Work in the employ of someone else and you can expect to get paid every 2 weeks. But of course whether you’re salaried or not you can probably also expect to be paid much the same amount every time. Sure, some people may get a raise every once in a while but there’s not much that they’ll be able to see in $ gains if they apply themselves to their job more and simply work harder than others. After they complete the licensing course real estate agents in Canada are in business for themselves, and there’s no guarantee you’re getting anything every 2 weeks, or ever for that matter.
Agents make money only when clients buy or sell houses through them, and if that doesn’t happen at all then there’s absolutely zero income being created through working as a real estate agent in Canada. You’re out there flying on your own, and there’s no net beneath you. Then add the fact there’s thousands of other realtors aiming to get the same clients you are, and there’s not enough of them for everyone to be getting the fill they’d envision for themselves. It is for this reason that real estate lead generation is so important. If you’re aiming to boost your real estate business in Canada, you need to be proactive in digging up leads for new clientele and not just waiting for them to present themselves to you.
Effective real estate network is always going to be a very core part of that. It will always be true that the more you do to build a name for yourself as a good local real estate agent the more likely it is you’ll have a more reliable stream of new clientele approaching you when they want to buy or sell a home. But these days your efforts have to go WAY beyond that and what once would be good enough for real estate marketing strategies doesn’t cut it anymore.
So what we’re going to do with this entry is lay out 22 foolproof tips for real estate lead generation that new realtors can – and should – utilize themselves as they look to cement themselves in their career and build a client based more quickly. Let’s get right into them.
Online Focus for Leads
Continuing with the idea of previous approaches being outdated now, there’s plenty more to real estate than showing houses and negotiating deals. Sure, agents must understand the latest market trends and know their way around numbers, you they also need to be a savvy marketer and have a keen understanding of how to get online real estate leads if you want to keep your client pipeline full.
Agents that come to be successful with this know that marketing and generating leads is always going to be an ongoing effort. You will be building your personal brand, expanding your network, and growing your real estate business. But for some the question becomes what comes first ideally, and what’s the most proven-effective approach for how to get real estate leads. Where do realtors find them most reliably, and how do they then convert leads into clients who buy or sell homes – which is how the realtor then earns the commission and, in the big picture, creates a livelihood for themselves.
Right, so without any further delay here are 22 proven techniques for good real estate lead generation.
Optimize a Facebook page
Facebook for real estate agents is a big deal nowadays, and primarily because Facebook is increasingly a social media platform for older adults – the people in the age bracket where they likely either own a home, or have the financial means of buying one. Agents can consider their real estate Facebook page a hub for online business. When a Facebook page is optimized for search, it can be an efficient way to generate real estate leads and have potential clients funneled towards a real estate agent’s website. Here’s how to optimize:
- Make sure page name and username are searchable and associated with working as a professional local realtor
- Optimize the title with relevant keywords
- Add a CTA button that lets people contact you right away. The CTA button can link to an agent’s email, a contact or sign-up form, or even FB Messenger
Work on an Instagram Hashtag Strategy
Instagram marketing for real estate is big too. Instagram hashtags are an effective way to expand your reach, increase impressions, and tap into relevant conversations on the platform. An Instagram hashtag strategy can help you grow your following and dig up leads through social media, especially on such a popular platform like this one.
Hashtags help Instagram categorize your content and make it more discoverable when people are interested in a topic. Posts that generate engagement with followers will prompt the algorithm to show that post to other people who may be interested, and in this case others who may be in interested in making some type of move in the local real estate market.
Use hashtags strategically to get in front of potential clients for real estate. There is no shortage of real estate-related hashtags that can be used, but the best way to get in front of the right people is to use niche hashtags. So rather than using #RealEstate it is better to use a more niche hashtag like #RealEstateListings. You can niche down even further and create a branded hashtag that makes it easy for your clients to keep up with your current listings and open houses.
With a more specific hashtag it becomes much more likely your post stands out and reaches the right people instead of being unnoticeable in a see of similar posts about local real estate.
Join a Slack Community
A lot of people will already use Slack to communicate with their team internally, and it can also be used for real estate lead generation. The social messaging app is at the center of many online communities, with many groups using Slack as a discussion forum and networking group at the same time via a Slack community.
With them people interested in a certain topic can come together to discuss the industry, ask questions, and share advice or stories with other members. Any real estate topic that’s especially relevant or one that you know potential clients will be interested in may be the impetus for joining a Slack community dedicated to the topic.
Examples could be joining a community for real estate investors or first-time buyers, and the way this can be a part of real estate marketing strategies is to be an active and helpful participant. Use your perspective and experience to help other members or answer their questions. Done right agents can be forming genuine connections that help them come into contact with would-be real estate clientele.
Request a Facebook Review from Clients
Back to Facebook for real estate agents here, and it is always going to be true that testimonials are gold for real estate agents. Any time potential clients search for an agent like you, glowing reviews from past clients can be hugely influential. Every time you have a client complete the sale or purchase of a home, ask if they’d be so kind as to leave a review on Facebook for you.
