Sign InPersonal Branding for Real Estate Agents: Tips & Examples Of Successful Campaigns
Differentiation is the name of the game when working in real estate. It’s easy for your offerings to get lost in the noise. The U.S. alone boasts more than 1.54 million realtors and an estimated two million real estate agents as of 2024.
So, how can real estate professionals stand out from the crowd when trying to draw in new clients? One major advantage is personal branding for real estate agents. When realtors and agents build a brand around their work persona, they can boost their name recognition and connect with more people in their community. This is a primary differentiator from other sellers in their real estate market and ensures more of the right kind of clients come your way.
But personal branding is an umbrella term for a combination of granular brand strategy tactics to market yourself. How can you get started? To create an effective personal brand as a real estate agent, you’ll need to understand its benefits, its main components, and what a successful personal brand looks like.
Why invest in personal branding as a realtor
With so many realtors and agents in any given market, you’ll need to brand yourself successfully to rise above all the noise and attract the right clients.
That’s just one advantage of personal branding for real estate agents. This marketing strategy provides realtors and agents with a bevy of other benefits, including:
Attract qualified buyers
Buying real estate is out of reach for many aspiring homeowners due to high mortgage rates (partially driven by inflation), high home prices, and record-low housing inventory. The pool of buyers has shrunk as a result, so real estate pros need a competitive edge to bring the right buyers to their listings.
As such, realtors and agents need to attract a broader swath of potential clients. And that’s where personal branding can help. When vetting real estate pros, buyers and sellers are more likely to choose someone who has a great reputation and is seasoned in their specific needs and niche. Communicating your expertise and experience with personal branding means you can position yourself as a pro who can meet a client’s unique requirements.
Win more listings
The industry has shifted—housing inventory remains at historic lows. That means fewer listings to go around in an ever-growing pool of realtors and real estate agents. So, you’ll need to stand out from other real estate agents in your area.
Personal branding for real estate agents can help you achieve that. Buyers and sellers want someone with name recognition, a proven track record, and a deep Rolodex—and the right branding can communicate your relevant experience and give you that competitive edge you need to get more listings.
More efficient time and budget allocation
Thanks to inflation, the cost of almost everything has increased—and that includes marketing expenses. Real estate agents and realtors have finite time and marketing dollars, so their efforts need to be targeted. That’s why investing in personal branding is an effective choice.
Personal branding allows real estate pros to target specific audiences that match their expertise with clear, tailored messaging. They can market on the platforms and places where their specific clientele hang out. This targeted approach makes it easier for realtors and agents to save time, and stay on budget while attracting the right kind of high-quality leads.
Elements of a strong real estate personal brand campaign
A successful real estate personal branding campaign will look a little different for everyone. However, strong campaigns will include some common elements, including:
An authentic persona
Discerning audiences can sniff out when a real estate pro is being disingenuous—and hiding behind a facade is a serious turnoff. That applies whether they’re meeting you in person or reviewing your brand identity online. So, show off your personality and experience when building your brand.
Authenticity is a sturdy bridge of credibility to your audience. When you allow your personality, values, and expertise to shine in your personal branding, it’s far easier for prospective clients to cross that bridge because your authenticity will build trust. Millennials and Gen Zers, in particular, demand authenticity and prefer to buy from brands with whom they have shared values.
For example, Alex Young of the Bow Tie Group out of Wisconsin shows off his personality in his email signature. This playfulness communicates that he’s approachable and might even be fun to work with.
Quality real estate marketing materials
Your marketing materials will be the workhorse of your personal branding—so, it’s important to get it right.
Your usual suspects when it comes to marketing materials include:
Business cards
A website/landing page
Pamphlets/flyers/brochures
Branded social channel profiles
Yard signs
Direct mail postcards
Newsletters
Real estate listings
These are the typical tools in every agent’s arsenal, so you’ll need to customize yours to make your materials special. That’s where Matterport can help.
When you partner with Matterport, you can create a wealth of high-quality visuals for your marketing assets from a single digital twin. From one three-dimensional scan of a property, you can extract an intuitive virtual tour, high-resolution 4K images, 360-degree panoramas, schematic floor plans, and even add Tags to leave notes to point out specific features of interest.
With all these features at your disposal, you can bring properties to life in your marketing materials in a way that photos alone simply can’t. The proof is in the results: Matterport digital twins have been shown to increase sales by 14%, shorten time-on-market, and increase the amount of time people spend on your site threefold.
Genuine tips for home sellers or buyers
Being genuinely helpful is a great foundation for real estate agent personal branding. When you provide advice and tips to buyers and sellers, you establish yourself as an expert in your niche and increase your visibility in your community as a trusted resource.
You can share your pro tips in a variety of ways, including:
Write blog posts answering frequently asked questions
Respond to questions posted on social media channels
Create video tutorials
Appear as a guest on real estate industry podcasts (or start a podcast of your own)
An example is realtor Kathy Fettke, who shares her expertise on investing in real estate via her podcast “Real Estate News for Investors,” along with sharing her knowledge in webinars, books, articles, and more.
