Technology has changed how people buy and sell houses. The real estate arena has become even more competitive. The modern realtor must work smart and employ tech tools to increase real estate leads into their sales funnel.
According to the last data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), there are about 1.4 million active realtors in the United States. That’s quite a competition if you’re trying to stand out in the real estate business.
Even before driving around the desired neighborhood, potential home buyers now browse properties online. At this stage lies the greatest opportunity to attract interested people and convert them as real estate leads into the sales funnel of your website listings.
The idea is to let technology do the hard “fishing” work of getting real estate leads to you with automation so you can focus on real estate expertise to close the deal. Setting up a winning sales funnel is simple and cost-effective. Let us show you how.
Real Estate Outlook in 2020
Every industry is facing uncertainty this year and the housing forecast is no different. But according to realtor.com, things will brighten up for the last half of 2020. Housing buyer demand will be now at its peak and this is the window of opportunity to make a sale and secure that commission cut.
Not only the fear of coronavirus seems to be diminishing but low mortgage rates are another driver for real estate optimism. Besides, this is the time of the year when families want to settle in new homes before the beginning of the school year. And of course, there are those looking for new homes with plenty of office space since remote work will more likely stick around.
Does this sound like the right time to revamp your website to attract those real estate leads into your sales funnel? You betcha.
What is a Real Estate Sales Funnel and What are Real Estate Leads
Long gone is the time where realtors would publish their profile picture on a newspaper ad inviting home-buyers for an open house. Now, according to the National Association of Realtors, 92% of all buyers use the internet in the search for a home.
Therefore, establishing your online presence as a realtor is not just necessary, but almost mandatory. Even if you’re part of a brokerage firm and your contact is already part of their website, your own real estate expertise must also be promoted like a brand.
Whether you already have your own real estate website or not, it should not be a static page just to display your contact information. There are many ways to improve it in order to build a sales funnel and turn it into a real estate lead generating machine. Let’s first define these terms:
Real Estate Sales Funnel
The sales funnel, in simple terms, is the buying process that businesses can lead customers toward the purchase of a good or service.
Also called as the purchase funnel, it is a customer-focused marketing concept that maps out the journey a customer goes through when making any kind of purchase. The typical sales funnel goes through the following stages: awareness, interest, desire, and action.
Therefore, the real estate sales funnel is that concept applied to the home buying process. And since we’ve stated that online presence is paramount, the real estate sales funnel can be a series of landing pages, hopefully converting visitors into qualified leads if a contact form is filled out and submitted.
Real Estate Leads
You’ve probably guessed it already, but real estate leads are actual people interested in buying any type of property. Not just a real estate lead is an interested person, but it only counts if that person gave away hers or his contact information to you.
It is only logical that if someone viewed your property listings page, even to just peek at a dream house, that person is already more inclined to know more about it than someone who never expressed any interest in real estate acquisition.
Of course, selling a house is not like selling candy and you can’t just as easily convince people to make such investment, but any real estate lead can become a potential sale. With the contact information, you can call visitors back in order to make your sales pitch and establish a connection.
How to Set Up a Sales Funnel for Real Estate Lead Generation
A glamorous website won’t sell houses on its own. There is more to a realtor job than to just publish a website and wait for orders to come, obviously. But most likely a home sale will start online. From a Google search.
You have to treat your website like your precious real estate shop, and each property as if it were beautifully displayed on a shelf. And by shelf, we mean its own landing page with an inviting contact form.
Setting Up Your Real Estate Sales Funnel
There are many approaches to set up a sales funnel for your real estate website. You can develop a real estate newsletter, design a popup window for an event invitation, or run a marketing campaign on Facebook and Google, just to give you some examples.
However, the most guaranteed strategy for a successful Real Estate sales funnel is to set up an individual landing page for each property. Do not panic though, thinking this is something costly or time-consuming.
We strongly recommend that you take advantage of using a mass landing page generator like Multiple Pages Generator (or simply MPG). We have covered this topic in detail before, in our article on How to Nail the Local Lead Generation Game.
The idea is to boost your website with thousands of unique pages to build your real estate sales funnel. With MPG, you can create multiple pages in bulk for any kind of keyword-targeted landing pages within minutes.
For example, you can create unique landing pages by each individual property, by neighborhood, by type of property, by price range, and so on. Map out how your visitors will view your website and tackle all three first stages of a sales funnel – awareness, interest, desire – to lure them into action!
