Shape Your Real Estate Marketing Around These 6 Most Desirable Agent Traits

When you’re developing your real estate marketing, it’s important to think about what will resonate with your target audience. What will home buyers and sellers be looking for in an agent? What type of person do they want to work with?

So, how do you create messaging that will resonate with home buyers and sellers? You start by gaining a deep understanding of your target audience and what they value most in a real estate agent.

The Balance published an article that lists six qualities and skills clients say they value in a real estate agent. We’ll go through each of these—in order, starting with the most important—and discuss how you can incorporate each into your real estate marketing.

1) Honesty and integrity

The top qualities clients look for in an agent are honesty and integrity. They want an agent they can trust; an agent who will be honest with them and everyone else involved in the transaction. But you can’t just say, “I do business with integrity,” and expect people to take your word for it. So how do you demonstrate your honesty and integrity through your marketing?

Testimonials are a must. To acquire a few testimonials that speak specifically to your honesty and integrity, you may need to ask point-blank: “Do you feel that I conducted business with honesty and integrity? What is the reason for your answer?”
Be transparent and let people see your ethical behavior, whether that means posting a photo of you volunteering at the local food bank or publicly replying to a negative online review you received. Be transparent about the good and the bad.

Related article: How To Be More Authentic

2) Knowledge of purchase process

Demonstrating your knowledge of the purchase process is much more straightforward than trying to prove your honesty and integrity. All you need is a solid content marketing strategy.

To establish yourself as an expert, create content—blog posts, emails, pages on your website—that educate people on the home purchase process. Here are a few ideas:

Create a drip email campaign for first-time homebuyers that sends a step-by-step home-buying guide one month at a time.
Create a page on your website that is a checklist of everything a buyer/seller should do prior to contacting an agent.
Write blog posts that answer frequently asked questions.

3) Responsiveness

Don’t just talk about your responsiveness; act on it, too.

Set up an SMS text message auto-responder to follow up on online leads immediately. Learn more about text message automation.
In your introductory email to a new lead, let them know how soon you respond to calls, emails, etc.
If you have a Facebook Page for your business, you can earn a badge that says you are “Very responsive to messages” if you’ve maintained a response rate of 90% and a response time of 15 minutes over the last 7 days.

4) Knowledge of real estate market

Just as in #2, here you can really leverage content marketing to demonstrate your knowledge.

Write blog posts and emails about the latest trends and news in the real estate market.
Create personalized content based on prospects’ zip codes. Pull relevant data and share via email.

5) Communication skills

Your great communication skills don’t need to be spelled out; they just need to be demonstrated in the way you interact with leads and prospects.

Proofread all marketing materials for spelling and grammatical errors. If you’re not a great writer, hire one.
Use a smiling headshot and friendly language to show people you are approachable.

6) Negotiation skills

If there’s one area that agents, on average, need to work on, it’s negotiation skills. In the NAR’s 2017 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report, negotiation skills have a lower client satisfaction rating (77%) than the other qualities listed in this blog post.

Brush up on your negotiation skills, and be transparent about the fact that you’re improving yourself:

Read articles about negotiation strategies on REALTOR Mag and Inman News and share them to your Facebook page.
Sign up for a course with REALTOR University and announce your completion of the course.

If you’re already a successful negotiator…

Pull together some testimonials and client success stories that highlight times you were able to negotiate a deal in a client’s favor.

Powerful real estate marketing requires a deep understanding of your target audience. In this blog post, we discussed the 6 traits that home buyers and sellers, on average, say they look for in a real estate agent.

But I encourage you to dig deeper. Your market is unique. Your people have a list of unique wants and needs. Find out what those are, and use those to shape your marketing into something even more powerful.

What do your clients say they value most in an agent? If you’d like to share your insight, please comment below!