How and Why Clients Buy

I talked about understanding your clients’ buying process in a previous article. I thought I’d go into more detail in the next few posts.

Many real estate agents make the mistake of believing that all it takes is one marketing piece delivered with the right message at the right time to produce a client. So they focus on advertising or mailing postcards or sending newsletters. With each piece they send, they take a “hope and pray” strategy - they “hope” that this time they’ll get lucky and “pray” that prospects will flood them with calls.

In today’s marketplace, this is rarely effective. Yes, you may generate a client here or there, but your results will always be sporadic. Why? Because for marketing to work, every interaction you have with a prospect - each ad, marketing piece, or direct contact - must be part of a cohesive strategy that helps them take the next step in their buying process.

A Look At The Client Buying Process
There are very few people that decide on the spur of the moment that today is the perfect time to buy a home. How many people have you worked with that have been able to decide to buy a home, choose a real estate agent, find the perfect home, and pay for the home in cash on any particular day?

It rarely happens that way, right? That is because buying a home is one of the most complex and stressful decisions a person will make. Virtually no one has the cash on hand to pay for the home, so they must explore financing options. For many people, that means they will go six figures in debt as soon as they sign on the dotted line and they will spend many years of their life paying it back. They often have other life events occurring at the same time - like relocating for a job or a life transition such as getting married, divorced or retired.

Every home buyer follows a process, during which they:

1. Become aware that buying a home is a real possibility for them
2. Gather information about how they might make that happen, including visiting websites, looking at home listings, reading books, talking to friends and family members who have recently purchased a home, etc
3. Evaluate the different options they have for buying a home, such as talking with a real estate agent, looking into the cost of movers, applying for a mortgage, and the like
4. Take the action they’ve been thinking about which includes hiring an agent, getting their financials together, doing what it takes to move the transaction along, and buying the home
5. Re-evaluate their purchasing decision such as whether they’ve made the right decision to move, how helpful the professionals they hired were, and how the home lives up to their expectations.

Most real estate agents only want to talk with people who are ready to take action now - that is, in the fourth step. At this stage, though, your prospect already has had time to research the home buying or selling process and has formed all sorts of options and preconceptions about what the process should be like. They’ve already been educated by the media, other real estate agents, their neighbors and just about everyone else they know who has an opinion about real estate. You must now correct all their misconceptions and overcome their objections based on what they think they already know.

A better approach to marketing starts when your prospect is initially gathering information about buying or selling. If you can get in front of them and start educating them at that point, you’ll have a much easier time converting your prospect into a client.

In my next post, I’ll talk more about the marketing funnel and the first stages of the client buying cycle.