The Missing Piece in your Marketing

Do you think of yourself as a marketer? 

If you don’t, you should. Your real estate business boils down to two ultimate skills: marketing to find great deals on properties (buying low), and then marketing to sell high. 

Communities help you do that. And by “community,” I mean both online communities and in-person local communities (although they sometimes serve different purposes). 

Here’s how we’re doing it, and how several guest experts we’ve interviewed do it too. 

Why Build a Community on Social Media?

You’d be surprised at how many opportunities you can create by building an online community. 

Here are a few of my favorites.

Grow Your Buyers List

As a real estate wholesaler, growing a community on social media helps you develop your buyers list.

The more buyers in your network — and the more engaged they are — the faster you’ll sell your contracts. And the higher the price you’ll get. 

The key? Building trust with them. And a community where you consistently provide value can help you do just that. 

Build a Network of Deal Finders

An online community also helps you build a network of fellow investors, who can bring you deals that they can’t take down themselves. 

I’ve seen friends of mine do this. As they teach other people how to invest, plenty of their community members will find good deals. But they won’t be able to close on all of them — so they bring them to you, their trusted leader. 

Still, think of building a community as a long-term investment, not a short-term lead generation strategy. Don’t expect bargain properties to land in your lap on Day 1. 

Networking with Related Real Estate Professionals

Real estate investors need plenty of support personnel. A few include:

• Contractors & handymen
• Lenders (both public and private)
• Real estate agents
• Home inspectors
• Title companies
• Property managers
• Bird dogs

A community of other real estate investors can provide you referrals as you need them. 

Email Listbuilding

By constantly engaging with your online community, you can offer them plenty of freebies — in exchange for their email address. These are known as lead magnets, in the online marketing space. 

“But Sharad, why do I need their email addresses? I’m already interacting with them on social media!”

You don’t own or control social media platforms. They could disappear tomorrow, or delete your account, or change their algorithm to minimize your reach. 

Your email list, you control. And you can import it right into your CRM on REsimpli. 

Cultivate a Personal Brand

Communities can help you build a personal brand for yourself. 

At some point, you may want to add another revenue stream by teaching other people how to do what you do. A community helps you market and sell your services. 

Besides, a community helps you build that “know, like, and trust” factor that leads people to want to work with you. 

Establishing Authority & Credibility with Other Brands

As you grow your business, you may want to market to other people’s audiences. 

You may want to appear on podcasts, or deliver webinars to the huge audiences of influencers. You’ll want industry big wigs to take your calls and respond to your emails. 

The simplest way to convince other people with big audiences to take you seriously: to have a big audience of your own. In the opening line of your email, you can say “I have a community of 50,000 real estate investors, and I’d love to chat with you about ways we can work together.”

You’ll get their attention. And that means you’ll get their audience’s attention. 

Professionalize Your Real Estate Business

Professional athletes don’t duct tape together their shoes. So why are you trying to duct tape together your real estate business?

If you want to earn profits like a professional real estate investor, use the tools your pro competitors are using. That starts with marketing and accounting tools like REsimpli. 

Don’t take our word for it. Try it out for yourself with a 30-day free trial. 

We look forward to hearing your feedback and successes after your first month running with the big dogs. 

How to Build an Online Community

“Yeah that sounds great and all, having an audience of 50,000 people. But how do I go from 0 to 50,000?”

Glad you asked. Follow these steps, which are simple but admittedly not easy. If it were, everyone would do it!

Pick a Niche

If you try to speak to everyone, you’ll end up speaking to no one. 

Drill down to the narrowest niche you can imagine. That can include the exact profession of people you’re working with, geographical market, age, gender, investment strategy, target property prices, or any other factor. 

Write up your “ideal customer avatar,” the exact type of person you’re targeting. Give them a name and a backstory. Then speak to that exact person in every piece of content you create. 

Marine Corps veteran David Pere launched a real estate investing community for current and former military servicemembers. I had a great conversation with him about exactly how he grew it — and it wasn’t by being vanilla.

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. No one will listen. 

Pick One Platform

You’re not going to become an expert on every social media platform. Pick one and commit to it. 

Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups foster engagement and community. Focus here first. 

