Real Estate Prospecting Strategies

Those of you in the real estate profession have chosen the field for differing reasons. Some of you love the hyper-competitive nature of our industry. Perhaps you entered real estate because you were drawn to helping others make major life decisions, of which buying or selling a home is at the top of the list. Many more agents get in because they've seen family members or good friends have tremendous success and want to follow in their footsteps.But the bottom line for most agents is they’ve chosen real estate as their primary way to earn a living. And the cornerstone to not just making a living but making a very good one in our industry is real estate prospecting. Top-producing real estate agents have a single-minded focus on prospecting for listings, adhering to the old adage: "Buyers take time, listings take skill."In this post, we’ll discuss the basics of real estate prospecting and provide tips for becoming a powerful real estate prospecting pro.

Real Estate Prospecting Defined

Filling Your Sales Funnel

Prospecting in real estate refers to finding new contacts, converting them into leads, and eventually into clients, aka listings. It’s a simple concept, but when done right, prospecting provides agents with new opportunities, helping them grow their business and increase sales.Prospecting offers agents numerous benefits, helping them find more opportunities and get more listings to increase their sales. Let’s look at a few of the more important benefits:

• Keep your sales funnel stocked. The more you prospect, the greater your database becomes. Not everyone will be a “now” client, but as long as you build your network continuously, you will realize the benefits.
• Learn how to qualify leads. It’s great to build a network of leads, but ultimately you’ll benefit by qualifying those leads to determine their value to your business. The more you become comfortable with prospecting, the more effective you’ll be at asking questions to help you qualify those leads.
• Asking for the business: In time, you’ll become more adept at identifying the right time to ask for the business.
• Making more money. Top-performing agents know that they need to make their own success and can’t wait for business to come to them. Those agents with a prospecting mindset take responsibility for their own success.

There are two strategic approaches to real estate prospecting.

1. Proactive daily phone prospecting is the preferred approach for the country's top-earning agents, who know they are ultimately responsible for their success. They understand that the inevitable rejection that comes with phone prospecting lays the foundation for long-term success and security.
2. Passive prospecting/marketing. Most of the country’s 1.5 million real estate agents (according to N.A.R.) stick with passive marketing/prospecting for one simple reason: they want to avoid the rejection that is an inherent (and important) part of active, continuous phone prospecting. They don’t like the idea of calling strangers and aren’t comfortable with asking for the business.

For the remainder of this post, we’ll focus on proactive real estate prospecting strategies. If you’d like to learn more about passive prospecting/marketing strategies, check out our post REAL ESTATE PROSPECTING TIPS FOR NEW AGENTS.

Proactive Real Estate Prospecting Strategies

The Clearest Path To Listing Success

Following are generally accepted estimates for the time it takes listing agents and buyer’s agents to get to the contract phase of a real estate transaction:

• Listing agent: 8 hours
• Buyer’s agent: 32 hours

So, it takes FOUR times longer for a buyer’s agent to reach a contract than a listing agent. This might explain why the top-earning agents in our industry tend to be listing agents. These top players know that dedication to phone prospecting is the most time-effective way to get listings… and earn income. Buyer’s agents, on the other hand, spend the bulk of their time carting buyers from home to home, with no guarantee that they will even find the ideal property.Knowing that “time is money,” many top-earning real estate pros turn to a lead generation system like ESPRESSO AGENT. Espresso Agent is widely regarded as one of the industry’s leading sources of proven MOTIVATED REAL ESTATE LEADS. There are several ways Espresso Agent helps agents maximize their warm calling efforts:

• Expired listings are the low-hanging fruit in real estate. These are the homeowners who listed with another agent but could not sell for several reasons. They likely have an urgency to sell quickly.  Espresso Agent delivers superior, expired listing leads to your desktop daily, with email addresses and multiple phone numbers.
• FSBO leads. Working with FSBO (For Sale by Owner) homeowners requires more patience because they need to reach their conclusions about using a professional realtor (and paying a commission). Until they reach that point, you must provide value and advice without making a hard sale.
• For Rent by Owner, or FRBO, leads can be tremendously lucrative because these are investors who often have multiple properties… and are more likely to buy and sell more frequently than a traditional property owner.
• Espresso Agent also provides Pre-Foreclosure leads. These are homeowners who, for any number of reasons, are in danger of losing their homes and may be interested in selling quickly.
• Real Estate Farming (otherwise known as Circle Prospecting) allows agents to become neighborhood experts in their MLS. Espresso’s Real Estate Farming data lets agents focus on areas surrounding their “just listed” or “just sold” properties.

