Hey, property management growth hackers. Today, I want to talk about a specific strategy you can use to develop property management leads for your company. That strategy is basically a Realtor Referral Program.
Before I get into it, just a quick introduction. My name is Stephen Fox. I’m one of the administrators of this Property Management Growth Hacking Club. I’m also the co-founder at Upkeep Media where we specialized in helping property management companies grow.
So, without further ado let’s get into it.
What is a Realtor Referral Program?
I’m sure many of you have probably heard of this, but just in case you haven’t here’s a brief definition. It’s essentially a partnership with local real estate agents who do not offer property management services.
Basically, you set up an arrangement with them where they send you referrals and in exchange for a referral, you offer them a commission. You can offer them a commission solely when you actually close the deals. This is great because it allows the realtor to earn additional income and it’s another source for you to gain referrals. And the best part about it is, it’s actually free to set up.
So, let’s get into it. How do you actually make this happen and start generating leads from your realtor referral program?
Step 1: Create a Landing Page
The first thing that you want to do is create a landing page on your website. You want to have one page on your website that’s dedicated to your realtor referral program.
You want to make sure that this page explains what your realtor referral program is, the commission that you offer as well as the services that you provide to your property management clients. This way, when the realtor reads your content, they understand the types of services that your company provides.
Quick pointers to understand before creating a realtor referral program page:
1. Optimize Your Page for Search
You want to make sure you optimize this page for search. So, make sure that in your page title, you use your “City“.
So, let’s say you’re from Denver, you’d use Denver Realtor Referral Program for your page title. Or if you’re from Miami, you’d use Miami Realtor Referral Program in the first heading that appears on your page.
(For those of you who don’t know what a page title is, it’s the section that shows up in the tab on the top of the browser page. If you don’t know how to change that, feel free to send me a message, I can help you out with that really quickly.)
The reason you want to do that is, just in case there’s ever realtors out there that are doing a quick Google search to see if there’s any type of referral programs for them, your website will show up. If your website shows up it’s more likely that they’re going to reach out to you, guys.
2. Include Commission
As I mentioned before, make sure you include the commission you’re willing to offer. As far as what commission you should offer, that’s entirely up to you and what you’re comfortable with.
Most of our clients that participate in the realtor referral program will generally offer anywhere from 10 to 20% of the first month’s rent. It’s really based on how much business they bring you.
You can sort of incentivize them and say, “Okay, if you bring us 1, 2, 3 referrals per month, we’ll give you 10% commission. If you bring us 4 to 6 referrals per month, we’ll give you 15% commission” and increase that commission rate with the more referrals that they bring you. It incentivizes them to see to send you more and more referrals.
If you want to take a look at a sample page of a company that already has a realtor referral program set up on their website, you can take a look at this site here. This is not one of our clients, for full disclosure.
Take a look but make sure that you include the commission that you’re willing to offer on your page as well. This is something that I see that this page is missing.
3. Share Your Page
Once you have that page set up on your website, make sure that you share this page on your personal social media profiles. If you’re on LinkedIn, make sure that you share the page on LinkedIn, make sure you share it on your Facebook, your Twitter, anywhere else where you’re active online.
The reason being is you never know who’s going to see it. Maybe you have a friend who has a friend who’s a realtor and it ends up showing up on their newsfeed. You can end up landing new referrals through them. So, it doesn’t hurt, it’s free to do and it takes almost no time to share your page, so just make sure you do it.
But simply sharing your page isn’t actually going to bring you in a tone of new business. What you need to do is actually promote this page which is what I’m going to talk to you about next.
Step 2: Different Strategies to Promote Your Realtor Referral Program
1. Facebook & LinkedIn
The first strategies you can use are Facebook and LinkedIn groups. If you head over to your Facebook account, what you want to do is search for real estate agent groups specific to your city.
Let’s say I’m a property manager in Denver. I would want to search for ‘Denver Real Estate Agent’, and once I have I want to head on over to where it says ‘groups’. Then I would want to join as many groups as possible that are relevant to real estate agents in my specific city. For example, I found a group with 531 members, that’s potentially a lot of real estate agents that you can team up with for your referral program.
Another place that you can do the same type of thing is on LinkedIn. If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s similar to most social media platforms. You create a profile and once you do that, you want to search again for real estate agent groups.
So, let’s say I wanted to find the real estate agent group in Toronto. I would type in Toronto Real Estate Agent then I would want to click on where it says ‘more’ and then go to ‘groups’. You’ll see there are a few groups dedicated to Toronto Real Estate Agents.
For example, one group has almost 1400 members, you want to join that and once you join these groups, there are a few steps you want to follow.
