Data for March Existing and Pending Home Sales is out, and whether you know it or not - it greatly impacts your real estate leads, marketing efforts and effectiveness.As an agent or broker witnessing these things in the market - you have known for months now that gaining listings is virtually a guaranteed payday, and that you already might have a number of potential buyers hanging around waiting or searching for the right property. What you may not know is just exactly what you can do about it that will have a significant impact on the short run to get you more paydays.Read on.

Home Sales Data that Impacts Real Estate Leads & Marketing

Without trying to bore, let's just recite a few stats available in the Existing Home Sales and Pending Home Sales reports. In March, we saw a continued trend that completed 13 consecutive months of year-over-year price increases, and sales have been over the 'year-ago' levels for 21 consecutive months. This is welcome and expected news for many professionals in the industry. What still has been a bit of a damper for many is the fact that total existing-home sales are actually down about .6 percent. Now this is still decently higher than sales from March a year ago, but what it does confirm is what agents and brokers in the majority of markets already know - inventory is highly limited.In fact, it is so dramatic, that in some markets, they are already on path to, or have exceeded, their pre-recession price peaks - crazy!This is actually the data that you need to be watching as you determine how you are conducting your marketing efforts.

3 Real Estate Lead Generation & Marketing Strategies to Win Listings

Knowing and seeing the market as it is, what is your marketing doing to take advantage of these trends and put you in the right place? There are 3 strategies that you can employ to start winning listings now.NOTE: In the interest of transparency, these strategies are extremely powerful and successful, but typically are hard for an agent or broker who is brand new and on a severely limited budget or is not ready to handle the leads. The clients we assist in taking advantage of these strategies, typically are or want to be their local market leaders.

Strategy 1: Not Just Featured Listings.... Actually Feature Your Listings

Getting a new listing lead is great - as mentioned before, it's a virtual payday in this market. What you do with that listing, and how you take advantage of that listing as an MARKETING ASSET is a completely different matter. The truth is, most agents and brokers don't consider listings marketing assets, except in marketing that listing.The truth is, you have something that an experienced marketing team can utilize for real estate content marketing on social media, to power blog posts, to rank on Google search results and a variety of other things. Gaining listings, when used correctly, turns into a positive spiral of gaining more listings.Every potential home seller wants to work with the agent/broker selling the most homes. You need to take each listing, turn it over to your marketing team with enough information (remember, you now can take video of an actual listing, take more pictures, and describe that sucker), and then let them do their thing.What? You don't have a good marketing team? Well.... what're you waiting for?

Strategy 2: Stake Your Claim as Your Neighborhood Expert & Local Specialist

A powerful trend, and one that we have been driving for years, is the approach to becoming a local specialist and neighborhood expert. The idea with this is that you want to show from a branding standpoint that you know how to cover a broad base, but you want to appeal to specific local markets that are interesting to you, and to whom you can be interesting.So, how do you stake your claim? Well, there are a few specific things you can to do make sure that you are the local expert. Again, it doesn't come without work or know-how, but if you know what you want, there are ways to get it done.

• Neighborhood & Local Search Rankings - it is an over-used idea & phrase, but regardless, it is effective and essential if you are serious. The key is making sure you don't fall for one of those 'we're partnered with Google' callers, but that you work with a group that really knows how to rank you in top placement and focuses on your local market.
• Real Estate Content Marketing - In many ways, this plays with all of the other strategies together. As we have talked about in other posts - content is really the currency of online results. It isn't the only factor, but generating quality and optimized content consistently is core to other strategies working well. In cold reality, most times you are the best mind to do this, but it may not be worth your time to sit and write forever - you ought to have a strategy that gets you the visibility without you doing all the work.
• Local Social Strategy - How are you going to appear in Social Media? Do you know how to leverage Google+, Facebook and Twitter to be the Local Specialist. This is an essential part of playing this role, and being top of mind for the locals.

Strategy 3: Exploit the Real Estate Niche - Pull the Real Estate Leads

This has been a key strategy for every top producer for years and years. So, in that way it's not new. However, the types of niches that are hot tend to adjust and change with the market. The key for you, is to identify the right niches that you are qualified and interested in focusing on (Short Sales, Luxury, Rentals, etc) and then directing your marketing team to focus on those areas.Your content marketing efforts, seo, and other factors should be including this as an essential piece, and it should bleed through on all fronts, including your initial brand, your visibility, and then it will also come through to your leads.

In Summary

One major note here is that you can tell that we are firm proponents of you not being the jack-of-all-online-marketing-trades. It is really just a stupid approach to your business these days. There is too much speed in technology advancements as well as a high level of competition. To compete, you need to know which marketing team is at your back, and how you are going to see the return. Get that right, and you will be able to implement solid strategies to own your market.