The Top 10 Listing Lead Generation Strategies for ANY Market

Welcome to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Bottom line, the real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to financial freedom. Traditional brokerages and coaching are designed to keep you running on the transaction treadmill with no exit strategy. While I didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience when I got into real estate, I was willing to bet on myself and figure it out because my family was depending. Having served over 5,000 families with their real estate needs, I've made every mistake you could possibly make in this business. Through Real Estate B School, I've helped hundreds of agents and team leaders realize their goal of true time and money, freedom and living a life without regrets. If you know there's another level of growth inside of you and you want to learn how to build a highly lucrative lifestyle business, then you're in the right place. You won't find any fluff or hype here on this show. Just real world tools, systems and strategies that work. Let's grow together.

What's up, Real Estate Business Builders? This is Lars Hedenborg, founder of Real Estate B School. Today we're going to talk about the top 10 listing lead gen strategies. The market is absolutely nuts and if you want to survive this environment, the saying list to last is relevant now as it's ever been. And here's how you will do it. This is gonna be fast and furious. I have got a more detailed listing of actually 31 listing lead gen strategies and you can grab that if you go over to our free Facebook group. It's Real Estate Business Builders is the Facebook group. You want to grab that over there. But the question I have for you today, as you lean in here and you contemplate like, how do I get freaking listings in this market where seemingly at least what the news is telling me or what other agents are telling me, there are no listings to be had. So the question do I have the right legion levers in place to systematically generate high quality seller leads? So I was never a cold caller. I was never one to pick up the phone and load the dialer and, you know, cold call expireds or circle prospecting. Never did it, never wanted to do it. First expired I ever called. He was mean to me. No joke, true story. And I don't remember calling again. I did all the work and loaded them up. I'm like, surely this is going to work. You know, I've got the script and everything and. And it just was not for me. So in this market Though there's definitely a feeling of, I'll ask agents, you know, what are you doing to generate listings? And some of them will sort of give me some tactics that are working. Those tactics are taking, you know, two to three times the effort they did back in the day, you know, a year ago, but they're still working. Other agents are telling me that, you know, that there are no listings to be had. And I'm saying, well, what are you doing, you know, last couple weeks, what have you done in your new business development time blocks to generate listings? And they'll say, I'm not. You know, I'm not. There's nothing.

Right.

And so to give up is not the answer.

Right.