How to Promote in a Group:
Don’t just join a group and start instantly promoting your program. A lot of groups will actually kick you out for self-promotion, so make sure you follow the group guidelines and read the rules when you actually joined the group.
There’s nothing worse than starting to promote yourself before you actually even contribute any sort of value to the group. So make sure you network with other members of the group, ask questions and answer questions, just be helpful.
Once you’ve been in the group for say a week or two and have contributed a bit, that’s when you can put up a post saying, “Hey, are there any realtors in here that don’t offer property management services? I’m looking to create relationships with brokers who don’t offer property management services. PM me if you’d like to connect.”. You’ll see, what happens is you’ll get some private messages from realtors out there that are interested in what you have to say. That’s when you can let them know about your realtor referral program.
Do the exact same type of strategy on Facebook and on LinkedIn and that’s a good way you can start generating leads for your realtor referral program.
2. Local Meetups
The second strategy that you can use to promote your realtor referral program is local meetups.
There are a few ways that you can find local meetups of real estate agents in your city. The best site to actually find meetups is the site called meetup.com or you can just do a quick Google search.
So, if I head over to Google, let’s say I’m located in Miami, I can just type in ‘Miami Real Estate Agent meet up’. You’ll see there’s going to be a bunch of results for real estate agent meetups in Miami.
If you see one here for example in Hollywood, Florida which isn’t too far from Miami you click on that and it will bring you to that site meetup.com. You’ll want to join this group. Then essentially, if they ever meet in person, that’s the perfect opportunity for you to go and network and talk with all these real estate agents that are located close to you.
So, again you basically want to find meetups and then network with real estate agents, let them know about your referral program. Let them know that if they don’t offer property management services this is a good way that they can earn some additional income.
3. Outbound Promotion
A few other ways you can promote your referral program through what called cold e-mail.
You can get a virtual assistant to create a list of real estate agents in your city, just have them do a Google search for real estate agents in your city.
So, say you’re located in Denver, you go to Google and just type in ‘Denver Real Estate Agent’.
Don’t do this yourself, go on a site like Upwork.com and hire somebody on there that’s going to do this for you. You have to focus on what’s going to bring in the biggest return on investment and sitting there and building a list of hundreds of real estate agents in your city is not going to do it. Pay somebody to do it, you can find cheap labor for this overseas
You can hire someone located in the Philippines who would build you a list of 500 leads for probably $20. And then you can even get them to email those leads for you as well. But basically, they’d go on Google, type in ‘Denver Real Estate Agent’ if that’s the city you’re located in. Then from there, you want to have them just go through all these different websites and take down the contact information.
So, tell them to take down their phone number, their email address, their name, their company name and then reach out to them so you can send them an email. Then follow up on that email if they don’t reply with a phone call.
I know cold calling isn’t always the most fun, but it works. And if you’re looking to generate property management leads and you’re serious about growing your property management company, it’s something that you should be doing.
Other Forms of Outbound Promotion:
Another thing you could do is find real estate agents on LinkedIn and connect with them. So, I’ll head off back over to my LinkedIn profile and I’ll just show you quickly how powerful LinkedIn. You can you really use this to help grow your realtor referral program.
Okay, so let’s say that I’m looking for real estate agents in Denver. Basically, I’d want to type in ‘real estate agent’ and it will bring me that search screen. Once I do that, what I can do is I can filter these results.
I can put in the exact city where I want them located.
I can put in Denver, Greater Denver Area. So, if we just go to Greater Denver Area and real estate agent, it’s going to show me a bunch of different results. You’ll see a literal list of real estate agents. All located in Denver and all these results are real estate agents that you can be reaching out to.
Or again, you can hire a virtual assistant to add them as a friend, and once they accept your request you can reach out to them with a message. Just let them know that you’re a property manager in this case in Denver and you have a realtor referral program, and you just want to let them know in case they ever have a specific client that is looking for property managers.
Another method that you can use to promote your realtor referral program is Facebook Ads. So Facebook Ads are obviously going to cost you a little bit of money to set up but it’s a great way to really reach a ton of realtors in your city without putting in any of your actual time.
Need Help?
If you want to actually learn how to set this up for yourself and you’re not really sure how to go about it, let us know in the comments below this video. I’ll be happy to shoot another video showing you exactly how to set this up step by step if that’s something that you’re interested in doing.
So, I want to thank you very much for attending or for watching the first training video. Which promotion strategy do you think that you’re going to use to get started and why?
Leave us a comment below, let us know. Also, let us know about any questions that you might have regarding this video, I’ll be happy to answer them in case it wasn’t clear on anything. If this video interested you and you learn something, please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. We’ll be putting the link below this video on the comments.
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We really appreciate it and hope to speak with you soon. Take care.
