The Jan 2010 Realtors Confidence Report (a survey of realtors experience with current market conditions) sums up the mood in the real estate industry with the following observations:
• “Due to the high unemployment rate it is very difficult for buyers to have any hopes of purchasing a home for 2-5 years”
• “11 percent unemployment and increasing gas prices are killing our market.”
While several real estate brokers and professionals have been forced to leave the industry as a result of the current economic crisis, many are still hanging on and a few are thriving even in these economic recessionary times.
So how do you as a real estate broker or agent survive and even thrive in this brutal market? The few brokers and/or agents who are thriving in this market are doing the following:
• Assured of getting the most return on their marketing dollars
• Ability to gather high quality leads without spending too much
• Assured of a 24/7 dynamic lead capture process
• Ability to follow up instantly their prospect calls
• Ability to create ongoing conversations with their prospects or customers
• Customize their messages and talk to their customers when they need to, knowing that the broker’s message is accurately presented on their customer’s mobile devices
• Automate the process of managing campaigns
• Create and view campaign analytics
• Build a database of prospective opt-in customers
Increasingly, real estate agencies across the country are using mobile text marketing strategies to quickly inform their clients with personal messages on new listings or information on closing deals. They are integrating mobile marketing into their traditional advertising strategies and they are improving their response rates as a result!
The New York Times has described mobile text marketing as “The most powerful advertising media ever invented”.
Mobile text marketing offers unique targeting abilities that are incomparable to traditional promotion and advertising media. With the appropriate mobile marketing provider, your prospective buyers will be able to get detailed information about the property on their mobile phone with detailed specs, pricing, virtual tours, and your contact information.
Here’s how it works: You choose a primary keyword (eg: JOESREALTY). This entitles you to an unlimited number of additional sub-keywords. You will then assign each property a specific sub-keyword. If you have 10 properties, your sub-keywords will range from JOESREALTY_1 to 10.
When anyone responds to your ad and sends a text message:
Step 1. A potential buyer sends a TEXT MESSAGE with the property’s KEYWORD to our SHORT CODE.
Step 2. The system generates an SMS to the buyer with the property’s description and details.
Step 3. The system can also generates another SMS – with a lead qualifying question.
Step 4. The system sends the agent an SMS with details on the lead.
Step 5. The system captures the sender’s contact info for follow-up campaigns or contact
Choosing A Competent Provider:
• Make sure you choose a provider with a trusted and reliable web-based platform to manage mobile marketing and alert programs over short codes.
• Your provider must also have packaged, ‘ready-to-go’ solutions that provide you the reliability, real-time compliance, and flexibility you need to implement.
• The appropriate package must include one or more “Keywords” you can use to build your permission-based marketing database and to market your products and services. Simply choose the keyword(s) you want to represent your company products, services or campaign and use it in all your marketing ads.
• The system must have a database control center where you will capture the opt-in contact information and send out follow-up or other marketing campaign information.
• Finally, the prospective provider must have a proven, easy to use system and a proven list of existing national and local businesses on board.
• You must be able to test “real time” with existing real estate client how the system works for them.
It’s no surprise 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 prospects to sell to and puts his or her company at risk of failure.
In the current recessionary environment, it is critical that real estate professionals quickly incorporate new, more cost effective lead generation strategies into their ongoing marketing efforts.
Mobile text marketing technology is helping Real estate agencies across the country to quickly inform their clients with personal messages on new listings or information on closing deals.
Find out more about how mobile text marketing could help your business.
