Real Estate Marketing 101: Outreach That Drives Results

Important Note: PropStream does not offer legal advice. Before marketing to homeowners, we recommend doing your own research and/or consulting with a legal professional.

Effective outreach takes more than sending a postcard or making a phone call. It requires adopting a proven system for contacting and following up with leads across multiple channels.

Without a system, you’re bound to let leads slip through the cracks, including some who are genuinely interested in your services. However, by following a few best practices, you can avoid this and ensure your outreach is as effective as possible. 

Maintain Quality Lead Lists 

Start with the right leads. It’s much easier to market to highly qualified leads than to shoot blind.

With PropStream, you can filter properties and homeowners in your market for potential selling motivations, such as pre-foreclosure status, bankruptcy, and tax delinquency. Even if the owner hasn’t listed their home for sale, they may be open to the right offer.

Furthermore, with PropStream Connect’s Lead Automator, you can ensure your custom lead lists stay up to date. It alerts you to new properties that meet your search criteria and automatically removes outdated ones.

Get Accurate Contact Information

Once you have a clean lead list, ensure you have accurate contact information. It’s no use identifying high-intent leads if you have no way to reach them.

While you could scour public records for homeowners’ contact details, there’s a better way. PropStream Connect includes free third-party skip tracing, which provides multi-sourced phone numbers and email addresses for individual property owners, LLCs, and corporate entities.* And if no contact information is available, your skip trace request won’t count against your monthly limit. 

Use Multiple Outreach Channels

Different real estate leads favor different communication channels. To cover your bases, it’s best to reach out using multiple options.

With PropStream, you can launch direct mail, email, and dialing campaigns—all from the same platform, so you don’t need to switch between different systems. 

For instance, PropStream Connect lets you use a Click-to-Dial feature to immediately call leads from a property page. This streamlines outbound dialing by eliminating the need to manually dial numbers or switch to another software application. 

PropStream Connect also offers discounted direct mail marketing!

Personalize Your Messaging

Don’t send the same message to every prospect. Tailor it to their potential selling motivations. 

For example, a homeowner in pre-foreclosure may have different needs than an absentee owner who’s tired of managing their rental from out of state. Speak to their specific pain points, and your message is far more likely to resonate. 

Since PropStream lets you filter and segment leads by motivation type, you’re already halfway there. Reference this context in your emails, direct mail, and phone calls to demonstrate that you understand the situation.

Have a Follow-Up System

No outbound strategy is complete without a consistent follow-up process. After all, few prospects convert after the first contact. According to one estimate, it takes an average of 8 interactions to get an initial meeting (or other conversion).

To keep track of leads, tag them with relevant labels, such as “not interested,” “interested,” “maybe interested,” etc. Then segment prospects based on where they are in your sales funnel. This, and keeping detailed notes, helps you pick up where you left off with each conversation.

PropStream’s dialing platform (BatchDialer) makes this easy. With each call, you get AI call guidance (to help you know what to say next), an AI-generated call summary, and automatic post-call labels to keep your prospects and conversations organized. 

Time Your Outreach Strategically

Even the most thoughtfully written message can fall flat if it lands at the wrong time. Outreach timing matters, both in terms of the time of day and where a lead is in their journey toward a potential sale. 

For calls and texts, test different time windows to see what works best. For direct mail, consistency matters more than perfect timing. Whatever you do, always review your conversation history before sending a message to a prospect.

Timing your outreach around a new distress signal, such as a foreclosure filing, can also be effective. Instead of contacting your entire list on a fixed schedule, let new events trigger fresh outreach. PropStream Connect’s Lead Automator can alert you the moment a new property meets your search criteria, so you can reach out before the competition does.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

That said, a lot of effective marketing comes down to avoiding common pitfalls:

• Relying on a single outreach channel. This could lead to missing leads who prefer email over calls, or direct mail over texts.
• Not following up enough. Giving up after one or two outreach attempts could be leaving money on the table. It takes an average of eight interactions to get a meeting.
• Using outdated or inaccurate contact information. Don’t waste time and money trying to reach prospects at disconnected numbers or old addresses.
• Sending generic messages. When your message tries to speak to everyone, it speaks to no one. Tailor each message to the individual.
• Ignoring telemarketing regulations. Calling numbers on the do-not-call (DNC) registry or calling outside permitted hours can result in hefty legal fees.
• Not tracking your results. This could cause you to invest in marketing channels or scripts that don’t convert, simply because there’s no data to show otherwise.

Try PropStream Connect for Free

Ultimately, effective outreach is a process of trial and error. However, you can shorten your learning curve by following the best practices (and avoiding the mistakes) listed above.

Ready to take your real estate marketing to the next level? Start your PropStream subscription today and enjoy PropStream Connect for 14 days for free on select plans!

*PropStream engages an independent third party to perform skip tracing.