It’s entirely natural that realtors will often evaluate whether or not they put their valuable time into an effort based on dollars and cents outlooks, and if you’re a real estate agent in Canada you’ll get our drift here. Not all real estate clients are equal, and while even the most successful and well-established agents will be happy to work with clients of all sorts it’s also not unnatural to have more a fondness for working with clients who are selling a home as opposed to buying one.
Now some will quickly connect the dots to conclude that’s because there is usually more commission earned by a realtor who has helped with the sale of a home for his clients. That’s fair enough, and it’s true for the most part. The value of the home has everything to do with that, but we can get it if some agents are going to be put more focus on strategies for generating seller leads. We’ve said it before, but we know that other paid real estate leads in Canada providers would likely tell you the same if you asked – there’s no one best way to generate real estate leads.
Indeed the most successful real estate lead generators take a multi-track approach to drumming up new clientele, and we’ve also talked at length here about how older and more traditional approaches like door knocking and volunteering at community / civic events can also be very helpful for the aim. The last part of that is particularly noteworthy if you are one more Canadian realtors who is happier to have home seller clients when possible, and so here we’re going to look at strategies for generating seller leads in much more detail.
Here are 17 proven effective ways for digging up leads on clients who intend to sell their home. Do you have what it takes to impress upon them that you are the best local real estate agent to help them sell their home? You will need to give off a certain confidence and put your expertise on display, but that’s the subject for another different blog entry here. Let’s get into it.
Strategic Reevaluation
These days finding home seller leads is increasingly difficult, and yes the fact there are too many realtors in any given area of the country does have a lot to do with that. Moreso than before, most people will already have a realtor in mind or when that’s been introduced to them before when they’re starting to think about putting their home on the market. This can be true even
for experienced real estate agents. In the event you’re in a rut with all of this it may be time to reevaluate your strategies for the best way to generate real estate leads, and with a specific focus on people who are likely to be selling their home.
What we’ll have here for you with this entry are practical and creative ways to help you focus your efforts more effectively and come up with better strategies for generating seller leads. Implement a few of these tactics smartly into your client prospecting efforts and you may well find you have more of your ‘preferred’ clientele to work with – people who have decided to sell their home AND decided you are the Canadian real estate agent they want to work with.
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Leverage Existing Network to Ask for Home Seller Referrals
It’s important not to overlook the more obvious choices when it comes to smarter marketing and self-promotion of yourself as a service professional. No matter what type of service you are providing, including helping someone negotiate the sale of their home for their maximum return and satisfaction.
A new realtor may have a smaller network to work with, but it is a network none the less and that’s where you need to start here. Lean on the people you know and have worked with previously. This can be your past clients, lenders, and others in your sphere of influence, and these most agents will be using a real estate CRM suite of some sort to keep track of everyone who’s in that network and where their professional expertise lies.
Here’s a stat to keep in mind with all of this; apparently in 2022 36% of sellers who used a real estate agent was put into contact with that agent through a referral. You won’t get referrals if you don’t ask for them, so you need to be assertive and go out and ask if whoever it may be knows of someone who’s thinking about putting their home on the market and isn’t working with a realtor – yet.
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Use Social Media to Build your Personal Brand
Social media like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are great for helping realtors create a strong online identity for themselves and build up their personal ‘brand’, if you will, as a means of standing out from the thousands of other realtors who would like those same clients you have your eyes on.
Social media channel activity and promotion is most effective when it’s paired with your real estate website where share value-add information and expertise on your local market to build your credibility. There are a lot of possibilities here though, and getting into all of them would be an entry all its own too probably. Explore and try new approaches, there’s a lot to learn here.
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Provide Custom Local Market Updates for Existing Seller Leads
There is always going to be more value than you’d imagine in your existing database, or at least that’s the case most of the time for realtors who have been working in real estate for a number of years minimum. It’s a good idea to email up-to-date summaries of active, pending, and sold properties to would-be clients when they match their search criteria.
This is definitely part of strategies for generating seller leads too, and again here we can’t recommend using a real estate CRM highly enough for this aim too. Plus you’ll find that a good real estate email marketing software can enhance your email marketing efforts and ensure maximum engagement.
