Real estate is an extremely competitive industry. Buyers and sellers don’t want to trust a transaction as important as a home purchase or sale to just anyone. They want to work with a real estate agent they trust and connect with. This personal connection is critical. With so many real estate agents vying for the same clients, simply having experience may not be enough to convince a buyer or seller to work with you. When you’re able to establish a personal connection, it will help set you apart from the other agents who are equally qualified to help a particular client achieve their goals.
Building your own personal brand is one of the most important steps you can take to stand out and establish that personal connection with current and potential future clients. The following overview will help you understand the importance of building your personal brand as a real estate agent and provide important tips to help you establish a brand that will attract clients in your specific niche.
Your personal branding is the way you can carve a unique professional identity for yourself in the real estate industry. Your personal brand will impact the way others – both colleagues and clients – perceive you as a real estate agent. A strong personal brand will help you build a reputation that establishes you as someone who can be counted on to deliver for their clients in whatever ways they may need – whether it’s compassionate guidance through the real estate transaction process, a tough negotiator, a skilled closer, a wealth of resources for third-party professionals to perform work on a house, knowledge of local neighborhoods, or expertise in a specific niche.
As a real estate agent, you don’t have a product to sell to potential clients. Instead, you’re essentially selling yourself and your ability to deliver the services they need in a way that aligns with their goals, values and personality. Your personal brand plays an important role in your ability to sell yourself as the right agent to clients, and it encompasses just about every aspect of your professional identity, including your:
Most brokerages have established a set of brand standards and in many instances, they may require you to use their branding materials. This may include their logo, colors, tag lines or other branding assets. It also typically includes high-level, generic messaging regarding how they want to be perceived within the community.
However, it’s important to understand that this brokerage branding is different from your personal branding. Your brokerage branding helps you inform potential clients of your affiliation with them, but this affiliation alone isn’t sufficient to help you build a client base and grow your business. Most individuals in need of a real estate agent are more concerned with the personal qualities of their agent than the brokerage they’re affiliated with. If you want to attract clients and establish yourself as a trusted real estate professional in your market, you’ll need a strong personal brand that effectively conveys who you are and the value you bring to your clients, independent of the messaging and reputation of your brokerage.
Most real estate agents don’t stick with the same brokerage for their entire career. At some point, you may decide to change brokerages to secure a more favorable commission split, work in a brokerage with a culture that more closely aligns with your personal values, or for a variety of other potential reasons. When you leave your brokerage, your clients most likely won’t remain loyal to your original brokerage since they don’t have a pre-existing relationship with the other agents there.
If you’ve done a good job building a personal brand that resonates with your clients, there’s a good chance they’ll still reach out to you the next time they need help with a real estate transaction. After all, you’re the person they have a relationship with and if they have a positive perception of their relationship with you, they’re more likely to want to work with you again than to have to build a relationship from scratch with a new agent they don’t know.
When you build a strong personal brand, it can have a tremendous impact on your success as a real estate agent. Some of the benefits you’ll experience from a strong personal brand include:
The first step to building an effective personal brand is to identify your brand values. Your values provide the backbone of your reputation and drive the way others perceive you. If you’re unable to establish a core set of values that define your brand, it will be difficult for potential clients to determine whether they identify with you both personally and professionally.
Your brand values consist of the beliefs that define you. They should be authentic to who you are in your personal life as well as who you are when you’re acting in a professional capacity as a real estate agent. When determining the values that are most important to highlight, think about the important qualities you would value in a real estate agent you want to work with.
This process may require considerable self-reflection to narrow down the most important attributes you want to highlight. Ideally, you should focus on no more than three to five core values. These should be the most important attributes you want to convey to others, and they should be core beliefs you live in your daily life.
Your unique value proposition is one of the most critical elements of your personal branding. It highlights the attributes that differentiate you from the other real estate agents in your area and helps your target audience understand the specific benefits they’ll experience when they work with you. To determine your unique value proposition, you need to understand your target audience, including their pain points, specific needs, and the messaging that resonates with them. Then you need to identify the unique ways you’re able to address your audience’s needs that make you different from your competitors.
Next, create a concise and memorable statement that conveys this unique value you provide. It should:
Your unique value proposition will serve as the foundation for all your brand messaging and help drive all your marketing efforts moving forward.
Your brand identity should contain the following elements:
Your brand identity will form the backbone of all your marketing campaigns. This will ensure you’re consistently conveying your message across all digital platforms so that no matter where people engage with your brand, they have a similar experience.
Your content will play an important role in establishing you as a trusted real estate expert in your particular niche. You’ll need to create compelling content that your audience will find educational and useful. The more value you can provide in your content, the more effectively your content will help you grow your brand.
You’ll want to create a variety of content assets that can be used throughout the digital platforms that are part of your marketing strategy. This should include:
Some of the ways you can network with people in your community to build the personal relationships necessary to grow your brand include:
Remember, just about anyone can become a potential client. This includes people you know personally as well as people you meet at industry networking events. Therefore, you should always convey your personal brand in every interaction you have with people, even if you’re on the golf course, coaching your child’s soccer team or hanging out at a friend’s barbecue.
If you’re interested in pursuing a career in real estate, Colorado Real Estate School can help. Our online real estate courses contain all the essential information you need to get your real estate license and build a successful business.
All our online real estate courses are developed and taught by local, licensed real estate professionals. This ensures you’re learning from the leading voices in your local market and will gain important insights into the latest trends impacting real estate in your area. With our online format, you’ll be able to move through the course material at your own pace so that you can devote as much time as needed to mastering the concepts you find most challenging. You can also access our course materials any time, day or night, from anywhere with an internet connection. This allows you to complete your coursework at whatever time works best for your busy schedule.
You’ll also have access to our VideoConnect Success Learning System™ containing the largest library of instructor-led video content available. Our video lessons provide an engaging format that mimics the feel of a classroom environment from the comfort of your own home.
At Colorado Real Estate School, we’re committed to your success, and we back this up with our TruSupport Pass Guarantee™. If you don’t pass your real estate exam on the first try, you’ll receive extended access to all course materials while you study to retake the exam. You’ll also work one-on-one with a Colorado Real Estate School instructor who will analyze your test results to determine the concepts you found must challenging. This allows us to create a personal study plan tailored to your specific needs, setting you up for success when you retake the exam.
Contact us today to learn more about our online real estate courses.
