You Can Get Listing Leads from Your Website

There are two major focus points used by real estate professionals in creating their websites. If they're listing properties, they want to feature their listings and use the listing presentation on the site in their personal listing appointment presentations. They show their potential listing client how they can market their home better online than the competition.

The other and far more content-focused approach is to provide local real estate information and attract buyers, or just prospects that the real estate agent can place in their CRM system. They market to them in the future, no matter what their current interests or real estate goals. They could be a buyer, seller, investor now or at any time in the future, and we just want them in our system.

Both of these approaches work if the site has content that is focused on those goals. What if we want to take a more "seller-prospect" approach? It is a mistake to assume that you'll just get lucky in getting a listing client now and then from your website. You get most of these sellers from other ads, farming mailings into neighborhoods, and referrals. The mistake is in assuming that homeowners who are thinking of selling are not really using the Internet much, as they're not shopping listings like buyers are.

Interviewing his listing clients who contacted him from website forms and email, a successful Web marketer found that they had some common things to say about their use of the Internet before they set any listing appointments:

• They wanted to see listing prices for nearby homes similar to theirs.
• They wanted to learn about current market conditions and if the time is right to sell.
• Most important, they wanted to see what local agents were doing to market homes online.

These clients didn't really rank these three goals in any order for importance, except perhaps the first being finding out list prices in their neighborhood. Now, most agent websites at this point will have seen that fleeting traffic come and go without any idea of who they were. What this agent did was to offer more to these visitors on the pages they visited. Forms were displayed offering free no-obligation CMAs to those thinking of selling.

Another popular offer was a current market sold property report just for sellers. The report gives them recently sold data for their area, and even their neighborhood if they gave that information in the form. Another was a report on the sidebar of IDX search pages that offers sellers a report titled "What List Prices Really Mean in Today's Market." This report really fits any market, so only one was necessary. It explains the way CMAs work, they're based on past information, and how this agent uses a second CMA based on current competition to set a more competitive selling price.

It really doesn't matter what you offer as long as it appeals to the prospective seller. The key is to offer it and get their contact information to be first in the door with your listing presentation.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.