Any highly successful real estate agent will tell you that the key to their success is having a strong real estate referral game.
Now, there are many ways you as a real estate agent could get referrals but keep in mind that each strategy has its own advantages and disadvantages.
That’s why we decided to write an article to introduce you to all the pros and cons of the best strategies to help you decide what’s the best one for you.
Top 4 strategies to generate more real-estate referrals:
1. Take full advantage of the power of social media
We know that this may seem like common sense, but since many real estate agents don’t seem to understand the significance of the power of social media, we believe it’s worth mentioning.
In today’s day and age, everyone uses social media, even businesses, partially due to the COVID-19 situation. Generally, we could say that people are used to buying products or meeting new people online more than ever.
Your social media profile is the business card of the 21st century. It shows your potential client everything about you and builds or breaks the belief they have in you.
It is worth investing in creating the best profiles among the most popular networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
LinkedIn should be the most crucial social media for you if your goal is to generate more agent referrals since it’s primarily used for business rather than entertainment.
Facebook, WhatsApp groups for referrals. Should you join?
Posting for referral in these public groups, is like throwing dart blindly out the window, into the wild, and hoping it will land across the country, in the lap of the right person.
You can imagine the experience that will create for all parties involved in connecting the referral client to another agent.
Also note that all these groups; you do not have any control on. There are so called administrators, moderators controlling the group.
We do encourage you to have your own Facebook page, Website and other profiles to increase your internet presence.
However, joining the groups which are controlled by others do not help. Instead, we strongly encourage you to build your own referral network, nurture it with agents in all major hot real estate areas, for solid inbound and outbound referrals.
2. Get referrals from past clients
Getting referrals from past clients is an excellent way to scale your real estate business. There are few things you should keep in mind if you choose this strategy.
First of all, it’s important to make sure you do your job the best you can so that your client is very satisfied with your work. Once the work is finished, it is highly recommended to follow-up after the sale and ask them for feedback.
The key to getting referrals from past clients is to stay in touch with them and regularly build relationships with them. You can, for example, send direct mail newsletters or call or visit them at least twice a year.
Doing all of the mentioned things ensures your client remembers you so that when someone asks them if they know a good real estate agent, you will bet the first person who comes to their mind.
3. Referral companies – Are they the right choice for you?
Many real estate agents often get pitched by the services of referral companies. Are you aware of what these so-called referral companies?
Basically, it is a type of company that sends leads to their own clients-real estate agents. While it may sound phenomenal to effortlessly receive leads from a company that finds the client for you, there’s a catch.
That catch being that these companies charge a fee in the form of a percentage from the sale. The percentages could vary, but usually, the rate is very unfavorable for the real estate agent.
On top of the percentage fee; these charge hefty sum to place referral in their network. They also charge big fees to be an active member of real estate referral company.
There are few internet portal companies such as Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com also started referral program. Leads from these companies are often not well qualified and low quality, resulting in waste of time for agent receiving the referral.
What if there was a better way of generating leads and ultimately scaling your business without the need of paying a high percentage fee to a middleman?
Introducing agent to agent referrals.
4. Agent to agent real estate referrals
We believe that out of the mentioned strategies, direct agent to agent referrals is the best strategy to scale your business since it’s the one you have the highest chance of success while still not having to pay additional fees in the form of a percentage from the sale to middleman for sending you the referral.
You may be thinking, why should one agent ever give a referral lead to another agent?
There are many reasons for this situation to occur. Here are a few of the most common reasons:
- The agent may be a seller’s listing agent and does not represent the buyer.
- The agent may be too busy to handle all clients, hence he gives all of the additional work to other agents.
- Client is relocating to another city. In this scenario, an agent would help them sell the home and refer a client to another agent in desired city.
We at Referrals.io saw the common issue of the majority of people, which is people not knowing how to start using the agent to agent referrals strategy, thus, we decided to help ease agents into direct agent-to-agent referrals and created the solution.
We believe it is the right time to introduce ourselves.
How can Referrals.io help you?
Our mission at Referrals.io is to provide a complete tool kit for real estate agents to boost their business utilizing referrals from other agents across the nation.
The technology solutions we created makes it easier to quickly grow real estate business, maximizing direct agent referrals.
With the help of our services, you can connect with agents across the country, boost your real estate referral business, find a perfect referral agent, effortlessly send out your referrals, attract more inbound market referrals, maximize referral value with multiple offers, and much more!
If you would like to know more about us, click here.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. Our team will be more than happy to help.
Conclusion
We believe that you now have all the necessary information on the best strategies to generate more real estate referrals. As we previously mentioned, each strategy has its own pros and cons, and everybody has a different point of view on each of them. One thing we do want to emphasize is out of the four stated strategies, we see agents succeed the most with the agent to agent referrals while also paying attention to their social media profiles.