サインインHow to Find Buyers in Real Estate: Best Strategies to Locate & Influence Home Buyers
One activity that takes up much time for buying and listing agents is creating a steady pipeline of new clients. And while the National Association of Realtors (NAR) research showed that 89% of homebuyers went through an agent or brokerage, there are some three million real estate licensees in the U.S. alone. That’s a lot of competition on the hunt for potential buyers.
When it comes to finding buyers in real estate, differentiation is the key. Basic real estate marketing tactics are no longer enough to draw in a steady stream of interested homebuyers. Instead, modern real estate marketing strategies will increasingly lean on digital tools—particularly since 52% of homeowners found their new house online.
One such tool that can connect you with more buyers is a digital twin. These virtual, three-dimensional replicas of properties are transforming real estate. They’re an ideal way to ensure your listings stand out while providing much-needed context for prospective homebuyers.
Before delving too deep into the ins and outs of digital twins in real estate, let’s examine the typical obstacles agents face when trying to find more buyer clients, plus some strategies to sidestep them.
5 challenges agents face when trying to find buyers for real estate
Every market is unique—so you’ll run into equally unique challenges when working with buyers in a specific area. However, agents often encounter a handful of common obstacles when finding potential buyers for their real estate business.
1. Understanding buyer preferences
One of the biggest hurdles real estate agents need to clear is to find the right buyers—not just any buyer. But unpacking the unique needs of buyers in your local market isn’t an easy task.
So, agents and realtors need to suss out what kind of buyer leads they want to attract, including the factors most important to them. That means doing some homework on your market and the characteristics of buyers and sellers in your area.
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 test it
2. Proactively standing out from the competition
As of 2024, there were more than 1.54 million realtors and an estimated two million real estate agents in the U.S. With all those real estate professionals competing for buyers, it’s crucial to rise above the noise and establish trust with the clients that you work with. And that’s where a few points of differentiation can help.
Realtors can proactively foster a relationship with clients as the average buyer will become a seller in 5-7 years. Great agents can prepare current buyers for what they need to do when they are eventually ready to sell their property. The relationship isn't just about your listing at that moment, but building trust to the point where you are the primary agent for your clients, and also encouraging word of mouth. The quality and professionalism behind your property listing is one way to make a good (and lasting) impression on all of your clients. When you offer potential buyers multiple ways to preview a home online—think digital twins, 3D walkthroughs, and dollhouse views of a property—buyers are more likely to choose you to help find their dream home over other agents in the area.
3. Overcoming communication barriers
It’s easy for communications to break down during a real estate transaction. Buying a home can be a lengthy, complex process that often requires a lot of back-and-forth between agents, their clients, and the sellers.
As a result, the buying process is rife with potential communication barriers, including:
Breakdown during the negotiation process
Misunderstanding the offer submission process
Clients changing their minds during a lengthy seller review or counteroffer
Although agents are often pulled in many directions, successful agents prioritize buyer communications. Only 11% of people completely trust real estate agents—but communication can go a long way to create a strong, long-term working relationship (we’ll dig into that below).
4. Providing user-friendly viewing experiences
Finding and implementing technology and tools that make it simple for buyers to view your properties online is difficult. Listings are how you show off and share the properties in your portfolio. So, real estate buyer leads need to easily access those listings and glean all the info they can from them.
While many listings feature plenty of high-resolution photos and maybe a basic virtual walkthrough, these are table stakes now—which means agents and realtors have to take their listings up a notch to get noticed.
As more buyers shop online before viewing a home in person, it’s increasingly important to offer more ways to explore a property. Buyers are 40% more likely to do a walkthrough of homes they saw online. And the right platform will provide features to help you create more user-friendly ways for buyers to get to know a property and picture themselves living there.
For example, 42% of buyer agents said it was much more or more important for their clients to have virtual tours available for listings. And if a listing includes a floor plan, another 8 out of 10 buyers are more likely to schedule a viewing.
A platform like Matterport provides multiple ways to elevate your listings, including:
All these features work together to bring in more prospects and turn more of those browsers into homebuyers.
5. Finding buyers who are ready to commit
This obstacle goes back to the idea of finding the right buyers. Not everyone is in a position to get their dream home—some people are just kicking the tires.
For some, high mortgage rates (partially driven by inflation), high home prices, and record-low housing inventory have put homeownership out of reach. So, the pool of serious buyers has shrunk. As a result, agents and realtors need a competitive edge to bring the right buyers to their portfolio of properties.
How to connect with the right real estate buyers
Now that you know who your ideal buyers are, let’s dig into some strategies that’ll help you better connect with these prospective clients and differentiate you from other agents.
Targeted marketing campaigns
To overcome the aforementioned challenge of finding the right buyers, narrow your property marketing efforts. Not every ideal buyer will respond to every marketing tactic—so, ensure your campaigns resonate with the right audience.
First, define your audience and their needs. Hone in on specific client demographics you intend to serve and research what those buyers want in terms of neighborhoods, square footage, and must-have amenities. For example: If your team doesn’t cater well to first-time homebuyers, then there’s no point in including them in your outreach.
Find out how your target audience prefers to be contacted. That could be social media (which is more effective than MLS for lead generation), email, direct mail, and so on. Learn which communication channels they frequent most and where you get the most traction. Then invest in those specific channels.
To further target your campaigns, determine which real estate marketing tools best serve you and your potential clients. The right tech and tools will streamline your marketing campaigns and broaden your real estate sphere of influence. Think high-tech tools to help real estate agents tackle digital marketing even without technical skills: a website builder, search engine optimization (SEO) tools, a customer relationship manager (CRM), and an email automation platform, to name a few.
Also, consider tools that help clients visualize the properties in your portfolio—like digital twins, 3D virtual tours, and video walkthroughs. You can share these detailed visualizations in emails, on your site, and on social media platforms to help your listings reach more potential buyers.
