The final guide on Real Estate text lead capture done right

As an estate agent, your entire income depends on capturing those real estate leads. How many properties you sell determines how much money you’ll earn, so finding the best strategies to improve your lead capturing is essential.

Although we have access to countless communication tools, clients have never been more difficult to reach. However, because 62% of home buyers prefer receiving property info via text messages, you can benefit a lot from using text messages or SMS marketing and drive the sales.

In this guide, we tell you everything about text message marketing for realtors and how you can capture leads with it. Make sure you stay tuned to find out more about it.

How does text marketing work for real estate?

Once a potential client gives you their phone number, you can launch your text messaging campaign. Not sure how real estate SMS marketing works? The primary purpose of real estate marketing is to create an incentive, which you can easily do with text messaging.

Here are a few use cases that show you how text message marketing works:

• Adding new information: clients interested in a particular listing will want to receive regular updates concerning the property. Text message marketing works wonderfully to get the message across.
• Building a connection: building authentic and genuine connections with clients is vital for improving the relationship and making your clients’ experience way more pleasant. Text messages closely resemble the communication between two friends, which will motivate your clients to find the right property with you and increase referrals.
• Creating a conversation: most agents and brokers who converse with their clients over the phone or via email have trouble creating conversations with their customers. Because text messaging is more easy-going, chatting comes quite naturally.
• Increasing convenience: there’s nothing easier than sending out a quick text with all the critical information about the property. With it, you don’t have to worry about unanswered calls or your email ending up in the spam folder.

Why you should use it to capture leads for your real estate business?

Did you know that approximately 98% of text messages are opened? If this isn’t strong enough of a reason for you to implement SMS marketing for generating real estate leads, the four reasons below will surely change your mind.

Namely, text message marketing will allow you to quickly:

Share property information

Your clients need to be informed about the latest developments, such as new listings in the areas they’re interested in, open house details, price changes concerning the properties they’ve shown interest in, etc. Sharing information about a property can keep your clients updated, and your effort will surely keep them interested in working with you.

Set reminders and appointments

Communication with prospective buyers must be easy and quick. Today, no one has time for long emails and phone calls, so setting all sorts of reminders and appointments is the easiest via SMS texts. Your clients can quickly receive reminders and appointment details they can always refer back to if they forget when or where they should meet their agent.

Advertise open houses

A mobile device is currently the most widely-used piece of technology, so advertising open houses via text messages makes perfect sense. Adding photos is an option, too, especially if you want to create visually capturing leads that’ll resemble real-life flyers.

Incorporate shortcodes

The five and six-digit phone numbers people can text for more information about a particular property are known as shortcodes. Incorporating shortcodes is an easy way of automating your digital marketing, as each client will search for the property they’re curious about.

Text messaging vs cold calling for capturing real estate leads

Many real estate agents contemplate between text messaging and cold calling techniques for increasing real estate leads. Namely, SMS response rates are 295% higher than cold call response rates, so there’s truly no need to search for further explanations.

Why is that so?

Cold calling is commonly frowned upon as a marketing or lead gen strategy. Finding the right time for cold calls is next to impossible because they’re often disorienting and distracting and typically catch a person in the middle of important activity. Since cold calling is unsolicited, most approached individuals are flustered and caught off-guard. 

Text scripts, on the other hand, are much more considerate. Even though they still contact individuals, how they do it is entirely different. There are no unwanted or disturbing calls. Instead, text messages can be read whenever a person finds the time, so they automatically set the ground for a more pleasant and engaging interaction.

What to avoid when text messaging

Nevertheless, not all real estate text message marketing efforts perform great. You can still make mistakes when crafting and sending out these messages to capture leads. Let’s go over some mistakes you should want to avoid.

