The Real Estate Agents Confidence Report for January 2010 (a survey of real estate agents’ experience with current market conditions) summarizes the mood in the real estate industry with the following observations:
• “Due to the high unemployment rate, it is very difficult for buyers to hope to buy a home for 2-5 years.”
• “11 percent unemployment and rising gasoline prices are wiping out our market.”
While several real estate brokers and professionals have been forced out of the industry as a result of the current economic crisis, many are still holding on and some are thriving even in these times of economic downturn.
So how can you, as a broker or real estate agent, survive and even thrive in this brutal market? The few brokers and / or agents that thrive in this market are doing the following:
• Ensured that you get the most out of your marketing investment.
• Ability to collect high-quality leads without spending too much
• Ensured of a dynamic lead capture process 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Ability to instantly track calls from your leads
• Ability to create continuous conversations with your prospects or clients.
• Personalize your messages and speak to your customers when they need it, knowing that the broker’s message is accurately presented on your customers’ mobile devices.
• Automate the campaign management process.
• Create and view campaign analytics.
• Create a database of optional prospects
Increasingly, real estate agencies across the country are using mobile text marketing strategies to quickly inform their clients with personal messages about new listings or information about closing deals. They are integrating mobile marketing into their traditional advertising strategies and improving their response rates as a result!
The New York Times has described mobile text marketing as “The most powerful advertising medium ever invented.”
Mobile text marketing offers unique targeting capabilities that are unmatched by traditional promotional and advertising media. With the right mobile marketing provider, your prospective buyers will be able to get detailed property information on their mobile phone with detailed specifications, prices, virtual tours, and your contact information.
Here’s how it works: choose a main keyword (ex: JOESREALTY). This entitles you to an unlimited number of additional secondary keywords. Then you will assign each property a specific sub-keyword. If you have 10 properties, your child keywords will range from JOESREALTY_1 to 10.
When someone replies to your ad and sends a text message:
Step 1. A potential buyer sends a TEXT MESSAGE with the KEYWORD of the property to our SHORT CODE.
Step 2. The system generates an SMS to the buyer with the description and details of the property.
Step 3. The system can also generate another SMS, with a qualification question from the potential customer.
Step 4. The system sends the agent an SMS with the potential customer’s details.
Step 5. The system captures the sender’s contact information for follow-up or contact campaigns
Choosing a competent supplier:
• Make sure you choose a provider with a reliable and trustworthy web platform to manage mobile marketing and alert programs via short codes.
• Your vendor should also have packaged, “out of the box” solutions that give you the reliability, real-time compliance, and flexibility you need to implement.
• The appropriate package should include one or more “Keywords” that you can use to build your permission-based marketing database and market your products and services. Just choose the keywords you want to represent your company’s products, services or campaigns and use them in all your marketing ads.
• The system should have a database control center where you will capture opt-in contact information and send follow-up information or other marketing campaign.
• Lastly, the prospective supplier should have a proven, user-friendly system and a proven list of existing national and local companies on board.
• Must be able to test “in real time” with an existing real estate client how the system works for them.
It’s no wonder in this market that the real estate industry is relatively concerned with gathering high-quality leads. If an agent doesn’t have good leads, after all, he or she won’t make sales, there won’t be any leads to sell to, and you put your business at risk of failure.
In today’s recessive environment, it’s critical that real estate professionals quickly incorporate new and more profitable lead generation strategies into their ongoing marketing efforts.
Mobile text marketing technology is helping real estate agencies across the country quickly inform their clients with personal messages about new listings or information about closing deals.
Learn more about how mobile text marketing can help your business.
