Category: Marketing

Why A Third Party Real Estate Portal is better at marketing

by HOMEiZ Blog Team Posted: 06/02/2017 Views: 1460

A third party real estate portal who is not bound by real estate laws, is a better marketing tool for real estate agents to reach consumer attention. Many real estate agents have no time or money for massive marketing. Most do 100% of their business by themselves. They are showing properties, transaction coordinator, and much more. Most agents know their market very well, but rarely do the rest of the stuff as well as a professional marketer would. A third party real estate portal has high tech programmers, web designers, marketing experts, the resources and the time.

Dealing with Online leads

Many real estate agents don’t understand how to work with internet leads. Many other industries who work with internet leads on a regular basis, will say that the mindset and lifespan of an internet lead is way different than the old way of generating leads. They require a different follow up plan, different information, and a different time frame from lead to transaction. Many real estate agents don’t have the patience or the systems in place to handle that and when they spend money on online leads and don’t get any transactions, they say online leads sucks. Yet those agents who have the right system in place to handle those online leads, make their living from internet leads.
Running your own IDX website
Agents feel that the third party real estate portals take away traffic that should come to their own IDX websites. Put yourself in the consumer shoes. The average consumer doesn’t really care about the real estate agent until they are ready to make a purchase. The average consumer really has no time to browse between thousands of agent’s websites. The average consumer prefers to go to a big website who has many listings from many different agents. Running a successful website takes much more than it seems. It takes around the clock attention and care. Many things can go wrong in a website and you should have the right personal, the money and the time to be on top of EVERYTHING! You can lose a customer over a poor factuality of your site. The average consumer will not spend more than two (2) minutes on a site who does not function right or is not easy to navigate or even looks bad. Having your own IDX website sounds very nice and promising, but consumers are not looking only on listings or for accurate data, they want to feel part of your website and if you cannot offer them their desire, your website means nothing for them.

Focus on selling properties

It was long time ago since I became a salesperson. My real estate senior mentor once told me: “You know why you are so successful in selling, it is because you are focusing only on sales and on nothing else”
It is almost impossible to sell real estate and to be successful while focusing on so many other things. To be successful in sales you must focus 100% on sales only! Nothing else. Marketing and sales are connected but they are totally different in their nature. Yes, without marketing, you would not have prospects or leads to follow up with, but without a good sales technique and strategy, your closing rate may depress you. Marketing and sales should work simultaneously, but in most big companies, there are departments who will do the marketing job for you. If we break it down to the basics, marketing is everything that you do to reach and persuade prospects and the sales process is everything that you do to close the sale and get a signed agreement or a contract. Both are necessities to the success of your business. You cannot do without either process. If you work to strategically combine both efforts you will experience a successful amount of business growth. However, if the efforts are unbalanced, it can diminish your business growth. Studies have shown that it takes lots of efforts and time using both sales and marketing to move the prospect from one level to the next. That is why it is important that you should focus on what you do best. As a real estate agent, you must focus on selling real estate and give it the best you can. For marketing use the portals out there to do the marketing for you. You cannot expect miracles to your business from a real estate portal as you cannot expect miracles to happen anywhere, but you must have a presence on any real estate portal out there and on the social media sites. You really have no idea from where business will come.  

Many agents are uncomfortable with the marketing process

Many real estate agents are working solo. An alternative is to partner with someone that possess the talents that you feel you lack in. If you are stronger in marketing, find someone who understands and gets the sales process. If you are better at sales find someone that can help you strengthen the message, create marketing materials that sell and give you tactics and ideas. But finding the right partner is not a walk in the park. The internet can be your partner without a real commitment from you. You can walk away from this partnership at any time you wish, without suffering financial hardships.

A Third party real estate portal is a business

Any business knows that it takes a happy customer to become successful. A real estate portal should be fully transparent with its client’s users. As a real estate agent, pick up the phone and speak to customer service and ask what they should offer for your business. A good real estate portal will provide full transparency to its clients and should answer any question you may have regarding what they must offer for you and for your business. Real estate agents should have the sense of the people who run the portal. Once you feel computable you can join as a member. What happens today is, many become members on many portals and really have no idea who are the people behind those portals. The lack of many portals, is to explain what is their business model. The consumer should understand the business model very well to make the right decision.