4 Ways to Avoid Bad Prospects and Kick Start Your Real Estate System

In most cases, real estate owners and real estate professionals dream up ways to get as many leads as possible. Getting more leads usually means better success with renting or selling your property. However, trying to get everyone you can as a potential lead may not be the best strategy over the long run. What you really want to have are the right kind of leads and try not to waste your time with poor prospects. Let’s look at some things you can set up at the front end to help you filter out bad prospects that just waste your time.

Give Your Prospects Enough Information – This is one of most important things you can do to improve your marketing efficiency. When you provide prospects sound information on your property, you give them the opportunity to pre-filter themselves. If you don’t do this, then you can’t blame them for pestering you with questions you could have easily given them at the front end. Most prospects don’t want to waste your time or their time needlessly. Simply by placing good content about your property at their disposal, you let them make their own decision about whether they are a fit with your property. Sometimes they will still think they are a fit when they or not and sometimes you risk losing a prospect that really was a good fit because you never had the chance to point out why. In most cases, however, you will find that prospects will filter themselves out efficiently which saves you huge amounts of time over the long run.

Set Up an 800 Number Message – A 24/7 pre-recorded message is admittedly low tech but it is also a low cost technique and surprisingly effective. You will want all of your ads directing prospects either to your pre-recorded message or to a website presentation on your property. Your telephone message will present the key benefits of your property, in a safe low pressure environment. Tests have shown that a lot of people prefer not to have to deal with a salesperson, particularly when they are first sizing up an opportunity. This is great news from your point of view. You look good because you carefully script the very best things your listener should be aware of, without having to compete with anyone or anything else in the process. Your pre-recorded message should be approximately three to five minutes long and should tell them exactly what you want them to do at the end of the message.

Get Your Prospects to Give You Quality Information Automatically– Not a lot of marketers use surveys, yet they can be one of the most beneficial things you can do for your marketing program. Surveys allow you get valuable information about how your prospects think allowing you to tweak your marketing efforts accordingly. Surveys are typically offered through an online Landing Page. Visitors to your landing page website are presented with a minimal amount of promotional information about your property and offered a FREE REPORT if they fill out a short survey. The survey asks them questions regarding their preferences about real estate such as what they might pay for perceived property features (such as a pool), or what kind of amenities they would like to live by, or how long they expect to stay in their next residence. Whatever important information you feel can help you filter your prospects without appearing overbearing can be included in a short 5 -10 question survey.

Use Videos to Let Prospects See Your Property Remotely – Why force a prospect to come see the property before they have had a chance to get an advance preview? Your  “video tour” will be placed on your property website and will represent the centerpiece of your property marketing program. This does not have to be a professionally produced piece. You can quickly put together a great looking video at a surprisingly low cost using Microsoft PowerPoint and a voice over narration.  Take the time to script out the story ahead of time in a fashion that points out the major benefits of the property to your viewer.  You can use cost effective applications such as Camtasia Studio to record your slide presentation and add voice over. Then, use Camtasia to convert it into a movie you can upload to your website on the fly. The process is quite easy to learn and you can do it without having to outsource it somewhere else. The video puts your prospects in a favorable mind frame as they have self selected your property as opposed to being “promoted” by a sales person. More important for you, unqualified prospects that have no business wasting your time will filter themselves out before ever giving you a call. Just as with the pre-recorded telephone message, you have the opportunity to pitch your property in a focused environment without any competition watering down your message.

The above techniques are just a few of the things you can do in advance to make your real estate marketing as efficient as possible. Remember that your objective is to first educate and then persuade the best prospects to come see your property and second, to filter out those prospects that are a poor fit for your property. If you can do this remotely, you allow time to focus on the most productive aspects of your marketing plan. By the time you get to a prospect that has been educated and already has enthusiasm for your property, you can focus all of your efforts on the close, which is the ultimate goal of real estate marketing.