The 5/5 Rule for Real Estate Agents – 5 Tips to Increase Your Conversion 5%

It can be challenging to win business when you’re in a world of constant competition to “close the next deal” or “convert the next lead.” As one agent recently described it, “it’s a bloodbath out here”.

I guess when you consider the fact that in 2017 there were over 80,000,000 leads generated in Real Estate but only 6,500,000 homes sold there definitely is a lot of competition.

While it’s never fun to “compete” over leads, there are some things you can do to stack the odds in your favor. Here are five simple tips you can leverage to increase your conversion up to 5% in your local market.

1) Create your very own market.

Developing a niche is a very well-known trick that rarely gets put into practice except by the top 4-6% of agents in each market. Most of the agents that I speak with want to “dominate the market” yet don’t know how to gain a foothold that will help them get started.

The first thing you can do to increase your conversion rate is creating a profile of the perfect client in your market. Get a picture in your head of that ONE client that would have you ready to blast out of bed every morning to make the world a better place.

The simple act of doing this takes you from an agent that would appear to be a commodity to an agent who is now a specialist that can grab as much as 80% of a new market you just created.

2) Generate exclusive leads.

If I had a dollar for every time, I heard how upset agents were that they had to share their leads with other agents I wouldn’t probably even be writing this. The simple answer to not being just “another agent” harassing new leads you were just given is to make sure you’re the only one generating the lead.

It’s hard to do this with companies whose entire business model is predicated on getting two or more agents to pay for leads in a given zip code.

The best way that I have ever seen to generate your very own exclusive leads is through the act of building a “Marketing Funnel” or what I like to call a “Dynamic User Experience.”

When you build out a marketing funnel, you’re creating an experience for the potential buyer and or seller to have with your business. From a cold lead that doesn’t know you exist to someone sitting with you at the closing table, this experience should guide your prospect into doing business with you all with little to no effort from you.

The best way I see right now to generate exclusive leads is through Facebook Advertising. There isn’t another place on the internet you can spend three dollars and get names, email addresses, and phone numbers of people are interested in Real Estate.

Use this incredibly undervalued and incredibly underpriced form of advertising right now, and you’ll have exclusive leads you don’t have to share with anybody else in the market. If you want to learn the specific type of ads, you can run to get leads you can take this free training.

3) Follow your clients all over the internet.

You know how every time you go to Amazon to buy a product, and you decide not to that product follows you all over the internet until you decide to buy it?

If you aren’t doing that with the leads, you’re generating you are doing yourself a massive disservice. This is what we call “retargeting” or “remarketing.” It’s where we have a chance to virtually remind the leads we generate who we are, what we do, and how we can help them every time they look at their cell phone.

There is no greater way to “follow-up” with a prospect or to stay “top of mind” than with remarketing.

When you do being retargeting these new leads, you should leverage what I like to call “Dynamic Video Retargeting.” You are in a relationship-based business, and every form of branding you put out should give these new prospects a way to build relationships with you.

We do this by recording three to five-minute videos about ourselves, about the market, about other small businesses in the area. If you’re struggling to think about what types of videos to create think of everything tied to a Real Estate transaction. Think of the process, and the people involved that you could interview. Think of the home and the improvement or maintenance someone will need to do after owning it. Think of the community and the people who serve it that your client would care about.

All things you would know if you know your customer inside and out.

4) Understand the game you’re playing.

“People love people.”

Just because you may or may not need a commission check right now doesn’t mean you aren’t dealing with real people who are making the most significant investment they may ever make in their lifetime.

Your need for money, if you do, should not outweigh their need to think through one of the top five biggest decisions of their life.

“Converting” leads from any source in Real Estate is a lot of things, but it is not quick. It’s the type of business you are in, and if that isn’t ok with you, then you might be in the wrong profession.

With that said, that does not mean you won’t find the “low hanging fruit” in your market that is ready to buy or sell right now.

If you can convert 3-5% of the leads, you generate you will typically earn tens of thousands of dollars in commission monthly. That is a tiny percentage of people who need to “make a move” in your business each month.

The best way to convert 3-5% of the leads you generate when the rest of the industry is struggling to convert 1-3% of the leads they generate is to focus more on building a relationship with them and less on “converting” them.

Your first interactions with a lead should be a lot more about their favorite place to have dinner on a Friday night and a lot less about how many bedrooms they need in their next house.

It’s not the first person that “converts” the lead that will win. It’s the first person that builds a relationship that will reap the rewards in your market. Shift your mindset completely from conversion to engagement, and you’ll notice an astronomical leap in your ability to generate customers.

5) Develop a “system.”

The number one greatest mistake I see Real Estate Agents make when looking to convert more leads is that they have absolutely no pre-defined system for doing so.

They “call em” and “text em” and then they move on to the next one in the CRM.

You should strive to “touch” (call, text, email, video, socially engage) the leads you’re generating at least 8-12 times per day each day for the first three days they become a lead. If you’re generating ten leads a day, this can compound to up to 360 “touches” you need to make on a given day. A feat that is nearly impossible to do and track at scale unless you have some simple tools that will help you.

The most successful agents I work with only strive to generate as many leads as they can appropriately follow up with on the peak days of following up.

Take the time to build out some pre-written follow up processes and feel free to swipe mine so that you have a checklist of steps to take with every single lead you generate.

Each of the tips laid out here can increase your conversion anywhere from 1-2%. While it might be a major task to implement them all at once pick one and focus on implementing it. Once you’ve got your sales process further dialed in, apply another.

Give yourself a few weeks, maybe even a few months, and you won’t even recognize your old way of converting customers.