How to Get Qualified Buyers to Want to Work With You

If you’re going to be successful in real estate you need to turn the sales process 180 degrees on its head.  This means getting qualified buyers selling YOU on representing them. Here are 3 powerful Thought Leadership Marketing techniques that can make you the preferred agent in the eyes of unknown buyers within a very short period of time.

#1 — Become a Published Real Estate Author: Authors in our society are put on a pedestal. They are seen as the best and brightest amongst us. If you want to quickly separate yourself from all the other agents in your market, become a published author. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn’t take a lot of your time, and gets qualified buyers seeking you out. So, start by publishing “Special Reports” on topics of interest to home buyers (electronically, so it’s cheap and can be distributed easily over the Internet). Here are a couple of sample titles, to get your mind working:

• The Secrets to Buying a Single Family Home in a Down Market
• How to Negotiate a 15% Discount Off a Home Sellers Best Offer
• How to Identify and Buy a Home in Montgomery County, Maryland – Before it Goes on Sale to the General Public

Only those interested in buying a home will have any kind of interest in these reports. And it gives you a powerful forum to demonstrate your skill, expertise and competence. It only needs to be a few pages long, but write it well and provide your contact info in the document and I guarantee you that you will get calls from people ready to start working with you.

#2 — Offer a Free Real Estate Home Buyer “Alert” Service: Offer buyers the ability to stay on top of breaking developments in the market they’re looking to buy in. They provide you all of the vital details of what they’re looking for: Type of home, price range, preferences, neighborhoods etc. Then you send them information as news breaks regarding things they’re interested in. This could be anything from new homes on the market and price reductions to details of a recent sale. This allows you to know the specifics of what a home buyer wants (and go seek it out so you can provide it for them), gives you permission to build a relationship with the buyer and will help you get new listings because home sellers will want to tap into all the subscribers you have following your “alerts.”

#3 — Create “Facebook” for Your Community: One of the hottest trends in marketing is social networks. This is illustrated by the ubiquity of social networks like Facebook and MySpace. You can put yourself in an extraordinarily powerful position by creating the social network, the “Facebook”, for the communities you serve. Buyers moving in to your community will be searching for information, by owning this portal you can be one of the first people to know of their desire to look for a home in this area. Best of all, the editorial will come from the community, drastically reducing the amount of work you need to do. And, there are tremendous (and free) software services that power these networks. Check out www.Ning.com and www.Kickapps.com.

No question these strategies require some effort to implement. But, do any one of them and you will shortly find yourself with customers knocking on your door (maybe sometimes even begging) for you to represent them.