The real estate world revolves around relationships. Some of the most successful agents in the world will tell you that it’s always the hardest to get the first deal. If you provide a great service in essence you don’t need to do any marketing, clients will come back to you and spread your name to friends and people they know naturally.

This works great for agents that have been in the business for a while or who are keen in growing the business at a slow and steady pace, for agents that are newer to the market and who need help with getting their names out there, they need all the tools they need at their disposal.

Having a real estate website is first step, the very next step is to allow people to contact you from the website. This can take many forms, they include email, forms, newsletters or just a phone number.

You want to make it absolutely easy for visitors on your website to contact you and preferably in whatever way they want. Here are some details:

  • Phone Number –  every agent will know that getting a potential client on the phone is the best way to getting a deal signed. Have a very visible phone number prefereably somewhere on the header of the website.
  • Contact Form – in the event that the visitor can’t or doesn’t want to get on the phone at that time you should have a clearly accessible contact form on the website.The form should be simple and should give the agent just enough information to start the conversation off well. As soon as the form gets submitted by the visitor you should get an automatic notification with that information so you can follow up as quickly as possible. Here in Toronto, we have over 60,000 agents alone.. competition is stiff and when you have someone at your door with potential business you need to be quick.There has been too many times where I’ve seen forms that are way too complicated or the agents take days to respond to the inquiry.
  • Online Chat – there are quite a few services such as Live Chat which integrate directly into the website, sitting patiently for users to start chatting with you live. You can easily control weather you’re available for chat or not and chat directly on your phone, this type of service can pay for it in spades just by signing one deal.
  • Newsletter – for past clients and those you didn’t sign there is always that handy newsletter you should be letting them sign up for. A small widget on the website where the visitor can drop their email for real estate news in your area can be a long term gold mine of leads. It requires you to once a month or so write a short article about real estate news or events in your area, this is a great way to keep in touch and keep your name on top of people’s list when they do need your services again.

One contact method we do not recommend is just placing your email on the website. Back in the days people would just place a link with your email on the website and hope for the best. This provides no tracking or analytics and opens up your email for a major spam attack.

About the author

Bart Dabek

Bart Dabek

Bart lingers in the shadows of WordPress. He specializes in creating, managing and optimizing complex, high performance WordPress websites.