The real estate industry, like many others, is undergoing a digital shift.
The rise of massive listing sites like Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zillow has spearheaded the change by simplifying the home-buying process.
People who are looking to buy a house can now use location, price, rooms, and other criteria to find a list of homes that match what they are looking for. They don’t need the help of a real estate agent to do this.
The ease, simplicity, and lack of commitment involved in online real estate shopping has propelled it to become extremely popular—now, almost 90% of Americans use online real estate websites to research properties.
Many real estate professionals are not happy about the shift from cold calls, referrals, newspaper ads, and other lead-generation mediums. However, if real estate professionals want to stay relevant, they need to adapt.
The National Association of Realtors found in a 2020 study that 52% of homebuyers in 2019 discovered their new home through the internet. Of the respondents, only 29% said that real estate agents were the first people they contacted when looking for a house. As time goes on, more and more millennials and zoomers are participating in the market, so the percentage of listings that are internet listings will continue to increase.
At the end of the day, the most important thing to a sale is exposure. The online tools available to real estate agents and brokers are more important than ever before. These tools allow you to reach a wider audience with your listings. What can you do to make yourself stand out if everyone is already posting on MLS, real estate directories, and sending newsletters?
If you want to make your listings stand out from the rest, use these strategies and take advantage of technology. You’ll get more traffic and sales will happen more quickly.
1. Use Instagram
Real estate marketing is a visual art. The pictures in a listing can make or break it and be the difference between whether or not someone is interested in buying it.
Instagram is a great marketing platform because it is a visual social media platform.
When marketing listings on Instagram, make sure to target ads to the right age group and interests. Instagram provides filters that can be used to target specific locations, age ranges, interests, and behaviors. These filters can be used to target potential buyers for your properties. A good strategy for targeting a specific demographic is to create an ad campaign that is based on images and interests that are desired by that demographic.
Buffer
Buffer is a tool that allows you to automate your social media posting processes and customize it to boost engagement. For example, you can make the first comment on a post to encourage people to engage with the post. Buffer provides metrics that allow you to track your progress and see how well your Instagram marketing strategy is working.
2. Drone Photography
Technology can help photography in a lot of ways. For example, drone photography can use technological advances to create appealing photos that buyers would want to see.
Drones can take photographs and videos, making them versatile tools. Aerial shots that are wide and sweeping can impress potential buyers, while drone videos can be used to give buyers virtual tours of the home’s exterior or interior.
The cost of drone photography can vary a lot, depending on how much you want and how good you want it to be. Drones can be used to film high-quality shots of properties for sale, which can show potential buyers the features of the property in detail.
3. Virtual Staging
When you are listing something online, you only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention before they move on. If you want to stand out in the virtual marketplace, it is important to make your online presence known. If you want your listings to be successful, you need to put in the extra effort to make them stand out from the competition.
Homes and condos that are virtually staged sell more quickly and for a higher price. Modern styling in listings photos make the rooms appear more inviting and professional to buyers.
You should only use a reputable virtual staging company that produces high-quality renders and has skilled Photoshop artists. Be careful of virtual staging companies that do subpar work—photos with models that are not correctly proportioned and have bad photoshop are often worse than just empty rooms.
4. Change the Main Listing Photo
Many potential home buyers will look through the same listings pages multiple times, looking for any listings that stand out to them. If the main photo of your property doesn’t attract a buyer’s attention when they first scroll through it, it’s unlikely to do so in the future.
A strategy to combat the effect of people losing interest in your listings is to change the main photo frequently. The main photo on a listing should be changed regularly to keep the listing looking fresh to buyers who are scrolling through filtered pages. This gives the listing another chance to grab the buyer’s attention.
5. Build a Strong Website
The website is a very important part of real estate traffic generation. A buyer will usually end up on your site, no matter where they first see your listing. If your site is appealing to buyers, they will often look at other listings on your site.
This means that traffic to your site will result in traffic to your listings.
So, just build a website. The internet has a lot of premade, attractive templates. Sounds easy, right?
