale than you did in the previous year. And that kind of goal setting will not make you satisfied. You will still be left wondering why your real estate business is not as successful as your competitors’.
Continually Read Over Your Real Estate Goals
Get in the habit of reading over your goals once you’ve written them down. It doesn’t do you any good to write them on a scrap of paper and place them in a drawer where they will be forgotten.
You should keep your goals in a place where you have to see them every day, such as sticky notes on your fridge, above your desk or on your computer’s desktop.
Looking at your goals daily will give you a sense of urgency and motivate you to take steps toward what you’ve set out to do.
Create Action Steps for All of Your Goals
Goals are useless if you don’t know what to do to achieve them. For each goal, write an action step or two to accomplish them. If your objective is to increase sales by 40% by 2019, here are a couple of action steps to take.
Reorganize my database of real estate leads.
Have two phone calls a day with new leads in my pipeline.
Once you act on your goals in these small ways, you’ll see some minor success and start to realize how the rest of your goal can come to fruition.
Hold Yourself Accountable for Your Goals
One of the best ways to hold yourself accountable for your goals is to share them with your team and/or colleagues. If you have other agents or an assistant on your team, let them know what your goals are. Making a public declaration of what you plan to do to grow your real estate business – or any business – has been shown to increase your chances of success because you now have people, besides yourself, who are counting on you. If you work in an office with other agents, spread the word about your 2019 goals – seek feedback and ask if they will help keep you on track.
Stay Organized and Connect with Your Sphere of Influence
Your real estate contacts should always be up to date and organized. If they aren’t, you will have a difficult time remembering who you have in your sphere of influence and at what stage of the moving processes they are in.
Maintaining your database of leads is a no-brainer if you want to increase sales or achieve other real estate goals.
HomeActions gathers all of your contacts from places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo and more and creates a spreadsheet of everyone in your sphere of influence in alphabetical order by what platform they came from.
Not only will HomeActions jump-start this process for you, we will then send a bi-weekly email newsletter to your real estate contacts on your behalf, using our database of hundreds of real estate articles. Click the button below to read more about HomeActions services and how we can help you achieve all of your goals this year.
Visit HomeActions.net today to start connecting on a regular basis with your real estate contacts and improving your real estate business.
We surveyed our readers to find out if they use a storage unit
HomeActions newsletters are distributed by over 5,000 real estate professionals reaching over 3 million email newsletter readers every two weeks. This week, we’re polling our readers to find out if they use a storage unit. Find out how they responded to our September 2018 survey.
Century 21 New Millennium, one of the top franchisees in the Century 21 System, is now working with HomeActions to roll out an exclusive relationship program for its 900 agents that provides help in building and nurturing contact databases.
HomeActions is a customized e-newsletter and lead-generation platform. The biweekly system delivers “conversation starters” for agents through its hyper-local content, widgets and predictive metrics.
Tracy Burakowski, regional sales manager for HomeActions, told the New Millennium management team: “We know that about nine out of 10 agents do not have a fresh, all-inclusive contact database. When in your offices with your agents, I saw firsthand how agents needed to be assisted with database building. We can get them organized and ready for e-marketing success.”
Todd Hetherington, CEO of New Millennium, sees the HomeActions content and delivery system as an essential tool for his agents to build their pipelines. “HomeActions lets our agents not only reach everyone in their database every two weeks with in-demand content, but helps them laser-focus on the segments of their databases that are warming up. HomeActions alerts our agents when closer contact is warranted. Our agents’ contacts will remain exclusive to those specific agents. This is a first-mover advantage that we want for our agents,” he said.
The HomeActions support team will use each agent’s contact sources such as social sites, the Multiple Listing Service, email and any customer relationship management platform to build a clean, updated database. Every two weeks, enrolled clients and prospects will receive relevant homeowner-focused content and widgets.
The newest HomeActions feature is called Social Sharing. Many agents struggle to maintain a social media game plan. Agents will now have the ability to “auto post” in-demand content to their social sites.