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Have a CTA (call to action) Offering a Home Valuation on Your Website
You may need to work with a webmaster if you’re not the builder of your site, and it’s not common for real estate agents to build their own website. But if you are going to use this CTA it will be most powerful among real estate lead generators if it can be linked or otherwise connected to community pages as well as contributing to better SERP (search engine results page) rankings when people search for realtors in the area of the country where you are working as one. This is a really easy way to start a conversation with potential seller leads and provide value to them.
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Drive Traffic to Home Valuation Landing Pages
You can easily create these types of microsites specifically designed to attract seller leads with a home valuation CTA. They should be directly integrated with your CRM in the same way your main website is and you can control the metadata, including the H1 tags to boost your organic rankings.
Take advantage of Google Analytics, Google Ads conversion ID, or Facebook here too and to track pixel to track conversions on the site. This is among the best ways to generate real estate leads because it can capture key information about their home plus their timeline for selling if they have a defined one – something that can distinguish a hot lead from one that’s only warm. This is then captured in your CRM as a seller lead, and you can choose how your leads are routed from there.
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Utilize Google Seller PPC Campaigns
Most common is to locate these pay-per-click ad campaigns with a seller site on its own domain, and so we recommend running seller lead campaigns at the municipality level to ensure you’re geo-targeting an area that’s large enough to the point that you can expect to generate at least some home seller leads from it. You will need to be casting a fairly wide net, and an even wider one depending on where in Canada and in which part of which Province you are working as a real estate agent.
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Use Your CRM to Build a Follow-Up and Lead Nurturing System
There are going to be occasions When a seller lead’s timeline is several months into the future, but that doesn’t mean you should automatically be back-burnering them. Instead you can use a combination of tags, action plans, drip campaigns, and real estate marketing automations in your CRM to develop automated ways that keep you in touch with them organically but without coming on too strong as realtor who’s desperate for new clientele.
You can also build a follow-up plan based on the lead’s engagement level. One example might be automatically enrolling a seller lead into an action plan once they’ve visited your site a certain number of times. The action plan can have call tasks and automated texts and emails to ensure you’re being timely with when and how you reach out.
Using AI tools is possible here too, you can automate initial engagement with the lead to help qualify them and alert an agent when the lead is more likely to be converted into a new real estate client. AI tools are also good for positive re-engaging of older seller leads without requiring a whole lot of you.
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Create Seller-Focused Content
It’s the simple fact that prospective clients who might list their home for sale with you will be more likely to engage with content related to the selling of homes. So it may be that blog posts on how to prep your home to sell or a landing page with tips on the home-selling process can be much more effective when it comes strategies for generating seller leads .
Seller-focused content that is written well and made available through the right channels can help augment the other ways you’re targeting these leads. This content can be used as landing pages for ads, in email marketing, on social media, and to attract visitors to your website.
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Use Cold Calling to Prospect Expired Listings and FSBOs
Being right on top of expired listings from your MLS and any FSBOs (for sale by owners) listing can be a similarly solid approach for creating real estate seller leads. It is possible that leads from expired listings might have poor experiences with other agents dulling the enthusiasm they have for working with a new realtors and perhaps even deciding to put their home back on the market altogether.
You need to define how you will convince them that working with you will be different. Having trouble making enough calls throughout the day? Increase your efficiency and productivity by using an automated real estate dialer. These can be good for connecting with a larger volume of prospects and maximizing your outreach efforts.
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Build a Networking Group Built Out of Local Service Providers
Real estate is yet another business where it’s all about who you know. And if you’re a realtor yourself then the best people to know in this capacity are people who work with homes in a similarly service-oriented capacity. The painters, carpenters and contractors who sellers are bound to call. Forming personal relationships with these companies can be a great way to become aware of homes about to go on the market before anyone else.
In addition, once homeowners hear you’re someone with the right network and plenty of local market expertise you may well be the realtor they contact when it’s time to sell.
