In late August, Roopler’s Kevin Markarian talked to Mike Hogan, President of The Hogan Group and #1 Real Estate Team in Richmond, VA. about strategies for generating and cultivating seller leads.
Kevin Markarian & Mike Hogan’s Top-10 Tips for Generating & Seller Leads
1. Pursue online seller leads from established providers such as Roopler.
2. Be a full-service solution provider—offer to help potential sellers prepare and stage their homes, putting them in touch with local contractors and home stagers as needed.
3. Contact absentee owners and explore whether they are interested in selling.
4. Find FSBOs (for sale by owner) listings and offer to represent these owners, explaining why working with an agent will likely yield them a much higher ROI.
5. Find expired listings and reach out to the owners to explore whether they are interested in putting their homes back on the market.
6. Rely on referrals; if you’re doing everything right, your former clients will always be your most reliable source of business.
7. If a seller has a property that needs major repairs, make an offer; if you can’t invest, partner with another investor.
8. Another option is to partner with a home repair company such as Revive, which contracts with homeowners to do renovations upfront on the condition that the cost will be recovered upon sale; in most cases, the sale price is substantially higher post-renovation, which generates a higher return for the owner and listing agent.
9. Invest in a team of ISAs to help set appointments.
10. Better yet, let AI cultivate incoming seller leads.
Terry Grayson | Agent, Team Leader|Grayson Group, Compass Realty
Transcript of Kevin’s interview with Mike Hogan:
Kevin Markarian: We are live with Mike Hogan! How’s it going, sir? What’s up buddy? Hey man. It’s another day in paradise, my friend.
You recently told me you’ve had a stellar last two months. In this market that says a lot, so I’m really excited about getting into the details. But before we get in, get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself?
Mike Hogan: I initially got licensed back in 2005. I operated as a single agent, through the recession in 2007, 8, 9, 10 but I came out stronger. I started my team around 2010 and discovered this thing called internet leads. At the time, you know, I was like the pariah. Everybody thought that I was damned to hell for using internet leads back in 2010. Well, it worked for me and pretty soon, I had more business than I could handle and started hiring agents. In 2014, I hired my first couple of agents, and fast forward to today. We’ve got, I don’t know, probably 125 agents or so on the team.
Over time, we’ve gone through a couple brokerages. We were with Keller Williams for a little while, and really enjoyed our time there, but we broke away three years ago and started our own brokerage. So we operate purely as a team today. It’s a brokerage, our own brokerage, but we operate purely as a team. We’ll do probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1300 to 1400 deals this year.
We did just over a thousand last year. And you know, like I mentioned to you before we jumped on here, the last couple months have been just absolutely stellar. We’re setting records. It has been a good market for us primarily because we have a lot of buyer leads. And where the market has started to slow a little bit. We’ve got a little bit more inventory popping up. A lot of those buyers that weren’t able to buy earlier this year are coming back around, and we’re able to recycle them and get them into houses. So it’s been, it’s been really solid for us.
Kevin Markarian: Well, that’s awesome. Congrats to you and and all of your success. You know, kind been watching you over over the years too, and seeing your name and everything. And, and I know you’ve been killing it for, for many, many years. And so that that’s, that’s amazing. You know, we talk a lot about buyer leads, but today, we’re gonna be talking more on the seller side and what you’re doing to convert sellers and, you know, some of those strategies and different sources that are being utilized.
Mike Hogan: Yeah, sure. So, you know, like everybody, back in the days before getting into internet leads, I was working then on expireds and FSBOs and out of town owners, absentee owners, that type of thing.
We still do that except we just automated. Today, we’ll buy an absentee owner list, FSBOs and expireds, and we’ll just put them into our database and let the system work the database for us. That way it’s not my agents working on those. We also big on Zillow leads, realtor.com leads, and Roopler.
Roopler is our newest sources and has been working out really well for us. And, you know, the cool thing is we get a lot of data on the leads when they come in. The leads are already to go—appointments are already set, so that helps a lot.
And of course, when you sell a thousand units a year, you have a ton of past clients that are always referring business. About 40% of our stuff is comes from past clients.
Listen to the full interview here.