How to brand yourself as a real estate agent
For a real estate agent to build their personal brand, it is essential to find the best ways to establish credibility, attract more clients, and come up with a marketing strategy that will help them stand out in a competitive market. Here are 6 best practices that help build a strong personal brand and a successful real estate career:
1. Identify your unique strengths
The first step to build your real estate agent personal branding is to start with a little self-reflection. Sit down and assess your unique skills and experience. Where do you shine most as a real estate pro?
When you create a list of the strengths that set you apart from other realtors and agents, highlight the top ones in your personal branding. Some of these distinct qualities might include experience in a specific niche, knowing a particular neighborhood well, your negotiation skills, or an aspect of your personality. For example, the real estate pros Epitome of Real Estate in Columbia, SC, specializes in the rent-to-own niche, which they prominently highlight on their homepage.
2. Understand your target audience
Your next step is to figure out your ideal clientele. What kind of buyer/seller do you want to attract, and what’s most important to them?
This will require some digging and research on your part. Study your market. What are some common qualities of buyers and sellers in your area? If you plan to target a niche (like first-time homebuyers or rent-to-own homes, mentioned above), how can you cater to the unique needs of that corner of the market?
To nail down your target audience, you can:
Identify the demographics of your ideal buyer/seller
Examine your current client base to outline their needs, preferred services, and pain points
Conduct market research
Build a buyer persona and then test it
Once you have a solid rundown of your target audience, it’ll be easier to tailor your personal branding accordingly.
3. Craft a brand statement
Now that you understand your ideal clientele, you have a strong idea of what’s important to them. You can tailor your messaging to resonate with your target audience.
Start with a brand statement. This concise, compelling description quickly summarizes who you are and what value you offer as a real estate agent. This is when you’ll incorporate those unique strengths you previously identified.
For example, Ben Kinney Companies offers a series of brief points about the value the real estate team offers that sets it apart.
4. Use the right real estate marketing tools
Once you have this skeleton of your personal branding, it’s crucial to adopt the right real estate marketing tools to communicate and distribute your new brand.
In addition to your real estate agent website, you can adopt social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to showcase your experience and connect with clients. You can also choose a property marketing tool that incorporates your branding and helps you stand out from other real estate pros.
Not only does Matterport make it easy to share digital twins/virtual tours with clients, but you can leave comments on property features with Tags, and easily embed videos/tours on your site.
And now with Matterport’s new personal branding plugins, you can bring your branding right into your digital twins to improve the client experience.
With the Business Card and Quick Link plugin, you can add branding, contact information, and custom links to each 3D tour to connect with visitors. While Matterport already helps you track traffic and engagement metrics for your virtual tour, Business Card and Quick Link give you a new way to generate leads.
With the Compass and Minimap plugins, clients can navigate any space with ease and precision. These two plugins add an experiential layer to marketing materials, to the point where they clients have the opportunity to understand cardinal direction and the position of the sun relative to each room — a value add that goes beyond a typical virtual tour or pictures.
Learn more in our 2024 Winter Release
5. Make your listings accessible
Listings are how you show off and share the properties in your portfolio. So, potential buyers need to easily access those listings and glean all the info they can from them.
That’s why you’ll need the right tools to enhance and share your listings. For example, Matterport's 3D virtual tours and interactive floor plans allow buyers to explore properties remotely and get a comprehensive understanding of the space. This form of an intuitive 3D scan of a property is a powerful feature that allows clients to tour every inch of a home.
Clients love getting granular this way when viewing a property online. Almost all (95%) buyers are more likely to call when a listing has a virtual tour. So, give them the option of a robust virtual walkthrough with a digital twin.
It’s also easy to share these high-tech listings with clients on just about any platform—you can embed videos on your site, share a link to a specific property on social media or via email, and publish your listing to portals like Zillow in a single click.
By providing this level of accessibility, you can attract more interested buyers and increase the chances of closing a sale. Better listings drum up more business for real estate pros—after all, 74% of agents using Matterport win more listings.
6. Network within the community
Connecting with other industry pros, businesses, and residents in your community is a powerful way to solidify your personal brand and spread the word about your services. The old adage that “real estate is a relationship business,” while cliché, proves true when you witness how effective networking can be.
Being active in your community can lead to better name recognition and referrals. Some ways to network in your community include:
Attend industry conferences and meetups
Join real estate business associations
Attend local business events (think Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club)
Go to community events
Appear on local media
Engage with community members on social media
For example, you can share interactive versions of your properties’ digital twins with local house hunters on Instagram and Facebook. You can speed up sales and get in front of new clients with this kind of high-tech online networking (with a little help from Matterport, of course).
One team doing this well is Beth and Ryan Waller, a real estate agents out of Guelph, Canada. This duo regularly appears at community events and on local media, including a weekly radio show to discuss real estate in the area.
Still trying to figure out how to get started with personal branding as a real estate agent? We’ve gathered some common queries and their answers to help you kickstart your journey.