The housing market is an enormous market and absolutely brimming with opportunity and a lot of competition. It takes a creative, prepared, and industrious real estate agent to pull ahead of the pack! Here are some tips to help you stay on your A-game.
Team up with other real estate agents.
Work together for a house showing. Specialize in particular areas and recommend clients to each other. Meet up to discuss things that you’ve learned and share tips and tricks. With a team to help you learn and grow, even if most of the work you do is on your own, you can accomplish a lot more and help each other stay motivated.
Use technology to streamline your business practices.
Whether this is making ads on social media, using house listings on a variety of websites to maximize your search time for a client, or just keeping organized through a scheduling program with automated reminders, make sure to utilize the many technological resources at your disposal to maximize your efforts.
Make your social media content stand out.
The effectiveness of digital advertising is sometimes overblown, in part because targeting tools sometimes only connect with consumers that aren’t actually having their minds changed because they would have purchased the product anyway. One big goal of advertising is to find a new audience that can be persuaded to buy your product—you! So when planning out your social media campaigns and building your social influence, try to find ways to grab potential homebuyers who might have otherwise overlooked you in addition to retaining your current audience.
Leverage DPA.
Let’s face it, buying a home is just getting more expensive, and for many would-be homeowners this creates a squeeze that they can’t overcome on their own. But imagine you are such a homebuyer, beginning to feel hopeless about ever escaping the rent cycle, then you meet this cheery, educated real estate agent who not only can help you find a home, but can help afford it by connecting you with a down payment assistance program, a closing cost assistance program, or a lease-to-own program. Suddenly you have a hope that just didn’t exist before and it was only possible because of that real estate agent—an agent you will want to make sure your friends and family know about! Now get back into your own shoes. You can only expand your reach and help more borrowers by learning about the assistance programs available in your area and making sure you can help borrowers access them. For a great place to start, CBC Mortgage Agency offers a leading down payment assistance program offered in every city, county, and state (except for New York state). The advantage of our national down payment assistance program is consistency, meaning you’ll become familiar with one program and then offer it wherever you go for the rest of your career.
Ask for referrals.
It doesn’t matter where or from who, ask for referrals. You can get them from lenders, from clients, from random connections on social media, or from open houses. Be polite and experiment with different ways to ask for referrals in different situations to see what works best, and you will find an extra client here and there. Directly asking “Do you have a referral for me?” tends to yield low results, but after a positive conversation you could end with, “If you or anyone you know is looking for a house, I would love to help,” or a similar message. This can help spark a thought in the person you were talking to without feeling like you are pressuring them.
Work with local communities and churches.
People want to feel connected to their communities and tend to trust real estate agents more when they have roots in the areas they work in. These real estate agents are going to know the needs and wants of the people, the pros and cons of the area (including schools, businesses, neighborhoods, and so forth). You can kill two birds with one stone by finding local community centers and churches and building a friendly relationship with them, holding education seminars, and so forth. This doesn’t mean that you need to join every community in your area, of course—no one has time for that! But wherever you are able, reach out a genuine hand of friendship to start a connection.
Connect with lenders.
Sometimes borrowers connect with lenders first and then need a real estate agent, and you want to make sure that you are the first person that lender thinks of when the borrower mentions needing a real estate agent. You can build a reciprocal relationship with loan officers by referring clients that come to you right back to them. There should be no expectations or requirements in such a relationship, of course—you and the loan officer should always refer borrowers to the resources that would best help them. But as long as you remain on the top of your game, you can ensure that you are the best resource in town!To learn more about CBC Mortgage Agency and its program offerings, visit chenoafund.org or reach out to our information team.
CBC Mortgage Agency™ – NMLS 1186381
