In need of some real estate conversion ideas to skyrocket your inbound and support sales? 

We scrape 10 real estate websites and learn from our own real estate customers to give you 10 real estate conversion ideas – tried and true. 

These include conversion ideas to generate demand and optimize your website, landing pages, and conversion pipeline.

Real estate conversion idea 1 - Build a VIP list

Building your email list of VIPs is one of the most effective ways to capture highly engaged leads and convert them. An email list is a list of contacts who gave you valuable information like names, emails, or other important insights because they expect something beneficial in return.

It’s one of the best ways to convert because you ‘own’ your email list. With ads or social media, you don’t really know who’s looking at your content. But with emails, you already know that these contacts are interested in what you have to say and want to learn more.

In the context of real estate, think about what your buyers or sellers would find the most valuable. For example, as the housing market is crazily competitive, buyers would want to know the latest houses as they become available and before anyone else so that they have the chance to snatch up their dream homes. 

To be first in line, your buyers need to become a VIP. This creates a sense of exclusivity, urgency, and fear of missing out on getting their dream home. Along the buying journey, you can support and provide educational content to help your buyers prepare for the big purchase.

What else can you send to your VIP list?

• Special campaigns for VIPs (Valentine’s discount for first homeowner couples)
• Real estate market overview 
• Customer loyalty programme

Anything real estate related, your leads are sure to hear from you first! 

Engaging your seller or buyer with guidance helps them make important decisions and choose you as their trusted partner.

Real estate conversion idea 2 - Use an interactive virtual tour

COVID-19 has fundamentally altered the shopping landscape, introducing a lasting transformation. If there’s anything that can be done online, people would rather not leave their homes.

Of course, buying a house isn’t like any kind of online shopping. 

If you want to catch buyer attention at all, your listings need to be informative and visually appealing. Buyers have their own pre-qualifying criteria before committing to visiting a house viewing.

An interactive virtual tour solves both.

On the tour’s left side, you can show images, videos, or any visual support to help you show off your listing. You can be as detailed as you want with this. For example, an integration with Matterport to map out the house structure in 3D.

On the right side, you provide as much information about the house as you want. And you can time the information on the right side to pop up to match the visual on the left.

Once your prospective buyers are convinced of the information given, it’s time to nail that house viewing. Make it easy for them to arrange a meeting from right inside the chatbot.

Real estate conversion idea 3 - Pre-qualify your prospects

Are you getting too many irrelevant leads? Asking pre-qualifying questions can help you identify right away if a customer is really interested and which property is the best fit for them. 

You can also ask questions that sort your customers into groups by needs, urgency, or priority and take action accordingly. For example, if a customer doesn’t know yet if they want to purchase an apartment or a house – or where they want to live even, then maybe they’re browsing and not ready to buy.

This doesn’t mean you should discard their interest entirely. You can still get an agent to talk to them and learn more about their needs. Or you can keep them on your email list and send them insightful content.

On the other hand, if a client says they need a property ASAP, you can send a notification email to the respective agent saying "Urgent VIP Client!".

Real estate conversion idea 4 - Contextual messaging

No time to answer customer enquiries but a chatbot seems too cold and robotic? Contextual messaging is a chatbot but taken to a higher level. It takes your listing description, agent's image, and contact info to personalise your chatbot, making customers feel like they're talking to your agent!

Purchasing a house is a huge decision and your customers want to have someone both reliable and knowledgeable about the housing market to guide them through the process.

You can make a great first impression by providing a lot of relevant information about the agent. For example, showing the agent’s name, area of expertise, years of experience, or even an image of the agent could help warm the impression and build trust.

You should also provide information relevant to the listing, which will increase the attractiveness of your property and entice leads to book a house tour. Here you can try the interactive virtual tours idea that we mentioned in section 2.

Real estate conversion idea 5 - Automatically route your leads

If you don’t have enough resources for a live chat agent, automatically routing leads to designated agents can also significantly reduce response time.

Of course, this means the ball is in the agent’s court (after the lead’s been sorted and sent!), so and it’s entirely up to them how fast they can reply to prospective clients. But before the leads have already been sorted out before they come to the agents! Remember the pre-qualifying questions I mention above?

For example, with Serviceform, we can build an automated system to filter all leads by postcode and send them to the appropriate agent in the relevant area.

Your agents are now equipped with helpful insights provided by your leads, which will let them respond faster, serve better, and convert more leads to customers.

“We were able to reduce our workload by 10x because we no longer had to manually sort leads and forward them to the appropriate agents.”