About Century 21 New Millennium Century 21 New Millennium is a full-service real estate brokerage firm with more than 900 real estate professionals across the greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The company has been the top-producing brokerage in the Mid-Atlantic region each year since 1999. It has earned the distinction of the No. 1 Century 21 franchise five times since 2010. Sales for 2017 were just over $3 billion. www.C21NM.com.
About HomeActions HomeActions LLC is a digital marketing and lead-generation solution with compelling content and interactive widgets for real estate agents. The HomeActions platform provides automated prospecting and marketing delivered biweekly via email to a professional’s sphere of influence. HomeActions’ professionally written articles portray agents as trusted advisors looking out for readers’ interests by helping them care for the biggest investment in their lives. With instant lead access, customer relationship management capabilities and robust predictive metrics, the system has the capability to generate real-time leads and top-of-mind awareness while nurturing relationships that lead to long-term success and more referrals. HomeActions is a privately held virtual company that employs more than 50 people and is headquartered in Green Cove Springs, Florida. www.homeactions.net.
It’s not just the real estate industry that’s going digital — almost every industry you can think of is taking the plunge. But digital marketing is especially essential for real estate agents because homebuyers are looking at websites like Zillow and Trulia as their first step toward finding a home.
They are also checking out social media to find inspiration for their dream home and recommendations for REALTORS®. That means you need to position yourself in front of these homebuyers online.
If you already have a real estate website and social media accounts, are you utilizing those spaces correctly in order to get leads? If you’re not keeping yourself abreast of how to improve your digital footprint, chances are you will get overlooked for agents that have a more robust online presence.
1. The Most Important Social Platforms for Real Estate
Some of the more important social platforms for real estate agents are Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. If you don’t already have a presence on these platforms, get on them today. Your potential clients use social media to find referrals for all kinds of services, including real estate agents.
Social media is also where you should showcase the best of the best when it comes to images and videos of your listings. Always post high-quality images that highlight the best features of the homes you’re selling. The standard for content is very high these days, so a few grainy images won’t cut it. You will get buried by competition using professional-looking photos.
Hashtags
When you post content on social media, make use of relevant hashtags. This will help you get recognized by more users and increase your followers. You can easily research hashtags by typing in some keywords into the search bar on Twitter — such as “open house” (#openhouse) or “real estate agent” (#realestateagent) — and see what popular posts come up and take note of other hashtags they’re using. Then you can incorporate those hashtags into your own social posts.
2. Paid Advertising to Promote Your Real Estate Business
Consider paid advertising using Facebook Ads or Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising.
Facebook Ads
Facebook makes it easy for you to “boost” a post, whereby you put a certain dollar amount behind a post. You choose your budget and the audience you want your post to target. For instance, you can target buyers or sellers based on location or demographics, or even their hobbies and behaviors.
You should also consider Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for your real estate website. It’s a way of advertising your website on Google so that it appears at the top of the page when users search for different keywords, such as “homes for sale,” “local realtors” or “open house.” Every time someone clicks on your ad, leading them to your website, you pay Google a fee.
There are still things you want to do to get organic traffic to your site, which we’ll go over, but PPC is a way to bring in additional paid traffic through advertising.
3. Make People Come Back to Your Website
Make sure that your real estate website is easy to navigate and a place where users want to return. Start by making sure all your images look professional. If you have pictures of yourself or your business, these photos need to be high quality. First impressions matter, and potential clients will choose another Realtor over you if their website looks more professional.
Content Creation
Another way to keep people coming back to your site is to create content that interests them. You could post weekly blogs about the real estate industry or certain markets. You could also blog about open houses, listings, up-and-coming neighborhoods and more. Try mixing up the content with some charts, videos and infographics. Creating interesting content will keep users engaged.
4. Collect Emails
The purpose of your digital efforts is to get leads, so you need to give users the option to provide their email addresses. In marketing, a squeeze page or landing page is where you collect the email addresses of those who visit your website.
