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Real Estate Text Message Marketing

Learn how to nurture real estate leads and close more home sales with SMS marketing.

Dani Henion wrote in Industry Guides
• May 30th 2023

Profitable, successful real estate doesn’t come down to your nice business card or your impressive speed at finding listings.  

It’s all about strong relationships. 

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that we’ve written a lot about one of the best communication channels for creating and strengthening them: text messages.

Here’s how to use text message marketing and SimpleTexting to overcome your communication challenges and bring in more leads.

Even though realtors run their operations using technology nowadays, real estate is still built on establishing and managing relationships.

The key ingredient of any good relationship? Communication. Texting offers busy agents and brokers a quick and effective way to:

• Follow up with new leads
• Organize phone calls, viewings, and other meetings
• Automate texts to new Facebook leads
• Place a keyword (a word or phrase that customers can text to a number to receive more information) on a property or flier

We’re not the only SMS fans out there. In 2019, Realty Biz News declared texting one of the most invaluable communication channels.

There’s a contradiction at the heart of modern real estate sales and marketing. There have never been more ways to reach people, yet people have never been harder to reach.

That’s because people are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,00 ads per day—and notice less than 100. 

On the communication front, email open rates continue to decline, and fewer than half of received phone calls are answered. 

Text messages, on the other hand, get 98% open rates. This helps realtors to:

• Catch clients’ attention
• Improve response rates
• Generate more leads
• Quickly find and communicate with buyers

If that all sounds good to you, we’ve got even better news: The majority of people want you to text them. In our 2022 SMS Marketing report, 70% of consumers said they opted in to a business’ text messages. That means they trusted the business enough to give them their personal phone number—and home buyers and sellers may do the same for you.

Agents use real estate text message marketing in two main ways—to generate leads and then follow up with them. 

We’ll outline how both work and then cover some other ways you can use text messaging.

Generating Leads Using SMS Real Estate Marketing

Real estate text message marketing can help you bring in leads from the ground up. You can collect contact information for interested buyers and sellers, promote listings, generate sales, and even handle sign-in sheets for open houses. 

There are a couple of different strategies you can apply here.

One of the most popular approaches involves keywords. (An SMS keyword is a word that your customers can text to your number to agree to receive your messages.)

Here’s how easy it is to create one.

Now that you’ve created a keyword, you’re probably wondering how they work in practice. Say a house hunter walks by your property and spots a sign or flier with the keyword “321MainSt” alongside your phone number.

You now have a new lead you can follow up with. To save time, you can automatically send them a series of texts using our autoresponder feature.

With text message marketing, you can also send a real estate text blast to prospective buyers’ phone numbers.

You can use that text blast to let your new contacts know about a new property that’s for sale, including photos of the property and links to the online listing.

Texting 1-on-1 With Leads, Customers, and Clients

Lots of SimpleTexting customers use texting to follow up with leads they got from other marketing channels, like their website and social media ads.

SMS is by far the quickest way to engage your leads, given that the average response time for a text message is 6,000% (60X) faster than email.

To make contacting you even easier, add a click-to-text button to your website to encourage leads to send you a text. This functionality is more important than ever as mobile devices continue to take a bigger slice of the real estate web traffic pie, with 89% of new home buyers using their mobile devices to search as they look for a home.

RE/MAX Okanagan lets its website visitors book private appointments by text and even check in for appointments upon arrival using SMS.

A number of our customers also connect their Facebook Lead Ads or web forms to SimpleTexting so they can instantly send an automated text message to new leads. 

Short response times leave a positive impression on clients, making them more likely to use your services and recommend you to others.

Finally, you can use text messages to:

• Send appointment reminders before a showing
• Reach out to cold leads

Everyone faces writer’s block from time to time, especially when they’re trying out a new communication channel. So, to help you avoid that, here are six real estate text examples you can take and use for yourself.

• John, thank you so much for choosing me as your realtor! I hope you’re delighted and would love your feedback. Would you leave me a review here? https://txt.so/SGAFTE

• Thanks for attending today’s open house at 193 Mockingbird Ln. Please feel free to reply to this text with any questions!

• Hi Jenny! I just wanted to let you know that the home inspector found no issues and your offer on the home at 54 Magnolia St has been accepted. Congratulations!

• Hello Amy! I wanted to reach out and let you know that the house you loved on Principal Ln has dropped from $850,000 to $750,000. Would you like to make an offer? 

• Nice to meet you, Ethan! Can you tell me more about the neighborhoods you’re interested in?

• Hi Mia, unfortunately, the home on Jericho Pl is now off the market. I found a few other listings that I thought you might like: https://txt.so/SGAFTE

As you send texts to your leads, don’t forget to:

• Keep it short: Keeping a message as brief as possible allows the contact to scan it and respond before you lose their attention.
• Aim for clarity: Text messages should be both short and easy to understand.
• Make it personal: Use the contact’s name, location, or other details they’ve given you so they feel valued—and like they’re talking to a real person.

You’ve probably guessed this, but we’ll say it anyway: We’re an SMS marketing real estate service. 

We’ve worked with thousands of real estate professionals to help them text their leads, clients, and customers, but we’re not going to do any hard selling here. We encourage you to do your research, read plenty of reviews on third-party sites, and sign up for a free trial if you like what you hear.

If you’re just getting started with SMS for real estate marketing, here are some of the boxes you’ll want to tick when choosing a service:

• Some text messaging platforms allow you to either text one-on-one with customers or send bulk texts. You want a platform (like SimpleTexting’s real estate text messaging software) that will enable you to do both.
• If you need to integrate with other pieces of software, like your CRM, or send real estate autoresponder messages, find a service that offers those features.
• Real estate professionals should be careful of services that limit the number of keywords and contact lists they can create (we don’t).
• If you plan on using a real estate texting service for two-way messaging with customers, you’ll want an SMS inbox that can manage multiple conversations and help you organize them.

The final point for you to consider is the cost of SMS for real estate marketing. The per-message price is a huge factor. It’s also worth understanding whether your credits will roll over from one month to the next.

That’s everything you need to know about real estate text message marketing. The next step is to sign up for a 14-day free trial and try it for yourself.
If you have more questions, you can also request a demo. Alternatively, you can text or call us at (866) 450-4185 or use the chat icon at the bottom of your screen.