With a single platform like Matterport, you can create a variety of high-quality visuals for your marketing assets from a single digital twin. One three-dimensional scan of a property can generate an intuitive virtual tour, high-resolution 4K images, 360-degree panoramas, schematic floor plans, and you can even add MatterTags to leave notes about specific features of interest on a property.
You’ll also need tried-and-true tools as part of your marketing arsenal. For example, your real estate marketing materials will be a workhorse for your campaigns—so, it’s crucial to get them right.
You’ll add your personal branding to all your promotional assets and use them to promote yourself and your properties. Your list of marketing materials should include:
Business cards
A real estate website/landing page
Pamphlets/flyers/brochures for open houses
Branded social channel profiles
Yard signs
Direct mail postcards
Newsletters
Cohesive marketing materials with your personal branding can work together as a strong foundation for your campaigns. For example, you can promote new properties from your website in a weekly email newsletter.
Now that you have a few marketing campaign ideas, sum them all up in a real estate marketing plan. This document will detail your real estate lead generation strategies, goals, how you’ll measure success, and which efforts were effective strategies. It’ll serve as a North Star that guides all your marketing efforts.
Good communication with potential buyers
Clear communication with current and prospective clients is crucial. Regular conversations and quick follow-ups can educate buyers on the home-buying process, ease any fears, manage expectations, and establish trust. Your marketing assets should also clearly communicate the types of buyers you cater to.
As with your targeted campaigns, meet your clients where they prefer to communicate. Some may like email or texting, while others send inquiries via social media (which 57% of realtors said is helpful for maintaining client relationships). Chat where and how they feel comfortable.
Next, be reliable in your communications. Respond promptly to queries, meet any deadlines, explain all stages of the buying process clearly, and be transparent about all properties. While this may sound obvious, consistently upholding the client-agent relationship with this kind of clear communication goes a long way to ensure buyers you have their best interests in mind.
Being clear in your marketing materials can go a long way to attract the right buyers as well. All your promotional assets should communicate your specialty or niche. If you mostly work with first-time homebuyers, highlight that in your materials. If you cater to renters, ensure they can see those details immediately on your website, newsletters, flyers, and so on. Communicating your specialty can bring in more qualified leads who are well-matched to your skills and experience.
Effective marketing visuals and interactive listings
Potential buyers want engaging and detailed real estate listings so they can easily picture themselves in a space. So, give them what they want with tools to enhance your listings.
Leverage digital twins to create 3D virtual tours and interactive floor plans for every home in your portfolio. These engaging visualizations allow buyers to explore every inch of a home. Clients love getting granular when viewing a property online—so, it’s no surprise almost all (95%) buyers are more likely to call when a listing has a virtual tour. So, give them the option of a comprehensive virtual walkthrough with a digital twin.
You can also easily share these interactive listings with clients pretty much anywhere online—embed videos on your site, share a property link in an email or on social media, 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.
How digital twins help you connect with more real estate buyers
As mentioned above, digital twins are indispensable tools to upgrade your listings and help you draw in more potential buyers. Digital twins provide buyers with additional context for properties that other real estate technology (like high-resolution photos and basic virtual tours) just can’t.
Fortunately, you only need to scan a property once for a Matterport digital twin to access a variety of tools and AI-powered features that make it easier to close more sales.
Accurate room measurements
Matterport Property Intelligence automatically calculates room dimensions across an entire property (including ceiling height) and labels the common rooms accordingly.
Accurate room dimensions and labels right on the property listing make it easier for potential buyers to determine whether a space meets their needs. That means fewer measurement queries for you and more qualified buyers who reach out.
Easy-to-edit property layouts
With Property Intelligence, clients can also instantly view any property’s layout. That way, potential buyers get a sense of the flow of the space and can virtually move through the home room by room. What’s better, it’s easy for agents who have their own Matterport account to edit these layouts. Getting started with a Matterport account is free and stays free for up to two users if you’re only working with one space at a time (some features are only available on paid plans). So, if a client wants to reimagine a space, all you need to do is point and click. Knock down walls or combine rooms—whatever your client can dream up. Property Intelligence will also automatically recalculate the room dimensions based on your layout changes.
Easily import data into partner systems
Matterport also makes it simple to share all that detailed property data. For example, agents who are in network with Matterport partners can export dimensional data from their scans like room name, room length, and height directly into their Multiple Listing Service (MLS), saving time and effort on tedious data entry.
The at-a-glance property overview also cuts down on back-and-forth between buying and selling agents while eliminating the need for potential buyers to make multiple visits to assess a property.
Intuitively navigate large spaces
With Matterport’s new Compass and Minimap plugins, potential buyers can also navigate large spaces—like large properties or commercial real estate—with ease and precision.
It’s easy to get a little lost when virtually exploring a large property like a warehouse or commercial space. But Minimap helps you stay oriented by contextualizing your position. Agents can also customize the minimap with different shapes and sizes, or place it in the corner of your screen for easy reference.
With Compass, clients can quickly understand which direction is north relative to their viewpoint within a space. For properties that need renovations or are under construction, viewers can get a sense of how daylight and wind might impact the construction of a space.
Add your branding to your digital twins
With Matterport’s additional plugins, you can bring your branding right into your digital twins to improve the client experience.
With the Business Card and Quick Link plugins, you can add your unique branding, phone number/email, and custom links to each 3D tour to connect with visitors.
Add an expandable business card to every listing so potential buyers know exactly how to get in touch. And Quick Links makes it simple to include an image and link in the corner of your listing to drive prospects to specific content. For example, you could include a link to your agent’s site with an image of your logo. Have some lingering questions about how to find home buyers? Review the common queries compiled below.
