For many real estate agents, focusing their businesses on pre-construction property sales can be a lucrative niche to work in; and many agents exclusively work in, and have built big businesses in, that space.
When you don’t have a brick and mortar structure in front of you to sell, and you rely on drawings and renderings, it can be difficult to put together an effective marketing strategy, but it’s definitely possible.
★ To learn more about building a niche in your real estate business, take a look at this post called: Carving a Niche to Get Better Real Estate Leads.
While there are many ways to market pre-construction properties, a lot of agents focus on one simple, effective technique: pretending to be the builder.
It may sound a little underhanded, but it’s a really strong way to not only market pre-construction properties, but also to build your own lead pipeline in the process.
While there are a number of effective ways to do this, most agents focus on SEO, search results, and paid advertising.
In most cases, someone that’s interested in a particular development will start with a Google search for the development name, and if you’re in the first few results, they’re likely to click it and convert on the landing page (mostly because they’re already interested). So by ensuring you’re in the first couple search results, you can capture those prospective buyers.
But what’s on the other side of that search once they do click matters too…
★ If you want to learn more about SEO and paid advertising, have a look at these posts and resources:
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- Using Paid Search for Real Estate Agents to Get More Conversions and Transactions
- Download Our SEO Strategy Building Guide for Real Estate Agents
There are two main types of strategies that you can build out:
1. Stand-Alone Landing Pages: In this type of strategy, all of the development landing pages are on their own, outside of the main website, and each on their own domain. In this approach, your goal is to build out the landing page to look as much like the developer as possible, with the development branding, renderings, and multiple options to convert.
This approach works best if your plan is to focus on paid advertising as a way of bringing people to the website. An organic SEO strategy isn’t likely to work here because single, stand-alone landing pages aren’t likely to rank in organic search results because they’re not authoritative enough.
2. Pages Within Your Main Website: In this type of strategy, all of the development landing pages are within 1 main website; and effectively, built out as a large database of property developments. In this approach, you can do a mix of developer branding and your own branding throughout the general look of the landing page and main website. While you won’t as strongly appear to be the developer, you will appear to be authoritative when it comes to these types of real estate transactions.
This approach works best if you plan on focusing on organic search results (with some paid search mixed in). By building out a strong, authoritative website that includes a large database of pre-construction properties and property developments, you’ll set the foundation for more easily showing up in search results for a large number of development projects well into the future.
Regardless of which approach you take, the goal here is twofold: to obviously sell pre-construction properties, but also, to build your marketing database.
After you’ve collected names, phone numbers, and email addresses of people that you know are interested in pre-construction properties (through either of the strategies above), you should build out a marketing strategy for that audience, which primarily, can be done through email marketing.
You already know that these people are interested in pre-construction, so by sending them personalized, related email marketing about other development and pre-construction property opportunities, you’re setting the foundation for them to convert sometime in the future.
If you want to learn more about email marketing, take a look at these posts:
- Building an Effective Email Newsletter Strategy
- Why You Should Never Stop Building Your Email Marketing Database
- How Real Estate Agents Can Improve Their Email Marketing Open Rate
Whatever approach you take, the primary goal is the same: build out a marketing strategy that makes it seem like you’re the actual developer or that you’re extremely knowledgeable about the development. Not only will the people you attract be motived to learn more about the pre-construction properties and developments, but if they don’t end up purchasing, they’ll at least be in your database as potential buyers that you can market to.
Want to drive traffic, build your brand, and engage your target audience? Download our eBook: ‘The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate Marketing’. It’s a collection of some of our best marketing articles, tips, and tricks that we’ve collected over the years.
