A Real Estate Lead Generation Strategy for Out-of-Area Buyers that Works

If you are a real estate professional in a resort or vacation home market, you're likely to be working with a higher-end properties niche and almost always out-of-area buyers. The information here also applies to any area with buyers that are mostly not current area residents. Often larger corporations, especially tech companies, have turnover and a constant flow of new employees from around the country.

In these markets, you can leverage the advantage of working with buyers who usually do not have friends or relatives in the area recommending your competition. Your ability to get them to contact you in some way from your website puts you in front of the line to get the sale. Having a lot of local area information is your first priority.

Local, Local, Local

You're trying to generate a lead who is someone not living in the area and probably not familiar with it. They will have even more questions and a greater need for information than the average local buyer. You want to be their primary source for local area information of all kinds.

Action: Articles and Posts About the Area

Think about what out-of-area buyers want for information. They will probably be seeking to learn more about local:

• entertainment
• neighborhoods
• home price ranges
• parks and green areas
• tourist attractions for a vacation market
• shopping
• local culture, museums, etc.
• zoning and commercial information
• employment

There are other informational needs that you'll think of that are specific to your market area. You will want to create a lot of content around these topics and areas of interest. For neighborhoods or MLS areas, you should consider a page on your site for each with lots of information about that area.

Involve Local Businesses

One real estate broker in a mountain area vacation home market put together a strategy that worked well for lead generation and was a win for local home-related businesses as well. Any business related to owning or maintaining a home became a potential partner in growing their business and getting real estate leads as well.

Action: Build a New Homeowner Value Page

You're going to want to have a page or pages on your website that features local home-related business deals, coupons, or discounts for new area residents. Furniture stores, home service businesses, appliance stores, electronic retailers and more are all going to have an interest in this strategy.

Contact the business owners and offer to feature their business and a special new resident offer on your page. You simply list the businesses with a brief deal description and provide a form to receive the coupons and offers via email. This is how you get your lead.

You are offering your marketing expense and site traffic as a free marketing resource for these businesses. They do not even need to create a new offer just for you, as they can use one they already have in place. It helps if you are doing PPC marketing, as you can show you are actively seeking traffic with key phrases to your offer page. If you're not doing PPC, show your traffic with your page stats if it's significant. The idea is to make this free and easy for the business.

Critical Action

You must make sure that in some way they at least word or title their offer or create one exclusive to your site so that the businesses are aware of the customers that come from your site and efforts. A printable coupon is the best approach, as the site visitor can print them and hand them to the business, showing you as the source for the customer.

You constantly want to monitor and measure traffic to the page or pages, and even, if you can, create special pages for the larger businesses so you can show them visitor views of their offers from your site statistics and analytics.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.