• Matias, RE/MAX

Real estate conversion idea 6 - Make your landing page mobile-friendly

Mobile phones have long been the dominant device for internet use across most countries. Mobile drives 55.5% of web leads so make sure to check that your listing pages and landing pages are responsive on the most common device types (desktop, mobile, tablet).

Even with new media like TikTok rising in popularity, most businesses still prefer to run ads on Facebook and there, mobile is king.

98.3% of Facebook users access the platform using their mobile devices. There’s a high chance your target audience comes across your ads while scrolling on their phones. So if there’s an annoyingly high bounce rate haunting your landing pages, check that your images, videos, and website elements like CTA buttons are mobile-friendly.

Real estate conversion idea 7 - Recruitment as conversion

An applicant is a lead and receiving a job application is a conversion.

If anything, your team is your foundation and you’ll grow much faster with a talented team.

Just like other types of leads, you won’t always get qualified applicants that closely fit your requirements. Not to mention you’ll need to manually go through all the applications and respond to each accordingly.

But also just like other types of leads, you can ask pre-qualifying questions that separate the good applications from the bad ones.

Here’s one example of how Serviceform tools pre-qualify for our customer – Valpro’s job applications:

We can build any kind of pre-qualifying automation tool with our Chatbot, Engagement bot (as seen in the example above), Dynamic forms (example below), and Smart popups.

Speaking of Dynamic forms, what makes them so dynamic? Your applicants will always go to the right hiring managers!

As mentioned in conversion idea number 5, we have an automatic and dynamic lead routing system that directly routes your buyers, sellers, and now your applicants as well to the right person in charge.

Want a beautiful and functioning form like Huoneistokeskus? Talk to our conversion specialists and we’ll figure out how best to qualify applicants for you!

Real estate conversion idea 8 - Create local community lead magnets

Remember the VIP list idea I gave in idea number 1? ☝️

A lead magnet is something you give away in exchange for people’s contact information. This is most commonly an email address because you can keep in contact and nurture the lead into a paying customer. 

Distributing lead magnets on social media or through digital advertising will build your VIP list.

But back to the local community lead magnet idea.

Before buying a house, homebuyers need to do thorough research on the neighbourhood they’re going to live in. 

This research includes anything ranging from a walk score (access to necessities or by walking) and drive score (access to necessities or by driving) to crime statistics and school ratings. 

You can create a lead magnet that provides any and all statistics related to your buyer’s neighbourhood of interest. When people start to imagine themselves living in a neighbourhood, you’re one step closer to closing the deal. Additionally, you have the option to enhance the appeal of your listings using virtual staging services.

What other lead magnet ideas are there?

• Homebuying or selling checklist
• House hunting checklist
• Home evaluation consultation (One of the most popular real estate conversion tactics)
• Home quizzes (For example, “Buy your dream home and we’ll tell you if you’re within budget”)
• How-to ebook (For example, “How to stage a home” for sellers and “How to find a good agent” for both buyers and sellers)

Real estate conversion idea 9 - Tips for homeowners before selling their houses 

Homeowners decide to sell their house months before they list it, so create and capture seller interest even before they think about selling their houses. 

For example, we have a treasure trove of real estate information, including some fascinating blog topics like:

• What Is The Best Time To List A House?
• Top 10 High-Converting Examples of Chatbot for Real Estate in 2023
• Top 5 Emerging Real Estate Trends to Look Out For in 2023

Just to name a few and jiggle your creative brains.

What works really well within these blogs are free tools like the Home Affordability Calculator or Down Payment Calculator for buyers, and the Commissions Calculator or Net Proceeds Calculator for sellers. And if you or your client is selling to a real estate investor, a short-term rental calculator would help prove the value of your listing. You can find more ideas like these on our templates page.

You can provide so much extra value that your prospective buyers and sellers want to stick with you for their entire buying or selling process.

Real estate conversion idea 10 - A lead capturing form but better

So we’ve been talking about chatbots, inline engagement bots, dynamic forms, automatic lead routing, and all that good stuff. All of these tools should give you an idea of why they’re better than your traditional lead-capturing form.

It all comes down to two things: speed and quality.

These interactive tools allow your visitors to communicate with you faster, understand what you do better, and receive the information they want faster. At the end of the day, this means that you receive more valuable information from your visitors and get higher quality leads.

Hungry for more real estate conversion ideas?

Have a look at our Real estate website conversion guide, where we aim to help you double your website conversion with just a few small tweaks.

Or maybe you came here after the guide! No worries, we still have a lot more real estate conversion ideas to share with you. In fact, we have in-depth blogs entirely focused on boosting real estate conversion rates!