The benefits here are direct and immediate. For starters, if they use their personal account to write the review, then putting a face to the testimonial goes a good long way to adding social proof to the review and presenting it as that much more genuine. Then consider as well that this Facebook rating will appear in Google results when someone searches for the realtor’s business. Having positive reviews next to their name will help boost their reputation and increase the likelihood that potential leads to reach out.
Engage with Past Clients
An agent’s relationship with a client shouldn’t end after their provision of real estate services has ended. Relationships are key in the real estate industry, so it’s important to maintain connections with everyone you work with, and this will apply to everyone from associates to past clients. Agents can help any and all of them stay in the loop by suggesting following on social media or by other means.
The agent can also congratulate them on their latest milestones and share any helpful or relevant housing or industry updates with them as they come up. Maintaining client relationships will help the agent stay top of mind if these people are in a buy / sell situation again where they want to work with a real estate agent in Canada. It also makes them more inclined to refer the agent to others when opportunities come up.
Create Effective Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is a tried and true marketing method for driving traffic to a real estate agent website capturing emails as part of real estate email campaigns. Agents can use this freebie to attract people to their website and convert them into clients. This is how a lead magnet for real estate will work; the agent creates a free, helpful resource and promotes it on their website and their social media platforms. A portion of it will display, but in order to gain access to all of it people must enter their email, and only then will the entirety of the information be sent to their inbox.
Typical real estate lead magnets include home-buying or selling checklists, guides to the local housing market, or fun neighborhood guides that highlight things to do in the area that the agent serves.
We’ve definitely seen the value of LinkedIn for real estate agents too. It is great for sharing expertise or any unique takes on industry topics and trends. What this can be seen as is thought leadership, and it can do a lot for building an agent’s personal brand plus helping them with lead generation through real estate networking.
Agents can create a regular post or an article if you want to address a heftier topic, and the posts can promote even more value if the agent includes a few relevant hashtags to help LinkedIn categorize their post and show it to people who may be interested in the topic.
Follow Potential Clients
This bounces off the value of social media for real estate again. One of the best ways for agents to find leads in real estate is to look for them on their own and spending time on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn, looking for potential clients to connect with. The first consideration with finding potential clients on social media is to take note of the platform you’re looking on.
If the agent wants to find people on Instagram, search through location tags and hashtags related to the market those people are seen to be living in. Agents may also find people who are new to the area or people who are about to embark on the home-buying process. The agent can send an Instagram DM if it feels natural, but they need to make sure they don’t come across as spammy.
When potential clients are being followed on social media, agents can do well by engaging with them now and then to warm up the connection with the aim to hopefully convert them into a lead down the line.
Use Reels to Reach People
Reels are huge on Instagram and they are a favored format on the platform. Nowadays they are also a great way to reach people who don’t already follow you. When an agent creates a reels it helps them increase their reach and can expand their audience on Instagram. A potential lead may see the Reel in their explore tab and visit the agent’s profile because they saw it. Those that want their profile to keep up with the benchmark rate of 21,000 profile impressions will want to put in the effort needed to create compelling Reels.
For Instagram Reels for real estate one idea is to repurpose listing videos into short Reels to give potential clients a glimpse before they see a full tour. Another benefit from using Reels is that they offer agents a chance to get creative and show off their personality. Also they shouldn’t be afraid to get in front of the camera themselves.
Support Local Businesses
Focusing on one market, like a city or a specific neighborhood, shows an agent’s pride and expertise in the area by supporting and promoting local businesses. Think about joining the local chamber of commerce to stay involved in community updates and initiatives, engage with local influencers, and support small businesses in the area. In any instance there’s a new business in the neighborhood or a longtime business is hosting an event there’s an opportunity for the agent to use their network to amplify it on social media and generate support / awareness and then possibly generate real estate leads from it.
Stories to Drive Engagement
Instagram Stories are a great way to interact with followers, amplify the agent’s other content, and stay active on the platform. The aim can be to share links to recent listings, repost your static posts and Reels to drive more engagement, or use the questions sticker to do AMA-type sessions. For any of them there are plenty of ways to reach and interact with potential clients.
Use TikTok to Educate
TikTok users always love to be entertained, educated, and abused. The hashtag #TikTokTaughtMe has over 13 billion views and counting based on how many people are in that corner of the internet aiming to learn something every day. Real estate agents can use TikTok for marketing too, and especially when they take a here-to-inform approach to using this platform.
The key to using TikTok to generate leads is to get creative with the hacks and tips you share. Giving out real estate facts and figures likely isn’t the best approach. Instead envision your target audience and what they’d want to learn about. When agents are aiming at a first-time homebuyer, for example, they can share how-tos on typical home improvement projects that people may take on in the first 12 months after buying their first home.
Participate in Facebook Groups
Whatever it is an agent can imagine related to their local real estate market, there’s probably a Facebook group dedicated to it already. Facebook Groups offer real estate agents a great opportunity to connect with people and provide genuinely helpful insights into what they know best, with everything from local knowledge to real estate-specific topics to how to find the best local mortgage broker too.
