7 Top Strategies for Getting Listings As a New Real Estate Agent

Starting a real estate business can sometimes feel like trying to open a locked door without the right key. You know there’s a way to get in — you just have to figure out how.

Here’s a hint: As a new real estate agent, your success hinges on getting seller listings.

If you can nail this critical skill, you’re on your way to a thriving career. But it takes the right strategies and know-how to start building your listings portfolio and making your mark in the industry. 

Read on to learn why listings are so important to launching your real estate career and how you can get more real estate listings as a new agent using several key strategies.

Why Listings Matter: The Real Estate Agent’s Currency

Listings are much more than just properties for sale or lease. They’re your professional currency, the foundation of your real estate business. 

While many new agents get started by working with buyers, seasoned professionals know that listings are the true drivers of success and profitability. As a new agent, you can take a page out of their book and focus right away on sellers — creating much-needed momentum early on and helping to build a sustainable, respected career over the long term.

Listings provide you with multiple layers of professional advantage, including:

• Market visibility: Each listing is like a billboard with your name on it. When you list a property, you’re not just selling a single home — you’re marketing yourself to an entire neighborhood and network of potential future clients.
• Income potential: Listing agents typically earn higher commissions and have more control over the transaction process. When you represent the seller, you’re in the driver’s seat of the sale.
• Professional credibility: A solid listing pipeline builds your brand, confidence, and reputation, and provides tangible evidence of your success. Each sold property becomes a further testament to your local market knowledge, negotiation skills, and professional capabilities.
• Networking opportunities: Every listing introduces you to potential sellers, buyers, and other industry professionals who can help you get more real estate listings through future referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. It’s not just about the current transaction, but the connections you can make along the way.
• Efficiency: Being the seller's agent usually means less visits to the home, less effort, etc. The buyer's agent has to put in significantly more work, and if the buyers don't get the house they wanted for whatever reason, the process starts all over again. 

Let’s now take a look at some of the top strategies for how to get real estate listings when you’re just starting out.

Check out Fello Academy, where our CEO Ryan Young created an entire masterclass on how to scale your business as a solo agent →

1. Leverage Your Personal Network: Start Close to Home

Don’t be shy about your new career. The more people who learn you’re now in real estate, the more likely they’ll think about you when they or someone they know wants to sell. Given this, your first listings will likely come from people who are already close to you and trust you. Here’s how to tap into that gold mine:

Announce Your New Career

• Post on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media that you’re now a licensed real estate agent.
• Send personalized emails or messages to friends, family, and professional contacts.
• Host a small launch event or virtual announcement.

Embrace an “Everyone Knows I’m a Real Estate Agent” Approach

• Update your job title, credentials, and experience in your social media profiles.
• Add your real estate credentials to your email signature (and link to your team page!).
• Wear branded clothing and have business cards always ready.

2. Embrace Digital Marketing: Launch a 24/7 Listing Generation Machine

Your online presence is one of the most powerful tools to help you get more real estate listings. Make sure you show up everywhere potential sellers might be looking for information and that your brand is polished and consistent across the board:

Optimize Your Social Media

• Create dedicated accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for your real estate business. In addition to seeing posts about your business, clients and connections occasionally enjoy seeing personal posts every now and then — such as a birthday or vacation — which helps create a more endearing connection to your audience.
• Champion your own success stories to show sellers why they should work with you. You can highlight quick sales, offers above asking, or how you helped someone find their dream home before it hit the market.
• Provide helpful home-selling tips, such as how to stage, how to increase curb appeal, and which home repairs are necessary before listing.
• Give behind-the-scenes views into your real estate career as you gain knowledge and experience. Posting about your successes is important, but so is sharing what you’ve learned or what you would do differently next time. 
• Engage with your audience by asking and answering seller-related questions.

Use Content Marketing

• Start a local real estate blog and post regularly — for example, write about topics like the local job market and employment opportunities, how schools in a particular district or neighborhood impact home prices, and a peek into luxury properties for sale in the area. 
• Create YouTube videos with home remodeling tips, local market trends that focus on a neighborhood’s economic picture or a community comeback, and first-time seller guides.
• Use hashtags like #RealEstate[YourCity] #HomeSellers #RealEstateInsights.

Pro-tip: Windy Goss, a Fello agent, is great at creating YoutTube and video content. Check out her channel for inspiration.

Create Targeted Social Media Ads

• Use Facebook and Instagram ads to reach potential sellers: 
  • Create simple ads promoting yourself as an agent who can help them buy a house in specific markets or sell their home fast for the most money.
  • Create ads that target homeowners in specific zip codes or neighborhoods where you’re developing expertise, assuring them you know their market and neighborhood and featuring stats about current home prices.
  • Target people who’ve recently experienced a life change (marriage, divorce, children, retirement), and demographic groups who are likely to sell (seniors who want to downsize).

3. Take Advantage of Tech: Utilize the Right Tools

Time is at a premium today for busy real estate agents. Implement technology solutions to help you speed up and streamline contact assignments and management, lead generation and management, communication, and other important tasks, which frees up more time to build client relationships and close more deals:

Adopt a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform

• Use a comprehensive real estate-friendly CRM like Follow Up Boss or Sierra Interactive or another similar platform.
• Track and qualify potential leads based on site visits or home value or cash offer requests so you know who to prioritize when you follow up.
• Set up automated follow-up reminders to make the follow-up process easier and faster.
• Segment your list by contact data and activity data:
  • Segment contact data by time in property, mortgage rate, equity in home, and zip code.
  • Once you’ve talked to the contacts, segment further into needs and interests, such as downsizing, upsizing, and job relocation. 

