Agents need a strategy that produces business in the present.
On Tuesday, Chris Jones, the co-founder of Guerilla Realty, a company that makes lead generation software, hosted a webinar titled “The Goof Proof Listing“ to share a step-by-step guide on how to land a new listing in 30 days.
Agents should have a vision for their business three to five years from now, Jones said, “but if the marketing that you do today doesn’t come to fruition for three to five years, then your marketing sucks.”
Using a bell curve graph and collected data, Jones explained that on average, after an agent generates a qualified sales lead, they are 105 days away from closing.
While around 2 percent of leads will take six months or longer to close, another 2 percent of leads will take 30 days or less to close. Focusing on those listings, Jones said, is the sweet spot.
Out of 100 generated leads, he continued, at least two of them will be under contract in the next 30 days.
But how does an agent generate enough of them? Jone’s says to follow three key steps.
1. Borrow 5 listings
Right off the bat, an agent should borrow five listings, regardless of the inventory they already have.
Borrowing is a good marketing tactic, and it gives the agent more exposure. It also allows them to cherry pick what type of customer they attract.
Agents should borrow listings with a strong curb side appeal and are 20 percent above the local market’s average median price, Jones said. By doing this, they’ll weed out headache listings from the lower-end of the market while still attracting a lot of eyes.
In most markets, agents needs to get permission before borrowing a listing, so Jones created a script to help them seal the deal.
Guerilla Realty script example.
The script can be accessed for free at guerillrealty.com/loaner .
2. Advertise the listings on Craigslist
Once an agent borrows a listing, they should advertise it on Craigslist.
Guerilla Realty found that the closing ratio on Craigslist is 1 to 20. On top of that, it’s free and there’s buyer intent, which means people go on Craigslist to look for real estate.
“Forget everything you think that you know about Craigslist,” Jones said. “We’ve used Craigslist, just in the last 12 months, to take $800,000 listings, we’ve closed on $1.1 million buyer deals.”
Chris Jones
In a blog post on Guerilla Realty, co-founder Levi Jones, who is Chris Jones’ brother, walks readers through how Craigslist helped him generate 67 leads in a month.
“I consistently capture 1-2 quality leads per ad that I post. That meant I needed to post between 2-3 ads per day. Craigslist allows me to renew my ads every 48 hrs so it looked more like posting 2-3 new ads for the first two days only and then I would just renew on alternating days until renews weren’t available,” he wrote. “That means that you can pull this entire campaign off with as few as six borrowed listings. You don’t need 20+ active listings–just six.”
The ad should have the following: a description of the property’s features, high-quality images, keywords like the names of the cities and neighborhoods around the listing, a catchy headline, and a call to action.
3. Convert the prospective buyers to sellers
Once the borrowed listings start bringing in prospective buyers, it’s time to turn them into seller leads.
On the webinar, Jones shared a free seller’s conversion script that can be accessed at callster.io, a tool built by Guerilla Realty that gives users free access to over 20 useful real estate scripts.
“About 55 percent of all buyer leads have something to sell,” he said. “The absolute best way to generate an easy, no competition listing lead is to start with a buyer lead who is interested in moving somewhere in the market.”
Jones explained that, typically, agents will send the first message to an interested buyer and ask if they’re finding everything they need. Most of the time, the answer from the prospective buyer is a simple ‘”yes” and the lead dies.
The seller’s conversion script keeps the conversation going and lays the ground work to help secure a potential lead.
A portion of the seller’s conversion script.
