Wholesale real estate businesses are everywhere, now more than ever due to the internet. With a market that continues to grow, you’re going to have to find a way to stand out from everyone else.
These marketing tactics can certainly help your wholesale real estate business stand out from the crowd — for the better.
1. Find a Niche Wholesale Real Estate Market — and Own It
One of the best ways to stand out in a market is to be one of the few businesses in it. If you’re able to find a niche wholesale real estate market, get into it before there’s competition. This market may be more difficult to segment depending on your location, but there are more niche options than you may think.
Most wholesale deals occur in low-income neighborhoods that are starting to become gentrified. That said, it’s worth breaking into other niche wholesale real estate markets. Consider focusing your efforts into one (or some) of the following niche wholesale real estate markets:
- Foreclosed homes
- Condemned houses
- Fix-and-flip houses
- Inherited properties
- Townhomes and gated communities
- Apartment complexes
- Pet-friendly housing options
- Vacation homes
- Beach-front property
- Single-family homes
- Multi-family homes
- Green or sustainable housing
- Rural land, farms, and ranches
- High-end, high-income homes
When possible, work in a niche you’re passionate about. Passion can make a lot of the work you’re doing feel a lot less like work, and passion can be what persuades someone to sell you their home.
Specializing in a niche is a practically guaranteed way for your wholesale real estate business to stand out from local competitors. OppGen’s real estate investor marketing program can help.
2. Build Your Brand
One of the biggest difficulties wholesalers face is a bad reputation, from real estate agents and brokers to home sellers.
Real estate agents undergo training for a certain amount of hours, which vary from state to state. They also must take a written exam. For brokers, the requirements are more rigorous: they must have a real estate agent license, undergo more training, and take a more in-depth test. Wholesalers, on the other hand, are able to circumvent these requirements by receiving a broker license under their state’s contract law.
Brokers and real estate agents may be more competitive with wholesalers in part to these lower barriers to enter the industry, but also because they compete directly with wholesalers. Wholesalers, brokers, and real estate agents all try to find properties before anyone else can and are not going to share information about any “off market” listings. However, if there’s a time when a broker or real estate agent is having trouble moving the property after listing it, they may reach out to you and see if you know anyone who’s looking to buy.
In such cases, you need to do everything you can to show others in the real estate industry that you know what you’re doing and that you’re worthy of their trust. You need to build a brand. A brand is so much more than your logo or colors. It’s how you conduct business, how you communicate, how you hold and present yourself, how you treat clients, and so on.
Not every brand is a good one. Some wholesalers tend to low ball their offers, which does not do them any favors in the eyes of home sellers. This can hurt the industry as a whole and give wholesalers a bad reputation.
By acting professionally, actively listening to home sellers’ concerns, and being honest and ethical when evaluating homes and making offers, you’re marketing yourself and your wholesale real estate business as being better than others.
If you’re able to change prospects’ perceptions of wholesalers, you’re standing out in the best way possible — and OppGen’s marketing program may be able to help with that.
3. Invest in a Website
It’s 2020, and every business needs to have a website in order to succeed. Websites can help people discover your business, learn more about your credentials, and how they can contact you for your services. It also proves to prospects that you are a real business and not a scammer.
You don’t need to know HTML or CSS; you can use website builders like Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress to build a professional website using customizable templates. Although these are great tools and resources, using one of these sites is not going to cut it when it comes to making a well-designed site. Not everyone has the eye for design, let alone what constitutes good web design.
Run a Google search for wholesale real estate companies, and you’ll see that web design is not an area many wholesalers excel in. Better yet, look at these three real-life examples below of sites in this industry:
Site 1
Site 2
Site 3
Of those three sites, which one would you be willing to sell your home to? Probably Site 1, right? Ask yourself why that is.
It’s probably because Site 1 looks clean, uses only a few colors that look nice together, has appealing images to catch your eye, and doesn’t use too many fonts. It’s easier to navigate than Site 2. Simply put, it looks clean and professional. It looks like a wholesale real estate business that knows what it’s doing. It feels like a company you can trust.
Site 2 looks like it was thrown together last minute in an attempt to make a quick buck from wholesaling. It doesn’t look like whoever made it cared much about what they did or how it was done. It fails to make prospects trust the wholesalers.
Site 3 is in the middle; it isn’t as poorly designed as Site 1, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a company you can trust. The images on the right-hand side look like spammy ads — but they aren’t actually ads. Many wholesalers’ websites look like Site 3.
Some wholesale site designs are outsourced and/or designed by a marketing agency. Certain agencies will give you cookie-cutter sites, which will do relatively little to help you stand out from competitors that are also using those agencies. Some agencies will also keep ownership of the website, which traps their clients into sticking with them.
Despite these issues, we still recommend working with a professional website designer or digital marketing agency when possible. Not all marketing agencies’ website design programs are terrible. Some (like us) will customize businesses’ websites and continue to optimize them to improve conversion rates, as well as hand over site ownership to clients.