Use a Lead Nurturing Tool

• Implement a lead nurturing platform like Fello, which can integrate with your CRM’s database to create a complete, coherent, real-time view of all your leads.
• Turn on Fello’s pre-built email and direct mail campaigns to message clients about home valuation, cash offers, and expired listings — then track which leads open the emails and click or scan the postcards.
• Surface seller leads who are actually ready to sell — via Lead Score and segmentation intelligence — and engage with them immediately.

Provide Home Valuation Tools

• Offer free home valuation tools on your website, like Fello’s home valuation widget you can add to a landing page. 
• Give homeowners additional insights into their property’s value or the market, such as local schools, businesses, and opportunities to update kitchens and baths.
• Send regular emails to homeowners when their home value has changed, driving them back to your site to check the value on their own so you can gauge interest.

4. Build a Referral Network: Rely on Strategic Partnerships

Your professional network can bring a lot of value to your real estate business by acting as a consistent source of referrals for you. If you want to know how to generate listings beyond digital tactics, do the following: 

Connect with Professionals in Complementary Fields

• Develop relationships with mortgage brokers and home inspectors.
• Leave your business card with home improvement businesses.
• Get to know local divorce attorneys and financial advisors.

Come up with Referral Agreements

• Establish formal or informal referral partnerships:
  • Consider Fello’s Shared Billing feature which allows you to market a partner from your professional network on a landing page and split the billing of your Fello account with that partner, saving you money and helping your partner get more business.
• Offer reciprocal referral arrangements — they refer to you, you refer to them.
• Always provide exceptional service to maintain your reputation and good standing within your professional relationships. 

5. Master the Art of Prospecting: Reimagine Traditional Tactics 

Because there are many ways to get more real estate listings today, it’s easy to overlook some of the old-school tactics that real estate agents have relied on in the past. However, these methods can still work — especially if you approach them in fresh, relevant ways:

Cold Call

• Put together targeted lists of homeowners in areas with high potential for selling, such as homeowners who have lived a long time in the property or have high mortgage rates or equity.
• Script — and practice! — your calls to sound conversational, not salesy (and use similar scripts for texting if you adopt an SMS tool as well).
• Focus on providing value, not just asking for a listing.
• Call on weekday evenings and weekend mornings, when you have a greater chance of reaching someone.

Download CEO Ryan Young's 30in30 Playbook with scripts, texts and tips to get more listings in 30 days →

Door Knocking

• Head to neighborhoods with older homes, signs of potential life changes (recent marriages, new babies), and areas with recent job transfers or economic changes (new housing developments).
• Provide value here as well, such as market reports, home value estimates, and local market insights.
• Be professional, respectful, and brief. 

Check out our webinar with the legendary Laurie Reader where she outlines how she interacts with homeowners on listing appointments — it's relevant here, too. 

6. Cultivate Expertise: Specialize in Your Local Market

Knowledge is power in real estate. You can get more real estate listings by displaying the breadth and depth of your local market knowledge, which instills confidence in your seller leads that you deeply understand the area and know what you’re doing:

Make Continuous Learning a Habit

• Attend local real estate workshops, conferences, and webinars.
• Join professional associations that offer continuing education.
• Subscribe to market trend publications. 
• Take additional certification courses. There are lots of FREE options through local real estate professional networks and associations, your local library, and low-cost options through Linkedin, Coursera and edX.

Provide Market Reports and Insights

• Create monthly or quarterly market reports for potential sellers.
• Share insights such as average days on market and price trends, as well as insider info about specific neighborhoods.
• Distribute these reports and insights via email and social media and make them easily available on your website.

7. Be Persistent: Enact a Follow-Up Formula

Last but not least, one of the best ways to get listings is through persistence:  

Communicate on a Consistent Basis

• Create a systematic follow-up process with leads so they hear from you regularly.
• Use a mix of emails, text messages, phone calls, and personalized direct mail. With the right tools, all of these channels can be automated with some dedication to setting up ahead of time.
• Set up drip campaigns with email sequences that follow a logical progression — such as a welcome email followed by an educational email and ending with an email that promotes a free consultation.

Track and Nurture Leads

• Stay in touch without being pushy — not every lead converts immediately.
• Strive to provide value in every interaction — whether it’s a tip, downloadable guide, report, or anything else the lead can put to immediate use.
• Retarget and re-engage with seller leads you’ve lost touch with.

Your Listing Success Roadmap

As a new agent, building your real estate listings pipeline isn’t about overnight success. To get more real estate listings, you need to make a consistent effort and focus on continuous learning, nurturing genuine relationships, and providing undeniable value — while using the tools and platforms that can save you time and streamline your tasks.

Remember, every top-performing agent started exactly where you are now. Your future real estate success begins when you can start implementing these strategies today.

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Ready to transform your seller lead generation strategy? Schedule a demo to see how Fello’s tools can help uncover more seller leads, get more listing appointments, and close more deals.

Already a Fello user? These strategies can work for you too. And if you have questions about any of the Fello features and tools mentioned above, schedule a call with your CSM, or email success@hifello.com.

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