How Are You Helping Agents to Monetize Their Contacts?

Whether you are a builder/developer trying to move more product or a broker or marketing company looking to do the same on behalf of a client, bottom line is you are trying to get more consumers to buy new homes. There are many familiar ways to do this:

• Build a website, pay to drive traffic, and hope that someone sees it;
• Build an expensive sales center and hope a consumer comes in the front door;
• Hold open houses for agents and hope that they do something with all those brochures you printed up for them;
• Create a direct marketing print or digital marketing campaign and hope consumers/agents don't unsubscribe; and, depending on your market,
• Translate all your materials (print and online) into multiple languages in the hopes of catching the eye of one of those many foreign buyers.

Do any or all of these resonate with you?

One additional area you might consider is beefing up your effort to incent external agents to market your projects. Why? Because, unlike the other methods described above, real estate agents have a reason to respond to your efforts—they get paid a commission if something happens.

Here are some ideas of how you might be able to do a better job in this area:

• Help make the agent's job easier. For example, make it stress-free for them to showcase your different properties in a more efficient manner. Sending out brochures, or even giving agents DropBox access, are not ideal or effective ways to do this;
• Make it easy for agents to register their clients. If they don't feel comfortable they are going to be protected, chances are, they will pass on showcasing your properties to their clients;
• Help agents look awesome by providing them quality materials, branded to them; and;
• Find a way to communicate and stay in touch with them regularly. You need them to be engaged with you and your properties.

I have analyzed dozens of builder, developer, broker, and project marketing sites over the past few months and have seen few examples of companies doing the majority of what I am suggesting here. When I talk to agents, they tell me they want all these things.

Why aren't you giving it to them? If you do, you will have a distinct advantage over those that stick to the typical methods.

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