30% of agents will not be in the business 24 months from now. And that's from NAR, that's from the national association of Realtors. So you may feel frustrated. The shift storm or the shiftiness of a market is definitely here. Lead costs are going through the roof. And if you're paying for listing opportunities, they're harder to convert and they want like 35%. So that's not going to work. It's harder to stand out because right now the income available in real estate is contracting in the U.S. there'll be 4.5 million transactions this year. A typical balanced year is about 6.5 million. So there's a 2 million shortage of sales for the amount of agents that are out there. So there's going to be increased competition. It's going to be harder to stand out. Sellers have a ton of options when it comes to real estate. So what do you do about this? First thing you have to do in this really tight market where there still aren't an overabundance of listing opportunities, you have to believe that you can do it. Back in the day, in the Great Recession years, you know, 2008, nine, ten, those were, you know, three. 2008 was my first full year in real estate. I sold 44 homes. I brought on one agent late 2009, did 50, 58, but I did 55 of them. The next year we did 118. Then we went on to, you know, three, four years later we did 453, and I was completely out of the business. But when I was in those heavy production years, when I was still sort of doing production and building the team, I think the year we did 178, which was 2011, 2010 or 11, I did 66 transactions. And I would say every day, you know, then this was more during the really the bleeding headlines in The Great Recession 2008, 9, 10, where every agent was getting out of the market. In my market, we went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents. We lost 10,000 of our 15,000 agent roster. But I believed I could sell a home every day. I said, you cannot tell me that I can't sell a home today. I will sell a home today. So first of all, you have to believe that you can go out and get listings. You have to believe every day you will find a listing opportunity or two. And you need to obsess, obsess about the listings, about the inventory. Every conversation is just like, hey, I've set some aggressive goals. The market, you know, is such that there's no inventory, you know, who do you know that would be interested in selling their property, right? Prices are still up and it's a good time to trade up, right? What, are you having enough conversations? Are you obsessed about finding listing inventory? And you need to look at your lead gen levers. That's what I call your marketing pillars. In your business as oil wells, do you have consistent oil wells, quote unquote, built up in your business? And in each of these oil wells, have you spent the time to go deep rather than wide? I'll go into a business, you know, doing, let's say a couple hundred homes and they'll have like 20 lead sources, you know, each doing 10, right? I don't enter a lead source unless I know it's good for 50 transactions. So if I had a team selling 200 transactions, there would generally be four lead sources. And on all of those lead sources, you want to go deep, not wide. And you want to squeeze the lemon. You want to optimize the heck out of it. Put your lead conversion and nurture sequences in place, right? So all of these things I'm going to tell you are not going to be be useful if you don't go deep. Build the oil wells, become obsessed, squeeze the heck out of the lemon. And then a reminder, if you haven't heard me talk about Atomic Habits by James Clear the quote, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems is appropriate here. We want to have a system in place. I did a training again. You can jump over to the free Facebook group, Real estate Business Builders, but I did a training, I think it was called listing marketing. Maximizers can jump into that group and you can look up that training where I taught how to turn one listing into five commission checks. So when I talk about, you know, Systems, that is a critical system you must, must have in place in order to capitalize on any listing. Lead gen lever, I want you to generate 1 listing, 1 listing Sign in the ground. And I want that to turn into five commission checks. So make sure you go check that out. All right, so let's get into the good stuff. So I'm going to go through these in pretty, pretty fast fashion here. So it's not going to be a lot of details, but hopefully it's going to kind of perk you up a little bit, get you excited about going after listing. So number one is open houses, like open houses, that's for buyers. I don't need more buyers. Open houses with the intention to generate listing opportunities. So you, you advertise that open house. You door knock 20 to the right, 20 to the left and 40 across the street or door knock 100 in the neighborhood, Invite all the neighbors to that open house. Circle prospect, the whole neighborhood, call everyone in the neighborhood and tell them I'm holding 123 Main street open. Will you visit us? Will you help pick your next neighbor? Right, that's number one, open houses with the intention to generate sellers. Number two, video challenge. We had someone in our community share specifically, step by step what she did to generate 30 listings, 30 signs in lawns in 90 days. And it was a video challenge. So she did it. She followed a simple process to do a Facebook live every day. And it generated from that one activity less than, you know, some days it's a little more elaborate, but less than, you know, on average 30 minutes a day to generate on average one listing every three days.

Right.

So are you using video in your business? Number three, for sale by owners.

Right.

The know it alls, the do it yourselfers. This is the kind of market where you could say as a real estate agent, they don't need us, you know, their home's gonna sell anyway. Or you could argue that the market is squirrely and they need us more than ever.

Right.

Are you mailing to for sale buyer owners? Are you calling for sale by owners systematically? Are you following up with them forever?

Right.

Number four is expired listings. I never cold called expireds, but I would send direct mail to expireds. I did these handwritten notes. I've actually done a lot of different things. A postcard series, letter series. And the most effective was a series of three handwritten notes or letters, rather white envelope, first class stamp, handwritten, everything in it. And you basically just saying, you know, hey Mr. Smith, I have a buyer that might be interested in your home, do you still want to sell it? And I'm talking about not the expired from like last month. I'm talking about expireds from 2019, 2020 and 2021 or 2018.

Right.

A service like Red X can help you get those old expires. Number five is database marketing. Are you calling everyone in your database, everyone you know, every past client and saying, hey listen Sally, it's Lars from Exp Realty. I've set some crazy goals this year. You know, actually before that I would say, hey listen, I know you're busy. I am too. I'm going to cut to the chase if you're cool with it. I've set some really big goals for my real estate business this year. The market is nuts. There's no inventory. Who do you know that might want to sell their home? Who at work have you overheard that might be talking about the real estate market, you know, who at church, you know, have you overheard that or is well networked that might know somebody?

Right.

