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Sphere of influence in real estate – prospecting postcards that identify seller leads with the “I have a client” approach

Are there other real estate marketing strategies that can help you identify sellers within your sphere of influence list? There are probably four or five ways. You have home valuation, which is the first of the real estate marketing products you might choose to invest in for your real estate business. Perhaps a second one is what I call ‘I have a client’. Let me give you background on this real estate marketing tool and how it came about.

Many years back, one of my clients and friend, Rob, was telling me that he had a buyer looking in a certain area in town on a certain street. He’d been waiting for a house to come on the market for a while, but nothing was coming on the market that he liked.

Using real estate letters as one of your real estate marketing products to identify sellers before they go on market

So my friend decided to be creative. He decided to write real estate letters. “Dear Homeowner. I’m a real estate agent. I have a client who wants to buy on this street and can’t find a house that he likes. If you are thinking about selling or are interested in selling, would you please call me.” That’s all it was. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. The real estate mailers should simply get the message across, “I’ve got someone who wants to buy right now.”

He sends the real estate letters out and guess what? He is able to find sellers out of it. He received a few phone calls from seller leads that said, “Yes, we are thinking about selling later this year. Tell me about your client.” Whether he made the deal between his buyer client or not is immaterial. He now has a new listing.

Take that same concept and rework it for your sphere of influence list. It might be that you write real estate letters and you tweak them. How do you tweak these real estate letters? That depends on a number of factors like where seller leads are and things of that sort.

Marketing to your sphere of influence list with real estate letters that allow seller leads to select themselves as a motivated seller

Let’s say you start with your sphere of influence list; that’s list number one. You can also carve out other areas. Maybe you have a subdivision in a certain area. Then, you’ve got the east side of town group over here. You’ve also got the south side of town group over there. Now, in all, you’ve got your personal contact list and sphere of influence lists. You send each of them a different one of your real estate letters based on where they are.

Let’s call the suburb Eastwood Cliffs. You write one of your real estate letters to all the people in Eastwood Cliffs. It might say, “I constantly have buyers looking in Eastwood Cliffs. They often get frustrated because it takes a year or two to find the right house. If you are thinking about selling, I might be able to get your home sold immediately because of these buyers that are looking. Would you please let me know?” Then write that letter to people in the south of town and east of town. Now you wait for potential sellers to check back with you.

You can also use some other real estate marketing tips. What we do is attract them bit with a different marketing strategy. We have technology at our fingertips that allows us to send out real estate postcards that always gets responses. Instead of saying, “let me know” to potential sellers, we say, “If you want to find out exactly what these buyers are looking for to see if your house is a match, go to this website.”

Sending real estate postcards to your sphere of influence as one of your real estate marketing strategies that will allow you to identify motivated seller leads before they go on market

We use a special URL on our real estate postcards that track the site visit directly back to the seller leads. When they go to our website, we are able to pinpoint the exact address from which they responded. What we’ve done is create a curiosity factor that increases the number of responses from motivated seller leads. Now we can identify those people who are curious enough that they want to know what those buyers are looking for. We generally find that 2/3 of these real estate leads end up selling.

This is a great way to identify sellers before they go on the market. Sometimes you find them three weeks before they are ready to list. Other times it can be 12 months. The fact is, you are now able to narrow your target down to the key people in your sphere of influence who are motivated seller leads. You are able to initiate conversation and stay in front of them so when they do go on the market, you are the one they call as their real estate agent.

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