Design isn’t everything, either (although it is still very important). If you want to rank high on Google’s search engine result pages, you need to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, and what you build your website on can impact your ranking. You’ll need to ensure your website works well on mobile devices and is lightning-fast. If your website loads slowly and is difficult to navigate on a cell phone, Google is sure to keep you off of the first page of results.
A professionally built website will go a long way in making your business stand out and build your credibility.
OppGen can build a website for your business from the ground up. Contact us for more information.
4. Maintain Your Digital Presence
Wholesalers should have more than just a website; they should have several places they can be found online. Social media sites are a must if you’re to stand out, as is a Google My Business account. In terms of social media sites, LinkedIn and Facebook are the best ones to use in the wholesale real estate industry. YouTube is also a fantastic resource where you can upload and share videos about all sorts of industry topics.
You’ll want to ensure that your website and social media accounts share similar messaging. You don’t want to have the exact same message, but the tone and quality should be as consistent as possible. On your website, start writing blog posts about topics that are relevant to your industry and share them on your business’s social media accounts.
Ask house sellers you’ve bought from in the past for a testimonial and/or review. Testimonials and reviews can make a huge difference, and the higher the review average, the better. Higher reviews, particularly when compared to competitors with lower reviews, can be one of the final decision-makers for prospective sellers. If you receive a negative review, reply with an individualized response to that reviewer, not a copied and pasted response.
Being active on multiple platforms can help you market your wholesale real estate business in more places to reach new home sellers and different audiences. Click here to learn how OppGen Marketing can help you get started.
5. Expand Your Network
If you really want to stand out, you need to stay ahead of everyone else. This means you’ll want to know about homes going up for sale before anyone else does. The best way to have that knowledge is to have people in the know: a network.
Building and expanding your professional networking takes a lot of time and effort, but thanks to the internet, it’s a lot easier than it’s ever been.
LinkedIn is the place for networking with professionals from just about every background. Naturally, wholesalers are no different and can be found there, too. LinkedIn makes it easy to find your fellow wholesalers but also to reach out to people in other industries that may be helpful in hunting down some home sellers. Specialize in foreclosed homes? Do some digging and find bank employees that specialize in housing loans. Connect with probate attorneys to see if anyone who recently inherited a property they don’t want.
If you’re running a national wholesale real estate company, you’ll have no problem networking with people all over the country. Have some cold call messages prepared for the people you want to connect with. It’ll take time to build up those connections, but it will be worth it.
Facebook Groups and Events
Facebook Groups are a digital location to have water cooler conversations. You’ll still discuss topics related to your business and share articles, but they tend to be a little more laid back. These groups can help you network in a slightly more casual manner, but you’ll still want to follow the groups’ rules and be professional. There’s a Facebook Group for just about anything, so you’ll have no problem finding one (and realistically, more) that’s ideal for your niche.
Some groups may host events from time to time, so if you’re in any local groups, it’s certainly to your benefit to attend these events. Check for wholesale real estate and real estate investor networking events every so often, too; not all groups have events, but there’s a good chance there are networking opportunities happening close to your backyard.
If there aren’t any Facebook Groups or Events pertaining to wholesale real estate or real estate investors, take initiative and start your own. Anyone can create and run a group or event, and it’s free. Plus, running a group or event shows that you are a local leader in the industry or are at least willing to start leading others.
Consider creating a webinar or seminar for people who are interested in wholesale real estate or for people just getting started.
Meetup
Meetup is an app and website that can help you, well, meet up with groups of people who share similar interests, from book clubs to beer and wine aficionados. Of course, this also includes several networking opportunities, many of which include real estate investors and wholesalers.
If there are no local real estate investor or wholesale real estate groups, start a group on Meetup. However, it may be more beneficial to host an event, like a webinar, using Facebook first, as running a group on Meetup does incur a monthly expense. (Meetup is free for group members/general users.) Using Facebook’s free services is an easy way to gauge interest and to see if it’s worth investing in creating a Meetup group, too.
Wholesale Real Estate Industry Conferences and Expos
One of the best ways to network and market your wholesale real estate business is to attend conferences in-person. Though conferences do require a pretty solid investment of your time and money, they are worth it.
You’ll learn from and meet with some of the most successful wholesalers in the nation. You can learn about how they market their wholesale real estate businesses and try to apply those to your own tactics. You’ll see some previews of upcoming trends and changes in the industry before non-attendees do. You’ll make connections and expand your network and maybe even find a business partner.
There are several conferences and expos: the National Association of Realtors Conference and Expo, Inman Connect events, and IMN conferences. And those are only a handful of what’s out there.
Wholesale Real Estate Mastermind Groups
More experienced and successful wholesalers should invest in being part of a real estate mastermind group. These are almost like conferences, except they’re smaller and require a hefty fee to gain entrance. Real estate mastermind groups can be found all over the country and tend to have high-level investors involved. If you’re making half a million or more a year, investing in these events can give you access to big-name investors and other successful wholesalers.
Start Standing Out in the Wholesale Real Estate Market Today
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are always more tactics you can utilize to market your wholesale real estate business and make it stand out from the competition.
To discuss more wholesale real estate marketing tactics, contact us or fill out our free digital audit today.
