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A strategy for nurturing current referral partner relationships and finding new ones is crucial.
How to Strategize, Attack, and Nurture Your Referral Relationships
How to Strategize, Attack, and Nurture Your Referral Relationships
Let’s think about the home-buying process. It begins with the eyes. People look around the internet at places they could potentially call home. Once they find a property that catches their eye, they reach out to their real estate agent for a tour.
They may fall in love with the property, imagining Christmas dinners and friendly gatherings. Real estate agents play a crucial role for potential buyers during this critical time in their home search, sharing insights about the neighborhood and current market dynamics. Agents are on the frontlines when people contemplate what is often the biggest financial decision of their lives.
Having a strategy for nurturing your current referral partner relationships and finding new ones is crucial, especially in challenging markets. In today's article, we will break down how to find new relationships so you don’t waste time on agents who do little business. And once you find those relationships, we will show you how to add value so you can nurture and strengthen them for years to come.
Written by Megan Anderson
About the Author >>>
Strategy
First comes strategy. Since MBS Highway acquired ListReports a few months ago, I’ve learned some exciting new tools and features to help you find the right referral partners to connect with.
Life is all about maximizing time, and ListReports’ Agent Intel feature lets you do just that. You can plug in the zip codes where you do business, and the platform pulls up agents in the area who would be a good fit based on your production levels. You can also search for any agent you might be interested in working with.
From there, you can see various stats like the agent’s contact information, total sales in the last 12 months on both the buy-side and list-side, and to whom the agent is currently sending their deals. This makes it easy to strategize whom to reach out to for a chat.
Attack
Once you’ve reached out and scheduled some meetings with agents, do you have a plan of attack to close the relationship? Do you know what sets you apart?
The easiest way to answer this is to ask yourself, “How can I help bring them value?”
At the end of the day, everyone wants a referral partner who can help close the deal.
Maybe you’ve been using Agent Intel and you see real estate agent John Doe sends a lot of business to one of your competitors. The majority of these deals all seem to be VA loans, and your company has an amazing VA loan program. This could be enough value to seal the deal and become referral partners.
Another way to build value is to ask agents what challenges they see in today's market. Maybe they have a lot of clients waiting for rates to come down before purchasing or are afraid home values will decline with all the talk of a recession. This is where you can use the tools in MBS Highway to help.
For example, if your potential referral partner says they have a lot of clients afraid of purchasing due to recession fears, you could start building value by showing them this graph (included in our email marketing campaign) to keep prequals engaged in the home-buying process.
The dark blue bars represent past recessions, while the white line is home appreciation, according to Case Shiller. This chart does a great job of illustrating that historically, home prices have remained strong during past recessions. The only time this wasn't the case was during the housing bubble back in 2006 to 2008. People often get this wrong, but the housing bubble led us into the recession and not vice versa.
Back then, there was a glut of supply in the real estate market and much lower buyer demand. Today we are not in the same situation, as we have an undersupply of homes on the market, which will support home prices.
Sharing crucial market analysis from MBS Highway can help you stand out among your referral partners so you build those relationships and your business.
Nurture
Once you’ve secured a referral partner relationship, ListReports makes nurturing this relationship extremely easy by alerting you of the agent’s new listings and social media updates. With done-for-you email templates and social content, nurturing your leads has never been easier.
The tools available on MBS Highway can help you nurture relationships by continually addressing the challenges or friction your referral partners are experiencing. Some examples include:
- Discouraged Buyers: Our Cost of Waiting analysis illustrates how much potential homebuyers could lose by delaying their purchase.
- Tight Inventory: Our Bid Over Asking Price tool can show clients if it’s a good idea to come in over asking price and when they will recover the additional bid.
- Media Fears: Our daily market update video will build your market knowledge so you can help your partners combat the negative media.