Well, sort of.
A cookie-cutter website is an easy way to build your site, but it’s not what you want. If you want your website to generate a lot of traffic and lead to conversions, you’ll want to make sure it’s presented well. Over 50% of homebuyers in 2020 found their listings online. If you’re willing to spend money on your clothes and office, why shouldn’t you spend money on your website?
There are a number of website-building solutions available on the market. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for building a website, but there are many products and services out there that can provide the framework you need for a successful site.
There are a few key rules to keep in mind regardless of the solution you use to create a new real estate site.
Mobile-Friendly
Real estate websites are created to target potential buyers who are searching on the internet. Why limit your site by pushing away mobile users?
The ready availability of real estate listing data has transformed the way people look for homes. When homes are listed in markets where they sell quickly, buyers who don’t act fast may miss out on the home they want. Since buyers can now search for homes while they are at work, in line for lunch, and on a bus ride, they have adapted to this change.
The statistics verify this trend. A study from the National Association of Realtors found that in 2018, over 80% of millennials found their home on a mobile device.
Your site must be able to be used on both mobile and desktop devices. If you don’t want your site’s ranking to suffer on search engines like Google, you need to make sure it’s mobile-friendly.
Optimize for Keywords
SEO-targeted local keyword searches can result in increased traffic and leads. As searchers often include the name of the city or region in their searches, ranking well for these specific clusters often brings in traffic that is high quality.
Focus on your main city when first building your website. For Denver, you may want to target:
- Denver buy home
- Denver home listings
- Denver homes for sale
- Denver real estate
- Denver real estate agents
- Denver realtor
The point of targeting keyword clusters is to get more local traffic to your site by owning your market. If you include your city in your text, searchers who include your city in their search are much more likely to become real leads.
If you want your site to rank higher on SERPs, use keywords throughout your site and blog posts. This will also organic traffic to your listings.
Informative & Updated Blog
A real estate agent with a strong online presence will have a blog that is informative and regularly updated.
An agent who writes a real estate blog can provide potential buyers with more information about a listing than is typically found in a traditional listing. By writing about a property in detail, an agent can give buyers a better sense of what the home has to offer, which could make it more likely that the home will sell. A blog post that provides detailed information about a seller’s home can be a very useful resource for potential buyers, since most multiple listing services (MLS) limit the amount of characters and photos that an agent can use.
An article that is tailored to first-time home buyers can be extremely beneficial if you provide first-time home buyer tips to help them through the buying process. A smoother transaction is in everyone’s best interest.
Added Value Tools
The challenge consists of two parts: attracting visitors and retaining them.
If you want buyers to keep coming back to your website, you need to provide them with added value. You can create a powerful property search tool on your website by integrating MLS database information using IDX plugins or Zillow’s database through their API.
6. High-Quality Photos
Most buyers search for homes online, so it’s important for real estate agents to use high-quality photos. Sellers should expect that the photos a real estate agent uses to market their home will be amazing.
Some real estate agents hire professional photographers to take photos of their listings. Although this costs more money, it can make a big impact. This is especially true when selling luxury homes, as there are usually many photos that can be taken.
Some real estate agents choose not to hire a professional photographer and instead rely on techniques and equipment that produce high-quality results. It is important for homeowners to make sure that the real estate agent they are considering using takes good-quality photos for their listings.
If a real estate agent uses poor-quality images to market their listings, it can make it much harder to sell the property.
7. Video
People love video, period! Video has had a massive impact on real estate marketing. It is expected that real estate agents will use some kind of video to help with the sale. It’s important to have some of them professionally designed.
8. Conduct A/B Testing on Your Listing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method of comparing two versions of your listing to see which one performs better. You can use A/B testing by running two versions of a listing at the same time to see how a change impacts the performance of the listing. A/B testing can be used on almost any changes, to see if there is a difference in how consumers react.
A/B testing is more accurate when there is a large number of people involved. You may generate traffic effectively by buying it and testing your marketing strategies if you are still in the process of building up your traffic-generation process and listings.
