How to Leverage a Slow Market to Grow Your Real Estate Business

With the real estate industry being cyclical in nature, all agents and brokers will eventually experience a slow market. This is the perfect time to focus on refining and growing your business by acquiring the real estate tools you need to set yourself up for success when the market picks up, and taking your brand to the next level to promote growth now and in the future. In times of a down market, agents and brokers should focus on the following:

• Revamp your website presence by switching to a robust website platform instead of a website
• Focus on your brand to boost conversion and agent recruitment
• Build your agent arsenal with tools that convert
• Build out your blog and website with relevant content
• Focus on SEM to win leads now

Refine Your Brand to Boost Conversion

Build your brand. Convert more leads. Recruit more agents.

The first step that you should take during a slowing market is ensuring that your brand promotes your business. You do this by ensuring that your digital presence provides the modern real estate experience that buyers and sellers are looking for.

A simple website does not cut it anymore in a real estate industry that is becoming more and more tech-forward everyday. You need a real estate website platform that is powered by cutting edge technology replete with robust tools to meet the demands of the changing industry and tech-savvy clients. [More on essential tools in the next section.]

If you are not using a website system that is powered by the latest cutting-edge real estate technology, use the down market time to revamp your online platform.

On the face of it, your system must have a user-friendly interface that users can easily navigate, with clear calls to action and a modern feel.

Most importantly, you need to provide relevant tools and information so that website users look to you as an expert and rely on what you have to offer. This helps you stand out and win more business. Remember, with fewer buyers and sellers during a down market, your conversion rate is more critical than ever. Once a website visitor lands on your site, you want to win their business to boost yours.

*Your website absolutely must be mobile-responsive across all devices* Having a platform that is not mobile-friendly is the fastest way to lose a lead.

There is no better time than during a slow market to rebrand yourself and position yourself for success when the market rebounds.

Brokers: Use a slow market to supercharge your agent recruitment potential. It has been reported that close to 70% of agents in South Florida have either moved brokers or considered a move during this down market. Take advantage of this time to focus on recruiting to grow your brokerage. The best way to attract the most agents is by highlighting yourself as a tech broker. This is the key to growth in the modern real estate industry.

Build Your Agent Arsenal with Tools that Convert

If you are trying to grow your real estate business during a slow market, and beyond, your website system needs to be equipped with high-level tools that are built for conversion. The most powerful conversion tools include:

-Artificial intelligence to manage your follow-up: Conversion really comes down to follow-up. The more responsive and available you are - consistently - and the more relevance you provide, the higher the likelihood of lead conversion. Artificial intelligence is easily the most effective and efficient way to accomplish this.

-Automatically generated up-to-the-minute market reports: Market reports provide your website visitors the value and relevance that they are looking for, but manually compiling the data is both time and labor intensive. You need a website system with tools that automatically generate thousands of unique market reports based on user behavior to provide maximum efficiency for you and value for your users. This is what leads to conversion and growth.

-Home valuation landing pages: An effective, easy to use home valuation tool is the most powerful tool in an agent’s arsenal for seller lead generation. Your web platform should not only have home valuation lead capture capabilities, but should generate niche-specific landing pages for every city, neighborhood, and condo building on your website.

-Auto-Populated, comprehensive pre-construction database: One of the best ways to drive your real estate business during a slow market is to hyper-focus your efforts where the market is strongest. In South Florida, a perennially strong market demographic is pre-construction buyers. You can capture the lion’s share of pre-construction buyers with a built-in, auto-generated and continually managed and updated pre-construction database highlighted on your web system.

Build Out Your Blog and Content Pages

Content is king - for SEO and relevance.

When the market is slow, you should spend time supercharging your website with relevant content and building out your blog.

This strategy is the ultimate in lead conversion duality. Current website visitors are more likely to convert because of the value that your content provides. Additionally, this serves your long-term goals of SEO.

Nothing goes further for your organic lead generation than loading your website up with relevant, consistent blogging and content generation. This strategy will pay off in SEO dividends when the market picks back up. In this way, you will be ready to hit the ground running for future lead generation since this strategy often takes several months to see results.

Focusing on your content output during a slow market is key for lead conversion - both now and in the future.

Satisfy Short Term Goals with SEM

When real estate markets are slow, lead generation gets more competitive than ever. The best way to win more leads to satisfy immediate goals is through SEM - search engine marketing. This is a strategy utilizing paid advertising to increase exposure on search engines or social media platforms. Studies show that internet users often do not continue searching past the first page of results. Paying for ads puts you in front of more users and is a great way to boost your exposure for lead generation.

What’s the catch? If you want to convert those leads that you are paying for, you need to make sure that your website platform provides the best, most user-friendly experience while delivering the relevance and value that the visitor needs in order to turn into a viable lead.

Remember, your website is your online business card. Not only do you need to put your best foot forward with a modern design that is mobile-friendly, but it needs to be full of relevant content, hyper-local IDX listings, and tech-forward tools to power their real estate search.

Most importantly, your system needs to be backed by Ai landing page technology to capture the lead as soon as they land on your site. If your SEM ads are pointing to a page that does not provide listings that are relevant to their search or answers to their questions, the chance of conversion is minimal. Effective landing page technology enables you to direct each website visitor immediately to the page that is the most relevant to their real estate needs - greatly enhancing conversion rates.

When the market is slow, it takes an agent - or broker - that stands out from the pack to win more leads and grow their business. With less buyers and sellers entering the market, you need to ensure that your website platform delivers the tools that you need to not only survive a slow market - but to thrive in it!