With more than half of sellers finding their agent through referrals from family or friends, it can be tempting to ignore your agent bio and focus your marketing time elsewhere. But that would be a mistake.
Buyers and sellers commonly consider multiple agents before settling on a choice, and they frequently use online resources to help them make that decision. This means that it’s still extremely important to write a killer bio to attract their business.
But you’re a real estate agent, not a writer — so how do you make sure your bio is professional and engaging? Try these seven tips.
1. Remember features and benefits
There’s an adage many marketers and salespeople live by: “Features grab customers’ attention, but benefits are why they buy.”
Translated to your agent bio, this means that you need to highlight your qualifications (your features), but you also need to show how they benefit a potential buyer or seller.
For instance, maybe one of your qualifications is that you’ve lived, worked and transacted real estate in the same neighborhood for 20 years.
The benefit to the buyer or seller is your resulting expertise, which means you know how to sell a home quickly in the neighborhood and can easily help buyers find just the right home for them.
2. Make it personal
Although it’s important to show why buyers or sellers can benefit from working with you, a bio that’s nothing but sales copy is no fun to read.
Make sure to tell a little of your life story, and show your personality: Are you funny? Cerebral? Easygoing?
Also share information and at least one photo that will help buyers and sellers feel like they know the real you.
Consider answering these questions:
- Why did you get into real estate?
- What are your hobbies or passions outside the industry?
- Do you have a spouse and children?
- Did you grow up in the area where you work?
3. Try an unusual format
For buyers and sellers, reading agent bios online can start to feel like Groundhog Day, the movie where Bill Murray’s character keeps repeating the same day until he gets it right.
Make your bio stand out by structuring it differently than the standard three or four paragraphs of block text.
Try an interview or question-and-answer format. Make a top 10-style numbered list. Or use testimonial quotes that also tell your story.
4. Keep it short
You’ve probably heard this statistic before: the average human attention span has sunk to just eight seconds — less than that of a goldfish. That means you can’t expect buyers or sellers to hang around your bio page for ages.
You need to grab their attention quickly and tell them what they want to know in just a few lines.
Using an unusual format, like the ones suggested above, can help with this. But if you still plan to go with a more traditional layout, here are some ways to keep it short.
- Lay out an attention-grabbing first sentence: “As a kid, Mark used to put on his dad’s glasses and pretend to sell houses to his stuffed animals.”
- Use no more than three or four short sentences per paragraph.
- Make your sentences clear and simple.
- Aim for a total count of 100-200 words.
5. Think like an editor
Nothing says “unprofessional” or “cuts corners” like misspellings or grammar mistakes.
Once you’ve written a draft of your bio, give it a thorough proofreading to make sure it’s polished.
Here are some tricks professional proofreaders use to make sure they don’t miss a mistake:
- Read your bio out loud.
- Read your bio backward (yes, really).
- Hold a piece of paper or a ruler to the screen so you only see one line at a time.
- Get a second pair of eyes on it — ask your spouse, teenager or friend to read it.
6. Don’t forget the basics
Always, always include your contact information. List it at the bottom, or put it right under your name or headline at the top.
Provide at least one phone number (office and/or mobile), but also include your email address or a mailto link. That way, potential buyers or sellers can contact you right from your bio page.
Bonus tip: Don’t write it
There are two meanings to this tip. First, know your limits and weaknesses. If you are a horrible writer, get someone else to write your bio for you.
Find a freelancer on a site like Upwork or Fiverr, or see if an English teacher at your local school would like to help. You’ll need to be willing to pay your stand-in, but it shouldn’t cost you more than $50-100.
Or don’t do a written bio at all. Record a short video instead. It will be awesome for your SEO and will likely grab the attention of millennial buyers and sellers more than a written bio would.
You don’t necessarily have to hire a professional for this, although you should if you can afford it. Just make sure your video looks polished.
Pick a nice setting, put the camera or your phone on a tripod (no handheld selfie videos!), dress nicely, and speak clearly.
Using these tips, you will create a crafty bio that’ll surely grab the attention of prospective clients.
Kathryn Royster is the marketing director for HouseLens, Inc. You can follow Kathryn on Twitter @kathrynroyster. HouseLens is on Facebook.
