You Can Get Listing Leads from Your Website

There are two major focus points used by real estate professionals in creating their websites. If they're listing properties, they want to feature their listings and use the listing presentation on the site in their personal listing appointment presentations. They show their potential listing client how they can market their home better online than the competition.

The other and far more content-focused approach is to provide local real estate information and attract buyers, or just prospects that the real estate agent can place in their CRM system. They market to them in the future, no matter what their current interests or real estate goals. They could be a buyer, seller, investor now or at any time in the future, and we just want them in our system.

Both of these approaches work if the site has content that is focused on those goals. What if we want to take a more "seller-prospect" approach? It is a mistake to assume that you'll just get lucky in getting a listing client now and then from your website. You get most of these sellers from other ads, farming mailings into neighborhoods, and referrals. The mistake is in assuming that homeowners who are thinking of selling are not really using the Internet much, as they're not shopping listings like buyers are.

Interviewing his listing clients who contacted him from website forms and email, a successful Web marketer found that they had some common things to say about their use of the Internet before they set any listing appointments:

• They wanted to see listing prices for nearby homes similar to theirs.
• They wanted to learn about current market conditions and if the time is right to sell.
• Most important, they wanted to see what local agents were doing to market homes online.