1. Sending unclear or long messages: The whole purpose of texts is to send important property information as concisely as possible. Confusing and long messages will only irritate your crowd, which will result in you being blocked.
2. Lacking purpose or aim: Every text message must have a clear goal. If you don’t motivate the potential buyers to do something, they probably won’t do anything.
3. Using abbreviations or slang: While text messages are laid-back and invite a more friendly and relaxed way of conversing, not respecting the limits and going too far will result in you being perceived as childish and unprofessional by your potential clients.
4. Overgeneralizing messages: Not everyone wants to hear about every property you have on the market. Carefully determine what each one of your clients is looking for in a property and send property updates only to those who might be interested in checking it out if not purchasing it.

Tips to follow for profitable SMS marketing

Now that you know more about how not to craft a text message for capturing real estate leads let’s go over some useful tips that’ll help you create engaging and profitable ones.

1. Keep it short and simple: The beauty of text messaging is quick, simple, and clear communication. To ensure you have this, keep your text messages under 160 characters, and don’t beat around the bush!
2. Use proper grammar: Even though text messaging is relaxed, proper grammar will help you sound more eloquent and professional to your customers.
3. Add a touch of personalization: Clients love personalized texts! You don’t have to do anything special since including their name is enough to offer a more personalized approach.
4. Categorize your clients: Each client will have some idea of what they’re looking for in a property. Whether that’s the property size, the number of rooms, city area, proximity to schools, or price, you can use these parameters to categorize your clients and send only relevant offers to them.

When should you be sending follow-ups

When sending text messages, 90% of them are read within the first 3 minutes. Yet, not many agents realize when it’s time to switch the CRM technique and put specific clients on a different regime.

Using the same text for your entire database won’t do much, even if you assigned a smart capture. Instead, you need to understand when you must send a follow-up.

The following five situations are just some of the examples when sending a follow-up text is a great business move:

• A customer is a highly-engaged buyer who hasn’t been contacted in the last three days;
• A customer is a seller who hasn’t been contacted in the last two weeks;
• A potential customer has a birthday coming up next week;
• A potential customer liked, followed, or favored a property the same day;
• A lead has never been contacted or texted.

Thanks to advanced tools and automatically generated databases, creating text message templates and scripts has never been easier. You can set automatic notifications or send messages to all your potential and existing buyers and sellers based on the parameters you want to follow.

Real estate text examples for capturing leads

For smart lead capture SLC, you’ll want to check out some of our real estate SMS marketing templates you can use to reach out to your customer base.

Contacting potential clients

Thanks for registering on our website, Emily! If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me. – Johanna

Interested in properties in this area? Text PHOENIXNORTH to 55525 to set up location-specific notifications.

Contacting current buyers

Tom, a new 2-bedroom, 1-bath property is for sale in the same school district. Do you want me to organize a viewing?

The property at 52 Narrow Street has dropped from $200K to $170K. Do you want to schedule a viewing or make an offer?

Outstanding news! Your offer for 52 Narrow Street has been accepted! When are you available for a call?

Contacting current sellers

Rachel, there’s a scheduled viewing this Wednesday, May 4, at 6 PM.

Your property has eight viewings scheduled for this week. Text 456NRST to 99352 for more details.

Check out our article on how to write the perfect real estate SMS Marketing text if you want to become a pro.

How to use Instasent for real estate leads generation

Instasent is a leading platform for sending bulk messages. With this tool, you can send messages to more than 200 countries worldwide.

With its innovative features, Instasent allows you to import your own databases, create customized marketing campaigns, and analyze the generation sources in real-time.

With Instasent, you can:

• Track when the clients received your text message;
• Customize the content of your messages;
• Set the desired date and time you want to send your texts;
• Personalize your messages by adding a business or brand name;
• Manage contacts by categorizing them into groups.

How much does it cost?

The bottom line

Overall, text message or SMS marketing campaigns are highly beneficial in the real estate industry. Even now, not many realtors are taking full advantage of this easy yet powerful marketing strategy, so now is the perfect time to start using text messages in your real estate agency and get ahead of your competitors.