Real Estate Prospecting Tips And Best Practices

Mindset Matters

Real estate is not easy; if it were, everyone would do it.Real estate can be financially rewarding and psychically fulfilling for select agents who focus on listings and embrace phone prospecting. Top-producing agents love that they are entrepreneurs who can control their destinies. They revel in the freedom and security of earning significant money on their terms.But these select agents also know that success lies in sticking to the fundamentals and never letting up. To that end, here are a few of the tips and best practices that many of the top-producing agents in the business follow:

• Prospect daily: You cannot treat prospecting as an occasional exercise you do when you have time. If you want real estate prospecting to work, you must integrate as a priority into your daily schedule. Creating the most effective system might take some time, but once you do, stick to it daily.
• Be confident and persistent: Prospecting can be intimidating, especially for new agents. Unfortunately, you’ll need to battle through it. Prospecting is all about persistence and confidence
• Embrace failure: Top agents know that they likely need to get nine rejections before they nail a listing. That’s what drives them. They understand that if they aren’t hearing “no” enough, they aren’t making the necessary number of calls daily. One other important thing: top performers don’t take rejection personally.
• Use your scripts: We’ve written extensively about the value of LEAD GENERATION SCRIPTS. Many agents avoid using scripts for fear of sounding too mechanical. But in reality, the opposite is true. The more you work with scripts, the more comfortable and confident you’ll sound. Homeowners want a confident agent! As an Espresso Agent client, you’ll have access to myriad scripts designed to help you control the direction of your prospecting calls. Perhaps
• Be dogged about follow-up: Top-producing agents will tell you that the bulk of their listings and revenue come during the LEAD FOLLOW-UP They understand that persistence and excellent organizational skills pay-off in the long run. This might explain why so many top agents turn to Espresso Agents CRM SOFTWARE to manage their contacts and stay on task during the follow-up period.
• Practice, practice, practice: Successful agents often start the day with a role-playing partner. Morning role-playing is a valuable way to get your head in the game and practice handling the objections that will come your way. Look at it as a pre-game warm-up.
• Find an accountability partner: Regardless of how disciplined you might be, it helps to have a trusted ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER to help keep you focused and on task.
• Work your sphere of influence: Your sphere are the people in your life who are likely to give you a reference, including friends, family members, professional associates, and former clients who appreciated your approach to selling their home.
• Build and nurture partnerships: Successful agents know they can’t do everything on their own. As such, they build a network of professional partnerships that help them offer their clients a comprehensive real estate experience. Such partners could include mortgage brokers, home inspectors, landscapers and contractors,
• Invest in your success: If you’re new to the business, your knee-jerk reaction to this suggestion might be, “I can’t afford it.” That’s understandable. However, we urge you to do what you can to invest in your future success. For example, hiring a real estate coach can pay huge dividends. A coach will challenge you to be the best real estate agent you can be.

5 Reasons Why Espresso Agent’s A Game-changer

Listing Success Starts With Embracing Technology

Hopefully, the real estate prospecting strategies and tips outlined above will give you the impetus to focus your energy on becoming the best listing agent in your MLS.As we suggested in the previous section, it is important to invest in your success. To that end, here are five reasons why you should consider Espresso Agent as your real estate lead generation system:

1. We deliver unparalleled access to high-quality, competitive, motivated seller leads.
2. We provide an industry-leading CRM with end-to-end functionality that keeps you on-task with your lead follow-up.
3. We offer a dialer that allows you to make FOUR times as many calls per session as manual dialing.
4. We are widely known to have the industry's most comprehensive training and onboarding process.
5. We invite you into a community of like-minded agents who share real estate prospecting tips and celebrate your successes.

If you’d like to learn more about Espresso Agent and the value of our lead generation platform, please Contact Us.