According to experienced real estate practitioners, a good rule of thumb is to set a marketing budget to about 10% of one's commission. To spend it efficiently, it is important to understand the buyer you engage with, and you can do that by categorizing which stage they are in the sales funnel. At the very basic, you can classify them according to these three stages, Leads, Pre-qualified Leads or Prospect, and Buyers. To put it simply:

1. A Lead is at the top of the funnel and a person who typically expresses some level of interest in your property but has not been qualified. An example is a person who made the first touchpoint in any of your ads and has asked the basic questions.

2. A Pre-qualified lead or Prospect is a lead whose requirements match your property attributes by going through a process and has a higher likelihood of buying.

3. A Buyer is a person who makes a purchase.

The bottom line is that you want every lead that you will encounter to become a buyer. Your capacity and time you are willing to spend on managing these leads will give you an idea of where you can allocate most of your budget.

1. Generate leads. A good lead generation campaign is your key to this. You want to get a hold of every channel you think a buyer would visit when thinking of real estate. Every buyer has different buying behavior and preferences. Some go to social media, and some go-to real estate portals like OnePropertee. For example, you can create an ad on social media about the property you're selling. However, to designate a budget and to make sure you get the most out of your investment, you have to consider what kind of ad appeals visually to your audience, how to target your audience, what kind of copies are enticing, and lastly, doing different combinations of tests to optimize your ad. That sounds expensive and a lot of work! Yet, you can skip all these steps with the Lead Boost of OnePropertee, wherein it does the creative visual and covers different channels to reach the people who are ready to be nurtured and most likely to be qualified. Once you have generated leads, you can start nurturing them to eventually convert them to become a buyer. More about lead nurturing here.

2. Qualify leads. Once you have these leads, a good engagement campaign can help you learn their requirements or preferences. It is important because when you know what they need, you also know what to offer them. A good example is a personalized SMS or email campaign specifically for your acquired leads to verify what they need and pre-qualify them. You can skip these steps and try the Lead Matching of OnePropertee, where every lead that goes in our system undergoes an intricate process to learn and verify what they need. If a lead matches your property, they are highly interested in properties with the same attributes, thus likely to buy. You also want to prioritize the prequalified leads since they are closer to buying already.

Learn more about the above Lead Acquisition services here.