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You Won't Close Out Of State Real Estate Deals Using Social Media
Social media sucks for real estate.
The best that you can do with social media is find a few customers and get them to land on your landing pages, fill out the opt-in forms and capture some e-mails and that’s with writing lots of great content on your blog and sharing it on social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, or paying for ads on Facebook.
As far as closing real estate deals, the chances are slim over a 7 year period. Yes, that’s right, a 7 year period! I met with one real estate consultant that was still working on closing his first real estate deal after 7 years - and still hasn’t closed one! Another lady had spent a couple of years working on one real estate deal only to find out that the buyer’s proof-of-funds was fraudulent. That’s his bank statement - fraudulent, made up, manifested out of thin air. You typically want the dollars to be real from your funding sources. They don’t mention that online there is an even greater proportion of falsified documents let alone spreadsheets filled with property information that try to pass as real proof of ownership like title.
I still don’t think that you need to rely 100% on the MLS and a real estate broker. I think that you can do things like direct mail to find deals - heck that’s how many real estate agents find their clients. You can also include your social media accounts on your direct mail material, but start local. You can get a following from that and start blogging with engaging content. Include calls to action to ask them to telephone you if they have cash or a property for sale and become the go-to expert. Paid social media marketing might work better, in larger volume and quicker - like on Facebook targeting your location - than by doing it organically for free.
Oh my gosh! It’s what every industry expert recommends or do they just recommend that you do social media and that’s it to get real estate deals done. I don’t know. I just know that if you aren’t famous, it takes a lot of time to get real estate deals closed using social media marketing. It can be cheap, but takes time.
The problem with trying to do out-of-state real estate deals via social media is trust. It’s generally very difficult to trust the person on the other end of the phone that you meet via social media if they aren’t from a site with a rating and grading scale and if you don’t have referrals from lots of people that this person is trustworthy. They could take your money and run if they are a contractor and you’re trying to fix up a property from a distance.
I still believe that the best way to find real estate deals is to climb over the backs of other real estate professionals in your network because you want to be the one dealing directly with the buyer or seller, cutting out other middle men and dealmakers. I don’t think it’s ethical if done on purpose, but there has got to be ways of getting there like direct mail and the online strategies that I recommend above that can make it ethical.
What experiences have you had with social media marketing strategies trying to close a real estate deal?
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