After experiencing some sort of difficulty over the years, India’s real estate industry is starting to enjoy some rapid growth. The demand for housing, from both an investment and consumption angle, is rising, doing so at a rate of 9% every year. For real estate companies and agents, it is the perfect time to increase sales.
How to find high-quality real estate leads
While the market is ready, it is noteworthy that it is an easily saturated one. Hence, the competition for real estate leads can be tough. For real estate agents, here are some of the best ways to get valuable leads for your properties.
Referrals
Ask any successful real estate agent and they would tell you that referrals are one of their biggest sales sources. Nothing beats word-of-mouth. Now, this has a lot to do with your service as a real estate agent more than anything else. Referrals are almost a guarantee when you treat a customer the right way, especially ones you are meeting for the first time. And like family trees, one customer can birth ten more.
As far as real estate is concerned, it is the cheapest way to get leads for your business. However, it may require serious efforts on your end sometimes. While a customer can casually drop your name in a conversation with a friend or colleague, you may need to have kept regular contact with them for this to happen. This can be done via cold phone calls or emails with incentives for referrals. The bottom line is you need to be top-of-mind.
Engage companies with the same target market
In other words, establish as many relevant partnerships as you can outside the real estate industry. For instance, a real estate agent will find it rewarding to partner with an insurance company that sells house insurance policies. Or a bank with specific mortgage loans for salary earners.
In another scenario where cities in India like Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, etc. are enjoying a fast and diverse entry of tech firms, which as a result is leading to a growing demand for real estate property. You can engage these companies to provide suitable properties for workers who are moving houses from within and outside the city.
Blog your way to valuable leads
This is probably an underrated way of finding real estate leads but it is very effective. One of the many ways to get leads to your website or landing page is to write about what you’re selling. By developing a niche-worthy content hub where visitors can land and read insightful stuff about buying, selling, or investing in a property, you can drive traffic to your website and increase your chance of converting your leads.
Another strategy to try is to create eBooks, if you can, on specific topics you are certain prospects would be interested in. Then, use this eBook as a give-and-take marketing ploy, where people can leave their details (name, job, location, age) in exchange for reading the eBook. Add their details to your mailing list so that you can follow up with them.
…With SEO
You can take it a step further and infuse blogging with SEO. For instance, if you have properties for sale in the Mumbai area, you can create content for a set of keywords that concern Mumbai. e.g. ‘Flat apartments in Mumbai’ as against ‘houses in India’, which is very broad. This is because people mostly search for items specifically on search engines like Google. Streamlining it makes it much easier to find you online.
Market on Real Estate Portals
India is home to lots of real estate portals where people can buy, sell, and rent properties online. As such, advertising on them offers you a great chance of finding genuine and convertible leads. Great examples are 99acres.com, MagicBricks, Zricks, and so on.
While it is fine to be a jack of all trades, you may find it more rewarding to pick a niche so that advertising on real estate portals, for instance, can be much easier. If you are into luxury homes, fitting your ad on the ‘luxury properties’ page of the portal is then straightforward. Keep in mind that customers already know the kind of houses they want. So, they prefer to choose based on the criteria available to them.
Advertise on Facebook
Facebook is an example of a social network that lets you market to a specific audience. And that’s because it has a large database of user information based on certain demographics like age, job, and most especially to you, location. This means you can conveniently create targeted ads for people living in different parts of India.
[Also read: 15 tips for real estate agents and developers]
Managing your real estate leads
Getting real estate leads is one thing, managing them is another thing entirely. You’ve done the hard work of finding people who might be interested in your listings, the next action would be to turn them into paying customers.
But, how do you manage your leads?
The best way to manage your real estate leads is to operate a CRM tool whose job is to ensure that you get the best out of your leads, ensuring zero lead leakage. With the right CRM software, you can capture and categorize property inquiries from both online and offline campaigns, including digital, social, and traditional platforms. You are able to tell if a prospect came via referrals from an existing client or they read one of your blog posts or if they clicked on one of your ads on a real estate portal.
As a team lead, this will help you to distribute leads to your agents based on their area of strength. You can also distribute these leads based on the type of property — residential, commercial, vacation-type homes, etc.
The idea for real estate agents in India, basically, is that even as you plan to acquire more leads online, it can be futile if there’s no optimal process for converting them into customers. Hence, the need for robust real estate CRM software.
You can check LeadSquared’s real estate CRM software here
