Real Estate - Industry Best Practices

Objective: Content Marketing is at the heart of the inbound methodology and a very important tactic for real estate companies to attract potential buyers and sellers to their website.

These strategies have the common goal of reaching prospective buyers and sellers while they are in the decision making process of buying or selling a property.

1. Connect Social Media Channels. It's very important to have a visual presence on the internet when selling property. See here for how to do this.

2. Configure the blog set-up and setting in your account. If you are both B2C and B2B it may be worth considering having two separate blogs.See here how to do this.

3. Use the SEO tool and social monitoring tool to help plan the site’s content strategy and target high-value topics. Topics could centre around a specific listing your target audience would be interested in, yourself reputation goes along way in the real estate industry or answering real estate questions posted online by buyers of sellers. For example "everything you need to know about a mortgage down-payment. See here for more content ideas

4. Use HubSpot's built in video tools to incorporate video into your content strategy. Real estate is a very visual industry, and video walkthroughs of properties offer better insight about a property and more immersive experience to perspective buyers.

5. Ensure all pages follow SEO best practicesby using the SEO tool.

6. Share the post via email (For European customers only send email to contacts who are opted in to receive this type of email) & social media. Consider writing posts that are unique to each social platform and if the post is targeted towards B2C or B2B and publishing via HubSpot. Or take advantage of auto-publishing tosocial media and/or enabling automated subscription emails if you’re short on time.

7. For blog content that’s gaining strong traction on social media, and driving quality visitors who convert on the site, consider boosting the post with some paid social spend on Facebook. Using the ads tool you can also create a Linkedin clicks to website ad via HubSpot to promote B2B content. This is a proven top-of-the-funnel ads strategy.

Bonus Tip: It can also be good idea to advice your customer to invest in some Google ads as well. It is said 44% of real estate buyers start their search on Google and 95% use the search engine at some point. As organic competition can be high it can be worthwhile bidding on specific keywords to ensure you are at the top of the SERP. Although you cannot create Google Ads in HubSpot, you can manage them.

Objective: Your real estate customers will always be looking to generate more inquiries. In real estate, the first step is usually talking to an agent who can answer questions, show an understanding of what the potential buyer and seller is looking for and then drive urgency behind the next step, the most crucial park in whole lead nurturing process in real estate is getting that initial inquiry or "first appointment".

To back this up, In a study done by Pipedrive it is said that agents win between 30 - 50% of business after the first appointment, which in contract to other industries in very high - read more anout this here.

Here’s an easy way to make it so that students and parents alike always have that option. Once this is done, your real estate clients will be able to enjoy a healthy trickling of appointments that are generated passively by the website and digital activity. Not to mention they’ll be able to include that page in all their correspondences, email signatures, and any marketing emails sent moving forward.

1. This is a bottom of the funnel offer, where your clients are offering up their time instead of some form of content offer for example an E-book entitled "A free guide to selling your home". Decide what you’d like to call it. Examples include: Talk to an agent, letting consultation , free first time buyer consultation. How you title the page will depend on who the customer is targeting and what the goal is.

2. Next you’ll want to create a conversion path for this offer. That will include the creation of a CTA > Landing page > Form > Thank you page. It’s best to work backwards, so you always have the next asset to point too.

3. Create your thank you page first. Go into landing pages, and find a thank you template. From there, edit your “Thank you” page in accordance with best practices In short: make sure your Navigation bar is not showing, make sure to say thank you by leaving an SLA (i.e someone will call you back in 24 hours), and provide next steps where applicable.

4. Create your form next. This one’s easy, you need a place to sign people up. You could create a form with the standard Name, Phone Number, Email, Enquiry. This is a good chance to get creative though, and have your customer ask questions that are good for segmenting and qualifying the audience.

Start with some base questions that do well with drop-downs, like "Which of these descriptions best describes you?", or “Choose the time range that most matches when you are looking to sell”?