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Work Open Houses to Generate Seller Leads
Every approach to strategies for generating seller leads is going to require plenty of proactivity and get-up-and-go on your part. So suggesting you get up and go to open houses is right in line with that and it can also be a big part of having success with home seller lead generation.
Open houses are perfect opportunities to meet people who are ready to sell. Whether they’re serious about listing their home or are just curious to see what competition in the area is like, these are great places to have organic and very natural first meetings with a potential client.
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Leverage Facebook Ads
We can’t even list out all the ways there is to utilize Facebook for home seller lead generation, but one strategy that’s a little beyond the standard approaches is to focus on specific interest groups that can help generate leads for you. For example, a FB group for young parents where you’re more likely to be in contact with young couples who have children making their families bigger and they’re looking for a bigger home because of it.
Use Facebook to find these people and start building real estate relationships. You may be surprised how much good can come from being even just a little engaged through targeted Facebook real estate ads.
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Provide Assistance for Distressed Homeowners
It’s never a desirable scenario, but there are times when homeowners are forced to sell. And in some instances they may need to sell quickly. Often this because of unfortunate circumstances. You can and should still contact these people if you’re made aware of them. Just tread lightly and be understanding and empathetic when working with this segment. Put your focus on listening to their needs and helping them sell their home and get through this unfortunate situation where they are at a disadvantage with selling their home.
And more to the point, be very forthcoming with anything and everything you can do to minimize any such disadvantage their in. If you can improv the outcomes for them and make the sale of the home as agreeable as possible all things considered you WILL have satisfied clients, and as we know it is satisfied clients who recommend you as a realtor to others they know.
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Convert Renters into Sellers
Renting out a home can be a good way to maintain and build equity despite whatever reason the owner may have for not living in the home at that time. But it can also be one heck of a hassle, and unfortunately that’s especially true in Canada. There’s maintenance, administration, collecting the rent, and also evictions in worst-case scenarios. You can do well by explaining these costs to potential clients, and helping them understand that in some cases it may actually be in their best interest to sell the home instead.
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Join a Team of Experienced Listing Agents
Networking with listing agents nearly always provides mutual benefit, and especially when it is a group of realtors who each come to the tablet with their own areas of local market expertise, this is part of strategies for generating seller leads too and can even be a quick and easy way to get more leads fast. Sure, it won’t be a good fit for those who’d rather work on their own, but if you can work well with others and you have an interest in the mutual gains you’d provide for each then this is something to consider for your real estate lead generation approaches.
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Make Contacts with Home Flippers / Real Estate Investors
Buying and refurbishing old homes is increasingly popular with real estate investors. And it’s quite likely there are entire neighborhoods in your city where this is happening. Be quick to move on this if you become aware of it and reach out to these individuals in the attempt to convince them you’re the right agent to realize the sale of their property. They’ll likely be motivated to sell fast and frequently, and again consider the satisfied client / referral angle here.
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Host an Event
People of all sort tend to like to socialize, and that’s why some realtors will host or arrange events that can be subtly used to promote their services when in the midst of a gathering of people that may have any number of prospective clients attending based on demographic factors, location, and so on. The more people who leave talking about it — and you — the more likely you’ll be recommended to others when they decide that now they’re ready to put their home on the market.
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Be Creative
All realtors will use print marketing collateral like cards and so on to hopefully stay front of mind with people who aren’t selling their home right now but may be in the not-too-distant future. You can and should do the same as part of what successful real estate lead generators do, but you should try and be as creative in possible in making your marketing and promotion collateral stand out from the ones other realtors use. A different and unique tag line may be a great place to start, but there’s much more you can do too and this is one area of all this where you can really think outside the box and find unique and creative ways to see to it you’re the real estate agent they’re most likely to think of.
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Remember that the strategies and tactics you choose to try here should be given at least something of a longer leash when it comes to you starting to evaluate whether they’re working or not for you with getting more home seller leads. Often it’s a combination of good old-fashioned prospecting and relationship building and paired with by strong marketing and technology implementation that will be contributing to real estate lead pipelines most effectively AND most frequently. And, of course, always be open to trying new things.
