One of the greatest challenges in the real estate industry is keeping listings moving into the sales pipeline during a low inventory market. The truth is that your time is money, and knowing the most productive ways of keeping leads flowing is a gamechanger in bringing you closer to the real estate dream of reaching financial freedom. To help you on your journey to success, we’ve created a list of the best ways to get real estate listings.

The list below is derived from the contributions made by some of the industry’s top performers — and while low inventory real estate might be problematic for some, our experienced coaches can always help guide you through how to implement and most efficiently use these methods in your day to day life. Schedule a free consultation to chat with one and learn how you can reap the success of your hard work and efforts.

Utilize Your Past Clients

Your previous clients are some of your best cheerleaders. And while this might seem like a no-brainer, consider it a challenge to analyze the means, frequency, and messaging that you use when you engage the contacts in your database.

Evaluating how you communicate with clients is an essential and enlightening step. If you think setting up automatic emails that periodically reach out to your database is enough, you’re missing out on some monumental opportunities. Ultimately, your database is the best way to get real estate listings. Explore the other methods of communicating with your contacts, such as through social media. We’ve provided several resources that you can use to take your communication with your database to the next level, like this blog on 10 Social Media Rules.

Frequency is another important thing to consider when looking at your database. Are people seeing your name every day and viewing your communications as spam, or do you reach out too infrequently that they forget your personal brand? Don’t be the person who spends time staring at their inbox and waiting for an email to come in — gain more business with your database and reach out with perfected frequency to grow leads that can help you through low inventory real estate issues.

Messaging is absolutely critical because it alters the way people think about their homes. Let’s use empty nesters as an example. When children move out and parents find themselves in large houses by themselves, the messaging in this scenario should prompt them to consider selling and downsizing to a smaller property or moving closer to their children. With your name and face backing the messaging, you will often be the one they call on for action!

Make Open Houses Events

Oftentimes, open houses can seem more like a burden than an opportunity. But this all revolves around your mindset — and that will link decisively with your results. This means that if you have to run an open house, you will almost certainly have no results. While if you get to conduct an open house you will be looking for opportunities.

The truth is that you can make money now with open houses. Consider the following:

  • Open houses attract potential buyers. This might be obvious, but well worth listing anyway.
  • They also attract other potential listings and are one of the best ways to get real estate listings. When the neighbor two houses down comes by to tour the house, and three months later decides to list their house, who will they call? The local expert!
  • Use social media to make your open house an outreach event. Invite everyone who’s relevant and build excitement around it.

Become an Area Expert

Low inventory real estate is hardly a challenge to someone who has good connections with a sustainable neighborhood that has a decent turnover rate. This means that walking around a block where you have experience — be it in listings or sales — can help generate opportunities that will yield a fruitful return. It also helps build your database, which goes back to that first point we’ve already discussed.

If there are For Sale By Owner houses in your neighborhood, knock on the door and introduce yourself. These conversations often lead to sellers following up for your evaluation, proving your value in marketing techniques, and displaying your expertise and knowledge of the neighborhood that would provide an edge in selling their home. There are a number of ways that this could lead to becoming a listing.

Utilize Listing Portals

The internet is here to stay, and with it comes all the curses and blessings of sites like Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, and the like. It’s a fundamental truth that people who are looking to buy or sell a home will often start on the internet, and you want to make sure that you are a brand that demands online attention.

Keep in mind that it’s not enough to just be seen, as you’ll also need to understand how to utilize the technology to understand what a ‘Zestimate’ is, and how it might not be the best estimate for their property. Once you sit down with a potential client, be prepared to talk about different websites and how you can utilize technology to bolster their efforts.

One really interesting feature to explore is Zillow’s “Make Me Move” prices. These are prices that homeowners have indicated would make them heavily consider selling. If an owner has done this, chances are they’ve considered selling their home. Maybe they are testing the waters and are not quite sure if they are in the market to sell yet, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be a viable lead a few months down the road! By reaching out and communicating with a prospective seller, you can establish a genuine rapport that could add to your database and turn into a sale down the road!

Expired Listings

If you’re looking into low inventory real estate issues, there’s no better place to look than properties that were listed and failed to sell for one reason or another. One of our blogs focused on how to dominate expired listings and that opportunity remains a viable one.

Here are several quick tips that you can use to help change the way you approach expired listings:

  • Was the property overpriced? Were comparables pulled that were just not close enough to be relevant to the existing property? Or is it so unique that it is challenging to find other nearby properties that relate?
  • Was the property under-marketed? This can provide you with a great opportunity to utilize your database, past clients, geographical farms, and a number of other points in this blog to emphasize how you will approach things differently.
  • Were the photographs poor quality? Perhaps the client was previously in a position where they couldn’t work to stage rooms, and now they might be. When potential buyers are looking online, photographs mean everything. At the end of the day, they need to be able to envision their family living there.

Online Seller Lead Generation

Facebook Ads provide an immense opportunity to market directly to potential sellers online. We’ve all heard the expression that our phones are listening. If someone searches for something concerned with selling their home, you want your ad to pop up.

Offer free home valuations — while the process may take an average of 18 months to bear fruit, it’s a strategy that can answer the question of “how to get real estate listings?” Oftentimes falling in love with the idea of another house is enough to persuade people to contemplate the idea of buying and selling homes by itself. If you can reach them with the idea of a new home, you can reach them with the assistance of selling their existing home as well.

Talk to an Experienced Real Estate Coach

If you’re new to the real estate industry, or found yourself in a rut that you just can’t find a way out of, consider a free consultation to connect you with an experienced coach. This list is far from inclusive on all ideas and potential ways to grow leads when real estate inventory is seemingly low everywhere.

Our experienced team of coaches leads the industry and knows how to reach buyers and sellers. Their experience combined with your drive and commitment to action can help you reach the goals that beckoned you into real estate.