Are you pushing, going deep into the conversations? This is not the kind of market where you're just doing the Ford method, right? You're calling up and talking about family, occupation, recreation and dreams. That's not the kind of calls that you want to make. And we only make four calls a year. We have a 60 touch program. So there's. Most of this is automated. But the calls that you make to your database are critical. Number six, social proof.

Right?

Do you have a system in place when you work with a client? Hopefully you get an awesome result and it's white glove service and they're blown away by you delivering on the promises that you made. But are you capturing that social proof on video or via text on Google reviews and using it in all of your marketing and getting them to brag about you online?

Right.

Social proof is everything in marketing. It is the future of small businesses. Number seven, new home builders. Like wait, new home builders? Yeah, new home builders. They don't typically go out and list the homes of the buyers that come in. You should know every new home builder rep in your entire market, you should be bringing them donuts and coffee. You should be speaking at their sales meetings. You should be treating their inventory as if it's as if it's your own. Do some of your Facebook lives there befriend the new home builder reps?

Right.

They are your friends. Yes. They're fair weather fans in terms of like when the market, when they don't need us, they don't pay us, when they need us, they pay us. Let that go for now. Just become their friend and they will refer listing opportunities to you, I promise. Number eight, buyer sold signs. So here's a ninja trick. After you get a buyer into a home, get them to agree pre closing that you could put your sold sign in their yard for two weeks post closing. So they own the home, you help them as a buyer, but they agree to let you put your sign in the yard with a big sold sticker on it and a rider saying, you know, whatever your riders say, right? This is super ninja. Most agents don't put the sold rider on their signs because they're not very organized. So this allows you to take advantage of that. And it's totally legit. There's nothing wrong with it. It's the buyer's property, right? They could do whatever they want in the property as long as they don't violate, like, city ordinances or HOA guidelines. Number nine is affiliates. Call every one of your affiliates, your lenders, your attorneys, your home inspectors, your general contractors, repair people, anyone involved in a real estate transaction and put it on them. Say, hey, listen, I need you to refer at least one listing opportunity to me every month. I know it sounds like a big ask, but I've got big goals. We do business together. We've known each other for a long time. I need your help to get through this market and crush my goals. Are you with me? Like, man Lars, I can't do that. I don't think I could do once a month, once a quarter. Can I rely on you to give me one listing every quarter? All right, good. Let's do it. And last number 10 is social media giveaways. We did a training in real estate B school called become the digital mayor of your market. And this one is awesome because lenders have a different bucket of money when it comes to, like, sponsorships, so they can sponsor a giveaway. So I'm not talking about, like, buying Zillow leads. I'm talking about, like, you know, having a July 4th Yeti cooler with a whole bunch of cool stuff for barbecues giveaway. And you just generate a ton of hype online and encourage people to share it. And everyone's going to sort of. It's like a raffle. So they call up a phone number on a specific day. We've run this different ways, but I just want to plant a seed for how to. How to think through that. We actually had over 100. I think it was like 150 people call in on a single day. And we asked every one of them for a referral. They called in for the giveaway but we asked them for, I think we generated 10 deals out of it. It was crazy, crazy, crazy. And we do about six giveaways a year. We got rid of the big expensive events and went 100% to giveaways and we zero costed all of them. So if you want to grab the 31 listing lead gen strategies, go into the Facebook Real Estate Business builders. Find that, find this training that I did. I think the name of the training in the Facebook group was called Top 10 Listing Lead Gen Strategies. And if you want to go further faster, the only thing I have to offer you is a deep dive into your business. A valuable coaching session. It's called a business Growth assessment. And just go to rebs growthassessment.com and we'll look at your business, where you are today, where you want to be in two to three short years. What's holding you back, what's getting in your way, what are the obstacles? What have you tried? And if we can bridge the gap and real estate B school is part of the answer, we'll definitely have a conversation about it. But if it's not, that is cool too. So check out R E b s growth assessment.com Much love, much respect. We'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other agents who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. And make sure you visit ScaleOrDiebook.com to get a free copy of my book. It's a nuts and bolts guide to building a real estate business that gives you true time and money freedom so that you can live your life without regrets. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.