How Real Estate Postcards Generate Leads for Keller Williams Agents

Background of Keller Williams

Keller Williams is a franchise operation that specializes in real estate, and the agency is based in Austin, Texas. There are nearly 180,000 agents worldwide working through this company, but the actual number will vary, depending on the year.

The number of agents working at Keller Williams is easier to understand when you divide the total into two categories. Combining the total number of agents in both Canada and the United States, there are close to 160,000 agents associated with Keller Williams.

It’s important to assert your presence in the market because many will forget about your contact information due to the large number of real estate agents throughout the United States. Gaining the attention of your prospective customers is the first part of the equation; the next task is to convince them to take action.

In this post, we will take a brief look at the history of Keller Williams, how agents can effectively generate leads with postcards, and why postcards are more effective than traditional real estate farming methods.

Background of Keller Williams

There are over 940 offices located around the world. This shows a remarkable rate of expansion, considering the fact that the company began as a single office in Austin in 1983.

The focus was residential properties during these early years, and the number of associates grew to 72 within the first few years of operations. The housing boom in the 1980s caused the agency to expand rapidly and open new offices, and this expansion continued to grow outside of the U.S. in the 1990s.

Strategies Keller Williams Agents Use for Generating Leads

There are a variety of strategies for generating leads. When it comes to listings, Keller Williams postcards remain at the top of the list. Homeowners are usually interested in the value of their property because the equity in the home is a major method for accumulating wealth.

Sending out Keller Williams postcards on a regular basis allows your prospective clients to become familiar with your brand and demonstrate expertise. The typical timeline should be once a month for a minimum of one year.

Aside from sending on a monthly basis, what else can Keller Williams agents do to ensure success with generating listings with postcards?

Sending Out Relevant Postcards

As a Keller Williams agent, there are several strategies you can utilize when sending out postcards. This process creates an opportunity for you to tap into the existing interest in various housing markets. Sellers may keep the postcards around for a while before deciding to put their property on the housing market, so it’s important to keep a long-term strategy in mind.

Here are a few options for developing a strong long-term opportunity by leveraging regular Keller Williams postcards to target neighborhoods:

Market Update Postcards

If you don’t have a listing within your real estate farm, keeping prospects up to date on the latest market conditions is the best route to take. Popular options for Market Update postcards include Recently Sold homes in their neighborhood, and year-to-date updates with relevant information.

Regardless of the option you choose, the branding and images should be consistent through each mailing.

Just Sold Your Neighbor’s Home Postcard

Once you’ve closed a listing with your target area, there is still opportunity to leverage your marketing to obtain additional listings. Sending a Just Sold Your Neighbor’s Home postcard is a perfect opportunity to let other residents in the area know the closing price of a home in their subdivision, and they will associate that closing with the name on the postcard.

After you get a new listing, there are additional postcards that can be sent:

Just Listed Postcards

Let the entire neighborhood know about your new listing with a Just Listed postcard with Keller Williams branding. These postcards make it easy to notify prospective sellers with your real estate farm.

Open House Postcards

Never miss the chance to send out postcards announcing an open house event. This is a great long-term strategy for building lasting relationships that might take years to yield a sale, so be patient. Following through with meetings at the open house event is also a great marketing strategy that is proven to be cost-efficient.

Under Contract Postcards

Once your listing receives an accepted offer, send out a new batch of Under Contract postcards. If the listing went Under Contract in just a few days, this postcard will demonstrate that the market is hot and buyers are eagerly in search of homes in the area.

Just Sold Postcards:

Once escrow closes and your listing gets sold, a Just Sold postcard lets the subdivision know what the final closing price was, how quickly it sold, and could even include a client testimonial.

For maximum results, Keller Williams agents could send a Just Sold postcard twice to the same real estate farm. Residents who have been tracking your postcards closely will see that you are an active agent in their community. When it comes time to sell their home, they are more likely to go with the expert.

Keep the Long-Term Goal in Mind

Direct mail marketing has been a long term strategy in real estate for decades. In fact, Gary Keller, the Co-Founder of Keller Williams, illustrates the value of postcards in his best-selling book The Millionaire Real Estate Agent.

The key to postcard marketing, as well as all real estate marketing, is focusing on the long-term. Most real estate agents require months to close their first transaction, which is why many agents do not last more than a couple years in the industry.

When time and money is limited, it’s important to create a strategy for generating leads that is likely to produce results over time. The goal is to maximize the return on investment, or ROI. This might not happen during the first few months of sending out postcards, so patience is also necessary.

Once the results start coming in, you will be in a better position to evaluate the actual impact of these activities. One of the biggest mistakes many real estate agents make is utilizing their budget in the short-term, spending on ads or sending a ton of postcards all at once, saving nothing for the rest of the year.

Even if you have a limited budget, the focus should be on the long-term. Stretching your budget throughout a calendar year (or more) is vital to success in real estate.

Generating Leads via Postcards vs Other Farming Methods

There are other ways to generate leads, and these can certainly be pursued in tandem with sending out Keller Williams postcards. There is no need to restrict your activity to a single method, but it’s helpful to know that real estate farming via postcards is more effective than many other strategies.

The combination approach still seems to be the most sensible, but it’s also worth delving a little deeper into the topic of why postcards are so efficient.

The number of hours spent on each activity gives a realistic activity-value ratio. This feedback is helpful information because it means that you don’t have to reinvent the proverbial wheel. For example, door-knocking is also a popular method for real estate farming.

It will typically take around five minutes per door, yet most people don’t answer the door. The time it takes to walk between doors can add additional time that isn’t being used on high-value activities.

This all contributes to time/opportunity cost. If you end up spending the same amount of time sending out Keller Williams postcards, it would take around eight months to use up the same resources that you spent knocking on doors.

This same breakdown can be applied to similar activities like cold-calling, putting up door-hangers and meeting clients at social gatherings. The opportunity cost for sending out postcards enables you to allocate that time to other areas of your business.

Summary

Even with the strong branding of Keller Williams, marketing is an essential element to success in real estate. Having the right plan in place is a huge step in generating listings, and postcards have proven their ability to provide maximum ROI with minimum time invested.

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