Start a LinkedIn Newsletter
One good way to establish authority on a topic and gather leads for real estate agents at the same time is to start a newsletter. It can be even easier for agents who have a business Page on LinkedIn, as they can create their own newsletter within the platform. Even if they have never created a newsletter before, LinkedIn’s native newsletter feature makes it easy to publish articles that people can subscribe to. This newsletter will have a page where people can learn about the agent and what they’ll be discussing before they subscribe. Subscribers may well become leads eventually.
Focus on Topics Clients are Searching for Online
Every realtor needs to have a real estate agent website nowadays, and part of making it such a valuable resource for lead generation is to use it for real estate content marketing. You’ll need to have it optimized for SEO strategies for real estate too, but that’s another discussion. We’ll focus on the content here, and this is best done with a realtor’s blog on real estate.
Good content here will be the type that address the typical questions potential clients will have related to buying or selling a home. Remember they often turn to Google with their questions, and ideally that points them to the site and blog where the realtor is there providing them with the answers they’re looking for – and promoting themselves as a leading local real estate professional at the same time.
Be sure to include a clear CTA somewhere in the blog post, like a contact form or a direct link to your email. This way, if visitors find your answer helpful, they may be more inclined to reach out for your services.
Promote Open Houses on Facebook
There’s every reason to promote any open house on Facebook. It’s a free, simple way to promote the event and attract interested buyers. When agents create an event on Facebook they can cross-promote with their personal network and invite people in it to the event. A person who ends up coming to the event may be a potential homebuyer, or someone who is also interested in putting their home on the market.
To reach even more potential buyers the agent may also want to consider boosting their event. Putting ad spend behind the event helps to reach even more potential buyers.
Leverage Facebook & Instagram Advertising
A nod to social media for real estate again here. For agents that have a flexible marketing budget, Facebook and Instagram ads are an effective way for real estate agents to get more leads. Getting the most of out social media ads for realtors is to have a compelling CTA (call to attention) or use attention-grabbing creative to make it so people stop scrolling and click on the ad.
One way to take advantage of Instagram and Facebook ads in real estate is to use carousel ads. These interactive ads provide users with more to scroll through than static ads and this makes them perfect for showcasing multiple images or videos from a listing.
Reddit also gets high marks for real estate agents who will welcome any helpful resource that points people with real estate-related questions in their direction. Remember that it’s a community-moderated platform and so there are certain guidelines users have to abide by, one of them being users are not be self-promoting there. So be sure to keep it strictly informative about real estate, and the key to getting real estate leads through Reddit is to be genuinely informative and helpful and not throwing out sales pitches. The goal is to connect, answer questions, share stories, and provide genuine, helpful advice to those seeking it.
Network with Home Professionals
Most established real estate agents will know plenty of other agents. But their network should also consist of people outside of the agent-broker circle, and that’s because connecting with people who aren’t agents but are adjacent to the industry can be very beneficial when an agent is building their referral network. Real estate referrals are an age-old way of getting new leads, and standard sources of them that can be gained from other professionals in related industries include:
- Insurance brokers
- Mortgage lenders
- Builders
- Interior designers
Agents that affiliate themselves with other home industry professionals increase their chances of being referred to new clients through them. Then it is also becomes possible the agent can recommend people to those professionals if they see they might need their services. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, and can be a way to generate real estate leads.
Add a Free Tool to The Website
Realtors can consider adding a free tool to their website, like a mortgage calculator or home valuation assessment. This is a helpful way to educate potential clients, whether they’re in the market to buy or sell. Asides from being a genuinely helpful offering for people, they can also be used to capture a lead’s information. Agents can glean essential information that they may be able to use to turn these leads into clients.
Contribute to Industry Publications
Agents can also position themselves as an industry expert and get real estate leads through by contributing to industry publications. These days it is possible to use tools like HARO or Qwoted to connect with journalists and publications who may be looking for quotes or insights from real estate experts. Some realtors may even have the skills required to write an article to contribute to industry publications that accept guest posts.
Contributing to trade publications or local media outlets will help them build their personal brand as a real estate expert in your local market. It will also help them get in front of a new audience of potential clients.
Take Advantage of Social Media Marketing Tools
Real estate agents who are attuned to marketing themselves in the modern world will be doing so on more than one social platform. Some are best for all-in-one social media content creation, scheduling, and monitoring and these days many realtors will use something like Hootsuite for this purpose.
Hootsuite Composer is good for creating and scheduling posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites. With Composer it is possible to put together a week’s worth of content that’ll publish whenever the agent wants it to go out on whatever platform.
These are all real estate marketing strategies that have the explicit focus of getting more leads for agents, both for clients who are looking to sell a home as well as those who would like the expert help needed when buying a home. Put as many of them to use as you see doable for you and we wish you success as you grow your real estate business in Canada.