YouTube works well for evergreen content but you can’t send direct messages on it. It’s great for positioning as an authority. TikTok can generate rapid audience growth but isn’t great for deep relationship building. Don’t expect to build a community on either of these platforms. 

The Initial Momentum Is the Hardest

Communities become self-sustaining at a certain point, where people interact with each other. But how do you get any movement at all in the beginning?

Start by inviting every single person you know with any connection to real estate. Reach out to them individually and ask them to post specific questions or topics, to create a sense of interaction. You can even give them the exact words you want them to post. 

Then ask them all to invite everyone they know in the real estate space. Again, that might require you asking each of them individually. 

It’s hard to create something from nothing. But people do it every day, and you can too. 

Keep Speaking to the Biggest Questions

Your audience probably all has the same 10-15 questions that preoccupy them. Speak to those. 

Keep tackling those questions from different angles, with different wording, different emphasis. 

Dig into your audience’s pain points. Then help them solve them. 

Consistency Is Key

If you want to build something from nothing, you need to show up day after day, week after week. 

Pose questions. Answer questions. Offer surprising tips, tricks, and advice. 

Tag people in your comments. React to posts. Friend people, message them.

In short: build relationships with them.

Share Your Lived Experiences

Nowadays, anyone can get answers to common questions from an AI. 

You know what they can’t get from an AI? Lived experience. 

Speak to what you’ve seen, what you’ve done, what unexpected curveballs came your way. The things that tripped you up, and how you’ve changed your approach in response. 

Share funny stories about what went wrong. Or perhaps scary cautionary tales. 

Talk about the 20 different approaches you tried, and how the 21st was the one that led to your huge breakthrough. 

Document your journey, rather than trying to come off as an expert. 

That’s what’s interesting to people. That’s what will keep people coming back. 

Focus on Others’ Successes

As the community leader, you are Yoda, not Luke Skywalker. You’re the teacher, not the hero. 

Even as you share stories, try not to make it all about you. Whenever possible, share your students’ or clients’ or audience members’ success stories. 

Seeing a peer succeed makes it feel more accessible than seeing a guru succeed. 

Create an In-Person Community of Peers

Online communities are incredibly useful. But they lack the full human connection and texture you get in the real world. 

As a real estate investor, you live and work in the real world. Locally. And it helps to create a local community that also meets in the real world. 

Organize local coffee meetups or happy hours. You might need to provide the coffee or beer or snacks at first, to encourage attendance. 

But in-person networking is infinitely more powerful than online networking. You can forge much deeper connections, in much shorter time frames. 

Join Others’ Communities for High Achievers

If you earn $100,000 from your business but you want to earn $1,000,000, who should you learn from and surround yourself with? 

People who are running $1 million businesses. 

Look for mastermind groups of people doing what you want to do. Local, in-person groups tend to work better, but if there aren’t any, join an online group. 

Most high-quality mastermind groups cost money. And not peanuts either — many charge four or even five digits for annual memberships. 

But they work. If they didn’t, successful people wouldn’t keep shelling out the money for them each year. 

High achievers will push you out of your comfort zone. They’ll help you see blind spots, help you move past limiting beliefs. They’ll drive you to play a bigger game, rather than continuing to play small. 

Check out this conversation with Leon Barnes, founder of the Collective Genius mastermind. You’ll learn why all the big dogs go out of their way to run with other big dogs. 

(link to video here, with thumbnail image Recording Link) 

Plus, you’ll learn how to run and grow your own communities better. 

Communities Are Sticky

Creating your own community can help you scale to new heights as an entrepreneur. 

They can help you sell online courses, masterminds, membership businesses, and more. And that says nothing of all the benefits to your real estate investing or wholesaling business. 

In today’s world of AI, human to human interactions and relationships matter more than ever. Don’t just create content, which an AI can increasingly do nearly as well as you. 

Create a community of people who all interact with each other — and with you. That keeps your audience coming back for more. 

You’ll grow your network of investors, buyers, and support personnel. And we’ll be here to help you manage your buyers lists, prospect lists, and marketing channels’ ROI. 

In the meantime, get started with a free 30-day trial of the best CRM on the market for real estate investors.