Roshan SrinivasanFundamentally, cold outreach is incredibly saturated in the market as we go into 2024. Everyone is tired of being cold called or cold emailed, and most providers like Google have taken steps to block less reputable phone and email contacts.
As we move into a new age for selling in real estate, generating inbound leads as an agent and increasing your public presence through your website is going become the dominant strategy for growth. This is where Camphor’s AI powered websites come in!
Quick History on Cold Outreach
Real estate, like many other industries, has witnessed significant changes in the way agents reach out to potential clients. Traditionally, cold outreach was synonymous with two primary methods: cold calling and cold emailing.
Outbound by Cold Calling
In the 1970s and 1980s, cold calling was the go-to method for agents seeking to expand their client base. Armed with phone directories and determination, agents spent hours dialing numbers, hoping for an opportunity to engage with interested parties.
However, the effectiveness of cold calling has waned over time. Consumers are now more empowered and informed, with the ability to research properties and real estate agents independently. The intrusive nature of cold calls often leads to resistance from potential clients, making it a less viable option in the current landscape.
Outbound by Cold Emailing
As technology advanced in the 1990s and 2000s with Gmail and Outlook, so did the methods of outreach. Cold emailing became a popular alternative to cold calling. Agents could reach a broader audience by crafting compelling emails and sending them en masse. While less intrusive than phone calls, cold emails faced their own set of challenges, including spam filters and the increasing reluctance of recipients to engage with unsolicited messages.
While many CRMs and automation tools exist for handling cold emailing, people’s inboxes are cluttered with cold emails, making this a less useful tactic for generating leads.
How Agents are Generating Leads
While cold outreach is the primary method individuals are generating leads, there are other approaches that agents have also been using. The problems are:
- identifying the quality of these leads
- generating a funnel for repeat clients
Using Zillow and Other Listing Site Leads
Many real estate agents leverage sites like Zillow, Redfin, Realtors, and others to generate leads from homes sold by the owners (FSBOs), expired listings, distressed sellers, and probations. The problem with these leads is that there may have been a change-in-heart with the owner of the property or some other consideration that came up with the property, which is why the house may no longer be listed. As such, these leads are fundamentally “lukewarm” at best for an agent since no qualifications were checked for the seller before the agent contacted them.
Paying for Lead Generation
Another common tactic used by agents is to pay sites like CINC Pro, Real Geeks, or Luxury Presence to generate cold leads. These sites generate leads for agents by scraping expired listings and FSBOs, or by generating leads off of reactions to marketing posts they do on behalf of a client. These leads are incredibly cold at worst and lukewarm at best.
Additionally, this approach is not very scalable for agents with limited budgets to spend on lead generation, especially those who are just starting out.
Leveraging their Personal Networks
Leveraging your personal network to find leads is the best way to find warm and qualified leads. These could be former coworkers looking to sell or buy a home, family members, or other friends in your social circle.
However, unless your friends and family are professional real estate investors who consistently use you to represent them, generating leads off of your network may not be super scalable unless you have a high rate of referrals to other business in the area.
Marketing on Social Media
Viral marketing on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms is a powerful way to draw in leads. However, one common mistake many agents make is not giving a clear call to action in all their public messaging. Essentially, they create a large following, but do not know how to funnel them to the right place. We will talk more about how agents can solve for this using Camphor below.
The Biggest Gap for Agents: Websites and AI
Given how outbound lead generation is hard to scale for most agents, it’s a wonder that agents spend over 50% of their time on external lead generation efforts. However, majority of agents and teams do not have websites beyond the basic branding of their brokerage such as Compass, Keller Williams, or Century 21.
Even more damaging is that most agents maintain static websites built by IDXBoost, Luxury Presence, and Placester which build their website templates on top of static site generators like Wordpress without identifying ways to include AI into their workflows.
Fundamentally, a real estate team or agent website in a public-facing business card. This site is the call-to-action any prospect would need to take in order to expand their brands.
How Camphor can Help: AI-Powered Websites for Agents, Teams, and Brokerages
Camphor is leveraging our AI property search tool and datalake to help agents, teams, and brokerages with expanding their public brands on their websites. We provide custom and luxury templates for any client to work with, which will integrate with IDX feeds and provide integrations with various CRMs and analytics tools for collecting leads.
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However, there is a simple question to answer: what makes Camphor’s website builder different from the rest?
We differentiate ourselves in 3 core ways:
- Generating inbound conversions as opposed to outbound leads - we integrate our AI search engine onto all our client sites to generate high intent prospective buyers who query for specific information in a community. On the seller’s side, we leverage our datalake to arm you as an agent with any information about a property once a seller types in an address including information about zoning, transaction history, etc.
- Balancing user experience with generating high-intent SEO traffic - we will create simplistic website templates but leverage two key levers to optimize your SEO traffic:
- Blog content generation: we will work with you to understand your keywords to stand out as a business and help you with leveraging AI to publish blog content on those subjects to target your users.
- “Orphan” pages: for additional content such as website pages for communities, we believe that including them within your website navigation will be cumbersome for users. However, these key words for community locations can help with driving SEO. As a solution, we will help create static “orphan” pages which are searchable in any search engine like Google to increase your web presence.
- Highly custom and detailed property reports - both for internal and external visibility, Camphor provides property reports on all properties listed in a region including information on schools, transportation, financials, permits, liens, and more. We also leverage the Camphor AI assistant to summarize property reports to share with clients and give any prospects the opportunity to learn more about a property beyond the MLS description.
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For larger teams and brokerages, Camphor also offers continued services for marketing and SEO support. If you are interested in learning more about our website building and AI integrations, contact us at roshan@camphor.co or schedule time with us on our calendar.