Another benefit of using a mass landing page generator, besides convenience, is improving online visibility on search engine results. If potential buyers are looking for specific homes within a zip code, your targeted landing page will be displayed on top.
The real estate sales funnel will be more effective if each step is clear and pleasant. Consider including photos of the property, map with full address, and maybe a tour video. However, don’t hold information as a ransom to be divulged only if a call or a house showing is scheduled.
Keep in mind that people will be looking at many websites while house hunting and if you hold key information back, they’ll simply move on to the next realtor. On the other hand, visitors will gladly continue spiraling down your real estate sales funnel if trust and expertise are promptly perceived.
Setting Up Your Real Estate Lead Generation
Maybe you’re just beginning your career as a realtor with only one or a few listings. Or a realtor for very exclusive luxury homes or some other real estate niche. Or even a homeowner selling your property yourself. Then maybe multiple landing pages won’t be as necessary.
But even if you decide to take another approach for your sales funnel other than multiple landing pages, you will most definitely need a landing form. A proper, responsive online form is truly how you get real estate leads.
Whether for your homepage or for each landing page, a contact form must be part of it. Your own contact information should be clearly displayed, but do not passively wait for a call or an email. Besides, if it can be quite cumbersome to keep track of tons of submitted forms, imagine for loose calls and emails.
Your goal is to secure real estate leads from your sales funnel AND efficiently manage them. How will you achieve that? With an online form builder like MightyForms!
Real Estate Lead-Generating Forms Guide with MightyForms
If you’re not familiar yet with online form builders, then you’ll be surprised how easy and quick it is to create and embed forms into your website or landing pages. No need to hire a professional or learn to code yourself.
A form builder like MightyForms will simplify all design and publishing process while offering great automation solutions so you can keep track of every real estate lead. Go ahead and log in with your Google or Facebook account to try it out. You can also create a MightyForms account and enjoy further advantages.
Here’s a quick guide on some MightyForms powerful features that will surely enhance your sales funnel and increase your real estate leads:
Drag-and-Drop Editor
Build custom property forms from scratch, from a template or from a PDF file. Edit any element like field, size, shape, spacing, position, and color just as you like it.
Free Real Estate form templates
There are tons of template options by type, theme, or industry, including, of course, a real estate seller form if you just want to get going even faster. After selecting the Real Estate Seller Form, you can tweak it to make it your own.
Responsive Forms
Seamlessly interact with potential home buyers with responsive forms that automatically adapt to desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones. MightyForms allows you to preview your form on how it will look and perform on these devices before publishing it.
Custom success page
Nurture real estate leads and establish a further connection by automating a custom success page to let visitors know that their inquiry was well received. Take it up a notch and you can even redirect visitors to another page, like a home financing calculator website, after they’ve submitted the form.
Auto-Notifications options
Easily create automatic notifications to yourself, to someone from your brokerage firm, or even to a property current owner, to let them know real estate leads are being received. Beat competition to the punch by enabling SMS feature so you can be immediately notified by text message of an incoming real estate lead.
Real-Time Data Capture Technology
Keep track of all interactions with your form, even if visitors drop it off, so you can save and use any information filled out later to rekindle this real estate lead. Sometimes prospects just need a little follow-up call to smooth out doubts and fears of making such a big decision as homeownership.
Logic Rules
Refine your sales funnel by setting up Logic Rules questions to improve your form even further. You can set up conditions for the next steps based on neighborhood options, price range, property type, etc., and qualify your real estate leads from the start.
Integrations
Connect your form to native integrations, like Google Drive, Google Sheets, Zapier, and much more. You can seamlessly export real estate leads data in order to follow up negotiations and commission cuts, for instance, on another platform of your choice.
Built-In ReCAPTCHA V3
Prevent your sales funnel from robots and spam attack by enabling reCAPTCHA v3 to your form, making sure you’re only getting submissions from real home-buying prospects.
Security
Real estate business involves large sums of money so you want to build a trustworthy channel for your prospects, with end-to-end SSL encryption throughout your sales funnel and secure storage for collected data of your real estate leads.
Now that we’ve shown you the importance of building a sales funnel to secure more real estate leads and how easy it is to manage it with automation solutions by MightyForms, it’s showtime!
It is up to you how will you leverage real estate leads received from your website and make the most it. Technology is here to do the heavy lifting so you can wow your prospects with your real estate expertise.
May you rejoice tracking up your real estate leads down into your sales funnel until finally convert them into home buyers!
