7 Ways to Find More Home Buyers

You’ve got the sellers. You’ve got the house. It’s staged. The yard is perfectly manicured. The season is perfect. Now where are all the buyers? Many real estate agents, homeowners, and investors are struggling to find buyers for their house. The market isn’t in a downturn, but there is stiff competition to stand out from the crowd, and with new realty websites popping up everyday, it can be very discouraging to put up a house for sale and get no return phone calls.

Here are some great tips for finding more home buyers:

#1. Place Facebook Ads

You might be thinking: does anyone really click on those things? The answer is YES. Facebook wouldn’t be the financial giant it was if its extremely targeted advertising didn’t work and work very well. One single ad placed for $50-$100 can generate as many as 50 or more leads. It’s not even hard: just use Facebook stock photography (or photos of one of your properties) follow the step-by-step lead form, and write a little text to entice the buyers. Maybe don’t do this to try to sell a specific house, but rather try to generate an email list of prospective buyers. Target people in a certain area with a certain net worth with a certain family size–Facebook has all of that information and more–and watch your prospect list grow.

#2. Use Your Platform to Talk Mortgages

If you have a blog on your website (or webcopy on your site), or if you have a Twitter account, Facebook account, or Instagram, talk about mortgages before you start talking about properties. The buyers you’re looking for have likely been looking around at houses they like already and they’re in the market for a mortgage–something that can seem really new, scary, and foreign to a new home buyer–and they’ll be wanting more information about that before they’re ever ready to pull the trigger on purchasing a house. Mortgages is the place to start.

#3. Get to Know Every One of Your Database Contacts

It’s one thing to have a newsletter list, but do you know what they’re really interested in? Maybe when they signed up, they filled out a form about their budget, their target neighborhoods, their home size, but do you really know them? Do they have any reason to trust you more than any other person on the phone? Take some time to reach out to every one of your contacts and make a personal connection. There’s nothing wrong with becoming friends with your prospects–in fact, it’s great! Get to know their family, their feelings, their fears, their goals. The more of a connection you can make with them the better you can find them their dream home. And there’s nothing mercenary at all about becoming friends with your contacts. Business relationships and personal relationships cross boundaries all the time. Talk about your life, your kids, and form a real bond. Even once the house is sold, they may refer you–their new friend–to other new buyers. 

#4. Network With Everyone

There’s nothing wrong with telling people what kind of work you do. When you’re at the hairdresser or the mechanic shop or the doctor’s office, they make small talk with you–why not tell them the kind of work that you do. You don’t have to give the hard sell to the guy who is fixing your flat tire, but you can make a connection with him and later–maybe six months later–when someone is looking for a house, he’ll say “I know a real estate agent.” The key here to be friendly, never pushy. You don’t want to be selling your dentist while he’s got a drill in your mouth. But talk about your job every time you come into the office, and maybe one day he’ll ask you about buying a new house.

#5. Be Inclusive

Maybe you only speak English, so you stick to English-speaking contacts. But there’s no reason why you can’t find an interpreter–they’re not hard to find, and often looking for freelance work–and you just might find that your city has a vastly underserved Vietnamese population, or no one is accommodating the Nigerian community that has sprung up in recent years. Create ads in their languages and post them on Facebook and Craigslist, and you may be surprised to see how quickly leads start rolling in because someone is FINALLY reaching out to them after so long being ignored.

#6. GoogleAds

You want to be on Google, but it’s so hard to know where to start. How do you rank highly? How do you get your ads in front of the right eyes? Here’s a tip from an industry expert: look at what the #1 and #2 top ranked ads are doing and do the same. Now, you don’t want to plagiarize their content, but if something is trending on Google, you have to remember: Google is very smart. If something has the #1 spot on Google, that ad is doing something right. They’re talking about the right things. They’re hitting the customer where the customer needs to get hit. It’s just competitive analysis: seeing how your competitors are doing, and adopting some of their good ideas.

#7. Newsletters

One of the biggest problems with shopping for real estate is that there is just so much to wade through. It’s hard for buyers to know when they’re getting a deal, if a house has any hidden perks, or if there is a real gem that is being swallowed up in the noise. The great thing about newsletters is that you can highlight these individual properties, narrowing your buyers’ focus on a small set of perfectly-suited homes. It’s also crazy good to have a newsletter contact list–people who have signed up to receive information from you and who you know are interested. It automatically selects buyers who are moving down the funnel toward purchase.

Ready to Go Newsletters creates engaging real-estate newsletters that can help you gain additional clients. Boost your real estate business today! We also make newsletters for other industries including mortgage, finance, general business, and many more.