From there, put in some dependent fields so that as students/parents answer questions, more relevant ones come up. For example, a non-commercial real estate agent might ask:

• Q. Which of these descriptions best describes you?(Base Question)
  • First time buyer
  • Upgrading
  • Downsizing
• Q. Have you been mortgage approved? (Dependent if lead selects "first time buyer")
  • Yes
  • No
• Q. How soon are you looking to sell your current home? (dependent if lead selects upgrading or downsizing)
  • Yes
  • No

The more context your customers get, the more informed they’ll be for that first appointment

5. Create a landing page. This time, bring in a template that has a form in it. Once you’re in the editor, click on that forms module, and pull in the form you just created. It’s going to ask you “what should the visitor see after submitting?”. Luckily you’ve already created your Thank You page, so go ahead and pull that in. See some example of good real estate landing pages here.

6. Create your CTA. Link your CTA to your landing page, decide how you want it to look, and once it’s saved and ready to go, have your client embed it onto their page! Folks should have access to requesting time no matter where they are on the site. For that reason, the most recommended place to embed this CTA (Even if it has to be plain text), is in the navigation bar. Short of that, you definitely want it on the home page, the contact page, and anywhere else where it might make sense.

Objective: A common request from real estate customers is to win more business from potential buyers and sellers who book an initial "first appointment" or show interest by downloading a specific content offer.

However some leads may not feel quite ready to commit and will need to be nurtured further.

In this case, we are creating a e-mail drip campaign to nurture and drive prospective to a point they are ready to commit and move forward.

1. Create a Campaign within the account. See here for more information. As you continue with the following steps be sure to tag each asset you create back to your Campaign to ensure accurate reporting.

2. Create an active list of everyone who had a first appointment but was not ready to move forward.

3. Use the HubSpot e-mail tool to create replicas of the follow emails listed below and then save these emails for automation.

EMAIL #1: Newsletter (even mix of promoting local listings and sharing area news and business updates)

EMAIL #2: Digest (promoting your latest blog posts and home buying or selling resources)

EMAIL #3: Multimedia (link a video, like a brand update or listing tour, or else provide an infographic)

EMAIL #4: Offer (explicit call to action offering something like listing presentation or another consultation)

4. If you do not already have a landing page and form for your specific offer in email #4, then create both so who click the C.T.A in email 4 will be directed to in order to avail of your offer

5. Use the workflow tool to create an automated email drip campaign. The goal of this workflow should be that the lead avails of the planned offer in email #4. In terms of cadence this is up to the customer but generally you should aim for 2-3 weeks.

6. Create a static list for prospective buyers and sellers and use this list in another nurturing campaign down the line. Have this static list a the final step of the workflow after whatever delay you put in place following the e-mail #4.

References for partners:

Examples of real estate infographics used to nurture prospective leads.

What is a real estate listing presentation and how do I prepare one?

Objective: For your Real Estate customers customer, a strong prospective buyer or seller, represents a significant opportunity for the business. This can occur as either a real estate agent generating new client listings to sell or generating prospective buyers who are interested in purchasing a listing.

It’s critical for the real estate agents interfacing with prospects, to maintain timely & effective communication with their prospective applicants.

1. Connect your inbox to HubSpot, and install the sales plug-in.

2. Use saved views to help agents stay organised with outreach to prospects. A few common saved views involve the “lead status” field, which can be used to denote the status of outreach with a prospective buyer or seller sitting in the lead funnel - for example, if there’s a new lead, disqualified lead, or a lead which is already in progress, this can help real estate agents stay organised and plan out their communication.

3. Tasks, and task queues, can also help teams manage their outreach, and set reminders for follow-up when they commit to next steps. For example, after a networking event or open house an agent can use a task queue to streamline personalised follow-up communication to every prospective buyer or seller they engaged with.

4. Build templates for common outreach emails to your different personas. For example, templates that follow-up on action(s) prospective sellers are doing on the website (downloading an E-book, or infographic). Follow-up emails can build on these actions, and engage the prospective seller in conversation to see if they have additional questions you can answer, and help them understand what they want to do.

5. Use sequences to automate 2nd, 3rd, 4th outreach attempts, so you don’t waste time tracking who hasn’t responded and sending manual follow-up emails.

6. The meetings tool makes scheduling a time to talk with a prospective buyer or seller a breeze. Eliminate the hassle of any back and forth trying to set up meetings at a time which suits you both. This could lead to the prospective buyer or seller becoming frustrated or disengaged if you cannot arrange a time within the first couple of suggestions.

Objective: 

When it comes to closing deal for your real estate customers it is important that they get a healthy number of private viewings on each property.

