How Realtors Can Fill Their Pipelines

Filling up a realtor’s pipelines is undoubtedly necessary to ensure that they stay in business. Clients start out as leads, so without a steady supply of leads, the pipeline will “run dry,” so to speak, and a real estate agent’s business will eventually grow stagnant.

It’s also important to ensure that an agent’s pipelines have not just leads, but also prospects and clients to ensure that each part is filled and the business itself is running smoothly, and the agent’s workload is fairly balanced.

In this post, I'm going to share a couple of high-level tips I've observed from working with top-performing agents (disclosure: I am not an agent, but my company works for top agents. As such, I have a good view of 'what works and 'what doesn't')

Here are a few tricks that all top agents really focus on.

Bring Back Your Old Leads

For sure, you have old leads in there whom you’ve never contacted or never followed up with. These ones are an easy task for you: try driving some content their way and test the waters to see if they are still interested in property as they were way back.

Before you start shelling out to bring in new leads, check first if you have old leads that can still be converted into clients. This is a pretty low-cost way to get you started on filling up your pipelines.

I've actually observed old leads end up performing better than new ones. The reason why is there simply is "more" old leads than new leads out there.

Focus on the Right Market Segment 

In the old days, cold calling was the norm. Without studying who or what they were calling, real estate agents would just ask someone if they were interested in buying or selling a property. They would do this for hundreds of customers per day.

Not only is this very ineffective, but it is also quite inefficient. A lot of time is being wasted on communicating with people who are not even interested in any property. Not everyone is a lead, but back then, you had to treat everyone as if they were.

Thankfully, with the advent of technology and the Internet, it is now much easier to narrow down the scope of potential leads.

But first, you are going to have to know the right market segment for you. 

Now, the standard advice is to think about if you prefer to cater to young, single first-time buyers, or would you rather serve married couples who are looking to buy a home for their family? What is the geographical area where you want to do your business? THIS. IS. THE. WRONG. WAY. TO. THINK. ABOUT. IT

Let's say you want to become a top agent. If you really want to focus on a specific segment, say young professionals, but your area is full of retirees, then you will never be able to become a top agent. There simply isn't enough buyers to go around. 

If your goal is to be the top agent, you need to specialize in the highest volume buyer OR the highest price point buyer in the area. There is no other option.

Make Sure You Have a Solid Plan for Funneling Prospects to Clients

If you have a website, prospects are the ones who end up on your website for whatever reason. From that point, the burden falls on you as to how to convert them to leads and, eventually, clients.

Does your landing page have an informative guide about the buying/selling process? Do you have a set of pages that will eventually lead them from “I think I want to buy property” to “I should call this agent”?

Throughout each part of the pipeline, you should always have a set plan for taking people from one stage to the next. The goal is to always get a close, and if you outline your pipeline with this goal in mind, you will be more efficient with each interaction that everybody has with your business, whether it be through a website or even in person.

Every interaction and conversation should always have a close in mind.

Invest in Paid Lead Generation Efforts

In this day and age, paying for leads is almost a must if you want to get ahead in the real estate game. With providers like BoldLeads, RedX, and Zillow doing all the necessary research and content delivery, the realtor needs only to do the follow-up and the contacting to convert these leads into actual clients.

Gone are the days when you would have to scour the market yourself, wasting plenty of hours that could have been better spent on converting, coordinating, and closing deals. Nowadays, you can easily target the market you want, and through the paid lead generation platform of your choice, deliver targeted ads to them to eventually get their contact details.

From there, you can begin your process of converting them from leads into clients.

This is a much more efficient way of gathering leads than just calling people randomly or even scouring for posts on social media in the hopes of stumbling upon a potential client.

If you want to be able to constantly fill up your pipeline, the first thing you have to ensure is that you have a steady supply of leads in the first place.

The more efficient you are with your time when it comes to looking for prospects, the more time you can dedicate to filling the other parts of the pipeline.

Automate the Follow-Ups and the Appointment Setting

With technology, it’s not just the advertising and the lead getting that are automated. Even the very task of consistently following up on leads can also be automated to save you precious time.

As a realtor, the main focus of your business should be on how to make it grow, be it getting referrals, consulting with your network, or even getting new clients through means that technology just cannot reach.

If you’re too busy with all these, it’s hard to blame you for not being on-call to respond to new leads within minutes. But the problem is, leads have short patience: they tend to wait for only a few minutes at most before hopping on to a new agent.

What to take away from this article as an agent

One point to really highlight here is that likely nothing you read about surprised you. Nothing is "groundbreaking." In fact, you've definitely read all of this before!

What that means is simple: the top agents don't have some secret strategy or technique that allows them to get where they are today. They use the same strategies as everyone else. The top agents just stick with their strategies and do all of them repeatedly.