It all starts with a web site
I started my real estate career in the mid-1990s and from the first day, I focused on one thing: prospecting for listings. I was fortunate to align myself with a top coaching company and I committed to following their system. It worked—I ended up creating a huge business. It was common that I would list more than 20 homes per month, doing hundreds of deals with just a few staff.
But I did one thing that, looking back now, I regret. I referred all of my buyer leads away.
About 15 years ago, a friend convinced me I needed a website and I was introduced to Jan, a web designer. She liked the friendliness of the Real Geeks platform, so I followed her lead.
We started building city pages. It’s a best practice now, but I had no idea I would end up ranking for those city names and organically generating more leads for myself. Then I decided I would build a team, add a few buyer agents, and start taking online lead generation seriously.
Next-level localization made simple
Once we had every city represented on my site, we went further and built out pages for each condo building and neighborhood in my market. As we did, I started to rank highly in organic search for those pages and leads started to pour in. All the while, the Real Geeks platform made it extremely easy to scale—and Google liked it, too, because we were ranking at the top for nearly every page we built.
Years later, I had over 900 community pages and another 800 condo building pages. Plus I had multiple city pages and informational pages. I refer to that as the first stage of my Real Geeks experience. At that time, my site was generating over 400 leads per week organically and I had no ad budget whatsoever.
As the platform grows, so does my business
Today, we have gone way beyond organic lead generation. We have strategies in place to generate online buyer and seller leads using the extended suite of Real Geeks tools:
- Facebook Posting Tool: We launch multiple Facebook campaigns from inside the Real Geeks platform. We typically capture another 500 buyer leads per month from this strategy.
- ‘What’s My Home Worth’ Widget With Landing Pages: We generate multiple seller leads with full information each month.
- Facebook Share Button: We are constantly sharing listings in various Facebook pages which we capture more leads.
- Pay Per Click: We drive additional traffic from our PPC strategies which deliver over 1000 lower costs leads per month.
- Workflows: When generating leads, you have to use automation to manage your leads to assure you are not losing them to your competition. We have thousands of people in campaigns at all times.
Currently, I have nine Real Geeks sites spread over three different markets. I have roughly 200 agents working the leads and we close around 3500 sales per year. There is no doubt that our success comes from a combination of ‘old school’ listing strategies coupled with ‘new school’ tech and automation strategies.
Last but not least, a best-in-class CRM
To top it all off, we could not manage this volume of leads if the Real Geeks CRM wasn’t top of the class. We have created custom workflows to help nurture leads for the short and long term. Thousands of people receive Market Activity Reports and Sold Reports in addition to all of the new property alerts that go out as they hit the market. We use the CRM to help monetize our database.
In order to scale your real estate business or even experience growth while maintaining a life-work balance, you must leverage automation. Between the Real Geeks lead capture capabilities and the CRM where we transform our database to a databank, I have never used a tech platform that has produced a better ROI.
Leveraging technology and automation will save you time, make you more money, and make life easier.