How Can Real Estate Businesses Easily Expand Their Reach?
Expanding your reach is the key to growing your real estate business in 2021.
With a wider customer base, you can move into new markets, attract better property prospects and turn your real estate business into a local empire.
But how do you tap into this wider base? Here are some tips for how real estate businesses can easily expand their reach.
Embrace prop-tech
How would the real estate sector have fared throughout COVID without prop-tech?
It’s difficult to say the housing sector would be on its knees, but prop-tech has proven to be an important asset to companies looking to serve clients remotely and provide a thorough experience when shopping for the home of their dreams.
For the uninitiated, prop-tech encompasses digital technology that is transforming the real estate world and improving customer service. From virtual reality (and augmented reality) tours to modern alternative houses driven by ‘Internet of Things’ technology, prop-tech has allowed the industry to step into the 21st century and provide services buyers are both hungry for and in need of while COVID is a live issue.
Embracing these technologies, whether it’s offering geothinQ geolocation tools to help out-of-town buyers learn more about their new area or transforming real estate staples such as home insurance into easily-accessible and flexible services as Candian company Duuo did, doesn’t just give your company the opportunity to provide a more thorough service, but establish itself as forward-thinking.
Identify your niche
Identifying a target market is one of the most important steps in expanding your reach within the real estate industry.
While limiting yourself to one specific niche or group might seem quite limiting, it actually allows you to focus your promotional and marketing efforts to create a more coherent and attractive brand for your business.
Most real estate agents and brokers you’ll find are experts in a particular niche. This allows them to do everything from conquer the rankings on Google search results to gain unique media coverage in top publications. If you’re a jack of all trades, you’re a master of none.
Experts in a niche can focus on how a particular market is growing and sell themselves on having a better idea of where (and how) to buy in that area. That’s appealing to layman buyers without the first idea about real estate.
Whether it’s young families looking for their first home or incredibly high-value property, identify your niche and stay on your path towards it.
Add a creative flair to your social output
You might not know the first thing about posting an Instagram story, but you should still make sure your business is all over Facebook.
You don’t need me to tell you how important social media is. You probably have a couple of profiles, occasionally respond to a good review, but ultimately, don’t know what to do with it.
Most businesses in niche industries fail on social media because they’re afraid to take risks. But these platforms are glorious opportunities to show your creative side and attract a more varied audience.
You can use LinkedIn to give audiences a better idea of your team’s personality, making them easier to connect with on introductory calls and viewings. Instagram is a wonderful platform for advertising luxury and unique properties (who knows, you might be the next Selling Sunset). Social media can feel vapid and trivial, but it’s about adding the colour that allows your business to reach beyond its original limits.
Of course, social shouldn’t be your only digital marketing avenue. You should also be looking at:
• SEO (particularly local search engine listings)
• Paid advertisements
• Property portals
• Developing your personal brand (new media appearances)
Stop thinking of social media as a platform for posting a new listing once a week and start looking at it as a tool for developing your brand and strengthening your bond with your existing audience.
Consider the holiday rental market
Remember what we said about finding a niche? The holiday rental market might just be the best niche to hop on right now.
In normal, peak tourist seasons, owning a property in a beautiful location you can rent to tourists is a tremendous moneymaker. Just ask the guys at Airbnb. But what happens in the off-season?
Expanding your service into the holiday rental market can grow your business in two ways.
1) It allows you to benefit from the growing public interest in holiday rental properties
2) It allows you to offer creative solutions for those buyers in the offseason
By offering cut-rate property management as part of your service, you make holiday properties a safer and more attractive bet for the average buyer.
Typically the off-season can be an expensive time for these buyers, as low business, the cost of hiring a property manager and the personal cost of upkeep makes the venture less profitable. Offering to take care of that as a business gives the landlord a friendly face they can trust and allows you to add an additional service to your portfolio.
How to expand the reach of your real estate business is just as much a question of what you want to achieve with it as it is specific methods.
There are lots of ways to make sure more people in your local area know your brand and you’re attracting buyers from all over the country. Sit down and think about where you want to take your business, what your team’s unique strengths are and the kind of investments you’re going to have to make.
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