Make an Offer
A squeeze page should act as an offer to the user that requires them to input their email. This could be in the form of an e-book, e-newsletter or an estimate on the value of their home. Whatever the offer is, make sure it’s essential for them to give out their email in order to receive the special gift.
5. Use Website Analytics Tools
The only way to know whether your website is working is by tracking views and the behavior of users on your site. How long are they staying on your site? How many unique visitors are you getting a month? Are users visiting your site and then navigating away almost instantly? The easiest way to track this is with a tool like Google Analytics. Google makes it easy for new marketers to learn how to use their features, which you can read about here.
Once you understand some basics of website analytics, it’s simple to start developing your website around what users want to see. Perhaps your site isn’t user-friendly enough. Maybe your content isn’t as engaging as your competitors’ content. Tracking the analytics of your site will help you identify and fix these issues.
We always recommend making sure you have a digital footprint because most of your clients will hear about you through the web. A great way to get started is by following these guidelines and signing up for biweekly real estate email newsletters. We make it easy for you by writing email newsletter articles and sending them out to your sphere of influence on your behalf. Check us out today!
Visit HomeActions.net today to start connecting on a regular basis with your real estate contacts and improving your real estate business.
HomeActions LLC (HA) and its IndustryNewsletters (IN) division, a lead generation and client relationship platform for real estate agents, accountants, payroll bureaus, lawyers and other professionals, have just rolled out Social Sharing, a new integrated app that lets clients seamlessly post HA and IN articles on the clients’ own LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts.
HA and IN provide a complete newsletter system that lets clients send out fully customizable newsletters to their clients and prospects, and the clients can choose from among thousands of professionally written library articles to add to these newsletters. Now, clients are no longer limited to using these articles in their newsletters. With a push of a button, any HA/IN library article can be scheduled into the clients’ social media platforms. With Social Sharing, clients have complete control over which platforms they use and when.
The simplicity of the system means HA and IN clients that were unsure about how to use social media platforms or concerned about how much time it would take no longer have to worry: Social Sharing does it for them with the HA/IN articles they’ve chosen.
Barry J. Friedman, CEO of HomeActions, LLC
“No professional can ignore social media today — it’s essential for marketing and client contact,” said Barry Friedman, founder and CEO of HA and IN. “With Social Sharing, we’re thrilled with how easy we’ve made it for even small firms to become big players in social media without having to write a single word.”
Social Media — and More — All for Free
Social Sharing is available to all HA and IN clients at no additional charge. HA and IN are also eliminating the cost for other well-established add-ons: its Automated Valuation Model, which helps agents market themselves with data-driven consumer engagement; Neighborhood360, which provides readers with estimated property value based on local data, as well as additional community information; and OnTarget, an email blast tool that allows clients to send up to 20,000 email communications per month to their contacts between regular newsletter launches.
About HomeActions and IndustryNewsletters
HomeActions LLC and its IndustryNewsletters division are digital marketing and lead generation solutions with compelling content and interactive widgets for real estate agents, accounting firms, law firms, payroll bureaus, professional employer organizations, human resources and employee benefits companies, and other service providers.
The HomeActions/IndustryNewsletters platform provides automated prospecting and marketing delivered biweekly via email to a professional’s sphere of influence. The professionally written articles portray a range of professional trusted advisors looking out for readers’ interests. With instant lead access, CRM capabilities and robust predictive metrics, the system has the capability to generate real-time leads and top-of-mind awareness while nurturing relationships that lead to long-term success and more referrals.
HomeActions is a privately held virtual company that employs more than 50 people and is headquartered in Green Cove Springs, Florida. For more information, visit www.industrynewsletters.com and www.homeactions.net.
We surveyed our readers to find out if they keep houseplants in their homes
HomeActions newsletters are distributed by over 5,000 real estate professionals reaching over 3 million email newsletter readers every two weeks. This week, we’re polling our readers to find out if they keep houseplants in their homes. Find out how they responded to our September 2018 survey.
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