In real estate there are two types of viewings, public viewings and private viewings. A public viewing is when you cast your net wide to get as many prospective buyers to view a listing as possible. From this you will be able to gauge who is really interested in the property and follow up with these people to organise a private viewing.

Private viewings are key to closing sales as it allows prospective buyers to imagine what it would be like to actually inhabit a property and also as this is a private viewing it can give them a sense of importance. By following these steps you can make sure you generate as many private viewings as possible for a particular listing.

1. Create a list of prospective buyers who you think might be interested in viewing the property you have available.

2. Create a sequence consisting of 3 emails inviting people to attend the open house, stagger these over 2 weeks so that the prospective buyer has time to make sure they are free to attend but also are given reminders coming up to the date, making them more likely to attend.

3. Create a form with a set of specific questions for specific information you want to get from interested buyers such as "what did you like most about the house?" "what is most important to you when deciding on a place to live?". By getting this information you can start to understand who's needs the house really meets and who is actually interested.

4. Create an email template to send to prospective buyers who showed a real interest at the public viewing and use the information gathered to personalise this email to highlight why you think why the property would suit their needs and why you would like to show them the property again privately.

5. Create a meeting link to include in your template so prospective buyers can book their private viewing at a time which suits both you and them removing any friction from the process.

Objective: 

Negotiating a sale in the real estate industry can a tense and stressful process. With a variety of offers, counter offers and various other potential curve balls, the goal of your real estate customer is to get a property’s price and terms agreed upon as quickly as possible without rushing either party.

For this reason it is important that your customers utilises HubSpots sales tools to allow agents to stay organised, spend less time on admin and more time closing.

1. Set up your customers’ sales pipeline(s). Talk to your client, and ask them to lay out the steps in their sales process. Help them create their deal stages, using these instructions. Remember that with Sales Pro you can create more than one pipeline. Your client may want to have a pipeline for potential listings (sellers) and prospective buyers.

2. Set up the HubSpot calling tool so that you can easily and quickly contact leads when needed. As mentioned the real estate industry is a high pressure, high stakes game. Offers are constantly coming in and are generally time sensitive. By setting up the HubSpot calling tool you can contact prospective buyers and sellers quickly and efficiently.

3. Upload any frequently used documents to the documents tool. real estate is full of documentation such as property insurance documents, tax documents, property deeds, purchase agreements etc. Make it so that your client doesn’t need to search their desktop every time they’re asked to send supporting documents during a sales process. Being able to call in frequently used documents into 1:1 emails with the click of a button will make their lives a whole lot easier.

Another great reason to do this, is that your client will be able to see which documents have been viewed. If you know a prospective buyer or seller needs to review a specific document in order to move forward you will be able to keep tabs on this and give a nudge if needs be.

4. Create Snippets for quick replies. In the real estate industry a lot of clients will have similar questions and concerns which need to be addressed. By creating snippets your customer will not need to write the answer out each time but instead can use a snippet to give the client the answer they need instead.

Use these instructions to set up snippets, so that your client can use commands like #viewingtime, or #offersubmitted to call in frequently used soundbites that speak to the questions and general communication you need to provide a response to on a regular basis.

5. Customise lead status to include deal creation triggers. This one will feed into step 6. We ultimately want to standardise the deal creation process where every deal has a similar naming convention, and requires minimal effort from the agents. If a group of agents are going in and creating every deal ad hoc, disorganisation can ensue.

For real estate specifically, include options like “first appointment scheduled”, and “private viewing scheduled”. We’ll later tie this into automation, and will make it so that the agent doesn’t need to leave the contact record until the prospect has actually scheduled in a viewing or meeting, at which point they’ll go to the deal. The less back and forth we can create between contact and deal records for agents, the less friction they’ll experience in using our CRM.

*While you’re at it, create any other custom properties that may be of use, like "selling timeline" or "offer made".

Set up saved filters so that your reps can easily access individuals in each lead status. For example, walking in on a Monday morning and filtering for contacts who have had a private viewing of a particular listing but have not yet made an offer should be easy.

Finally, make sure you add the “Lead Status” property to the contact record sidebar, so that it can be easily changed from the record by your reps.

6. Create a deal shell using workflows. Make it so that when lead status equals first appointment scheduled, private viewing scheduled, verbal interest shown etc., that a deal gets automatically created. Follow these instructions to create the workflow for this. This will cut down on the administrative work admissions teams have to do to create deals, and will further our goal of staying organised.

When you’re doing this, make the deal have a standard naming convention that uses personalisation tokens. Something like “[Contact First name] | [Listing of interest]” will allow each deal to be unique while staying within an established naming convention.

Objective: 

In any industry feedback is the breakfast of champions and that is no different for the real estate industry. Your potential prospects want to work with the best to ensure the best results. For that reason it is important that your real estate customer first of all benchmarks themselves against their competitors and then constantly looks to raise the standards to consistently meet and exceed customer expectations.

HubSpot surveys help your real estate customers keep their finger on the pulse of how their past and present clients feel about the service provided, ensuring they’re able to measure & take action on trends in responses over time.

1. Understand different types of surveys, and when to use which kind. [Blog post]

2. Loyalty surveys (NPS) are great for understanding how a client was with the service provided. Use this to track big picture sentiment on your real estate business overtime, and to identify those who you can pull aside to help (detractors) or those you can encourage to become evangelists of your real estate business (promoters).

3. Use Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) to understand a more specific experience a client had with your agency. Usually it can be good to do this type of survey after a particular sale has gone through. For example, you may have introduced out a new virtual tour option for prospects to view a property and want to make sure it was a good experience.

4. Customer experience scores (CES) surveys are better for learning about a clients experience working with a specific agency. An example of where this could be used is after an engagement with a student services team (like an IT help desk).

Objective: 

As mentioned before, a lot of real estate business is generated based on reputation. Prospective buyers and sellers want to ensure they are working with a competent business and a great way to highlight to potential buyers and sellers that you know how to get the job done and have done so before in the past many times.

See these steps for putting together a process which will help your customer generate more testimonials for their website

1. Create a list of contacts who you either sold a listing for or helped to purchase a listing in the last 6 months. If your real estate customer has also been using the NPS surveys you can also layer a filter for these contacts who also gave you a high NPS. This can help drive better engagement as you know you are only reaching out to people who had a really good experience

2. Decide what way you would like to collect testimonials from your customer for example you might just want your client to send you a written review with their thoughts or you may want the testimonial in video format or you might want to receive the testimonial in a Q/A format which you can put together later on, this is a great way to make sure you are getting the information you need. If you do decide to do a Q/A format then you could build out a HubSpot form which clients can fill in or use an integration like surveymonkey.

3. Create a 3 step sequence top send to these contacts and use personalisation tokens to make each email in the sequence seems more personal. Make sure you explain very clearly in the email why you are looking for a testimonial from this client and what exactly you are looking for them to do (format etc). Make sure to also include all relevant links and run this sequence over the course of about 2 weeks.

4. Once you have collected your testimonials you need to make sure they are presented on your website in an engaging and eye catching way, this could be something like an image of the happy clients outside their property with the testimonial overlaid, or even just a nice background. A great tool for easily designing eye catching testimonials is canva.com and as an added incentive HubSpot has a direct integration with Canva

5. Put all the testimonials gathered somewhere on your website and also use these testimonials in future prospecting initiatives. If you are using the HubSpot CMS it is possible to build a testimonial slider module and this community post explains how.

Bonus Tip - If you find that you are not getting a good response rate, try to add in some kind of incentive to motivate them, such as a small gift card

Objective: 

In the real estate industry it is a given that your clients buyers will have questions during the process of selling their listing or purchasing one. These questions could be: "Can you explain the home-buying process from start to finish" or "can you tell me what time the public viewing is".

Of course once a client comes on board they will usually be assigned to an agent who they can reach out to personally. However, by creating a chatflow you are able to help customers in real time and in a time sensitive and high stakes environment, make sure people get the answers they need when they need them.

1. Set up, and customise your conversations inbox. You can connect multiple channels to the conversations inbox including your team email, Facebook Messenger, chat, or a Support form.

2. Configure your conversations inbox settings to understand your business hours, where to place the chat window on your site, and your styling preferences for your chatbot.

3. When setting up a conversations inbox, consider if you are looking to set up a live chat flow, or a chatbot flow. Consider the resources you may have available to monitor a live chat, and the complexity of questions you could have answered by a chatbot.

If you have chosen a live chat functionality use this article to build, target, and display your live chat on your site.