The Complete Guide To LinkedIn For Real Estate Agents

Over 50% of real estate agents are currently using LinkedIn to attract new business and close more deals—and with good reason. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), social media is more powerful for generating quality leads than a multiple listing service (MLS).

LinkedIn is the ideal place to market yourself, but it’s also an excellent platform for real estate agents to:

🤝 Expand their networks.

🤝 Increase brand awareness.

🤝 Connect and share knowledge with other local and international real estate professionals.

🤝 Develop as a professional.

If you’re ready to join the 82% of marketers who use LinkedIn for successful lead generation, this guide is for you. We’ll explore strategies for leveraging LinkedIn to generate more leads and discuss the types of content you should be sharing on this platform.

Why Should You Use LinkedIn for Real Estate Lead Generation?

Using LinkedIn to market your brokerage has several advantages:

✅ Convert more real estate leads

LinkedIn has the highest lead generation conversion rate of all social media platforms.

Traffic from LinkedIn has a 2.74% visitor-to-lead generation ratio. This indicates that approximately 3% of visitors to your LinkedIn profile are likely to convert into leads. While this percentage might appear modest, it is significantly higher compared to Facebook (0.77%) and Twitter (0.69%).

✅ Reach your target audience

Looking at the most recent statistics, LinkedIn is buzzing with potential real estate clients:

More than 75% of LinkedIn users are aged 30 or older.
Just under 50% of users earn over $75,000 per year.
Around 50% are college graduates.
90% are household decision-makers.

✅ Network with other real estate agents

Broadening your sphere of influence is critical if you want to gain more referrals and close more deals. LinkedIn is the ideal place to foster and nurture professional relationships.

LinkedIn also allows you to join real estate groups. A LinkedIn group is an effective way to share knowledge and get more connections organically—we’ll share more about LinkedIn groups later in this article.

✅ Meet your future team

A key element for a thriving brokerage is finding skilled real estate agents. Since top-notch agents are seldom without work, it’s crucial to adopt a long-term strategy for attracting and retaining them. Meet them via networking on LinkedIn, get to know them, and then give them a reason to come and work for you.

You can also use LinkedIn’s jobs feature to post your vacancies. People recruited via LinkedIn are 40% less likely to leave a company within the first six months.

✅ Face less competition

On LinkedIn, users tend to share more business-focused content than the social clutter that dominates other platforms.

This means you stand a greater chance of having your target audience see your LinkedIn content, giving you a competitive edge.

✅ Boost your search engine rankings

Ensuring your business is discoverable on search engines like Google is crucial if you want more clients.

Having a LinkedIn business page enhances your visibility in search results when people look for topics related to your company.

Google prioritizes trusted websites in search results, and LinkedIn is among these trusted sources.

✅ Differentiate your brokerage

Real estate is a crowded market. The question you need to be able to answer is why potential clients should choose you over thousands of competitors.

Your LinkedIn profile is an excellent platform to showcase your expertise and experience, distinguishing you from the competition.

How You Can Use LinkedIn for Real Estate Marketing

Now you know why you should use LinkedIn, let’s look at how to generate real estate leads.

To begin, you’ll need to set up two types of profiles on Linkedin: your personal profile and a page for your real estate business.

👉 Optimize your personal profile

Having a good personal profile will give you a solid foundation for success on LinkedIn. Make sure you have the basics right:

Ensure your summary and work history are updated.
Use a recent, professional headshot as your profile picture.
Use a background image that indicates the area of real estate you specialize in.

👉 Write a compelling headline

Your headline is one of the most critical parts of your personal LinkedIn profile. You need to tell people why they should work with you in just 100 characters.

There are a few approaches to this. Let’s look at some examples:

In the example below, Alexander Gudim explains what he does and where he does it. This helps potential clients determine if he is the right real estate agent for them:

Mike Karisny takes a different approach, as you can see below. He emphasizes his numerous awards, lending credibility to his profile. In his headline, he effectively markets himself and his expertise. Additionally, he portrays himself as a spiritual individual who highly values teamwork:

Headlines also help your LinkedIn page rank in Google search results. You can rank higher by including popular keywords in your headline. Keywords are words or phrases about popular ideas, topics, and explanations commonly searched on Google.

Check out this guide on how to use LinkedIn keywords effectively so that your personal profile shows up in search results.

👉 Expand your network

Referrals are one of the best ways to generate real estate leads. They are a vital source of sales for new brokerages trying to find business in a saturated market.

Your LinkedIn network can be a steady source of referrals. If you are connected with a person on the platform, you will be able to see all of their connections. This is known as your second connections.

You can see next to the person’s name that they are a second connection in the example below. Beneath that, it shows the mutual connection you have with them.

You could approach this first connection and ask them to introduce you to one (or more) of their connections. Or, you could simply send the second connection an invite.

Many real estate agents miss out on extensive networks by not connecting with all their real-life acquaintances on LinkedIn.

Make sure you add as many people as you know and try to connect with everyone you engage with on LinkedIn.

👉 Ask for referrals and recommendations

LinkedIn has a unique function that allows you to ask for recommendations from your connections. This is invaluable for real estate agents.

To do this:

Visit your profile.
Scroll down past your experience, education, and skills to where it says “Recommendations”.
Request that former clients and colleagues write testimonials for you here.

One good tactic for increasing the number of positive recommendations you get is to write them for other people, encouraging them to reciprocate.

👉 Join LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn groups allow people with shared interests to network, discuss topics, and stay up to date with any industry news.

There are thousands of groups dedicated to different real estate sectors. You can search for groups that are relevant to the location you operate in, your real estate niche, or the industry updates that are most important to you.

By contributing to these groups, you’ll build brand awareness and authority in the industry. You’ll also be able to interact with thousands of people who may be interested in your services.

Groups are run by admins, and you will need to request permission from them to join their group. Once you do, here are some good practice tips for groups:

Join ones where your target clients are active.
Try to join groups that are as local to you as possible.
Avoid hard selling in groups. Rather, provide insights and respond to people’s questions.
Generate a discussion and engage with others.
Interact with the group regularly. Aim to post or respond to something once per day.
If you see someone looking for services you offer, send them a private message explaining how you can help. This way, it won’t look like you’re being too salesy on the group.

For example, imagine your brokerage specializes in mid-market properties in California. You may want to join the California Real Estate Group:

It has nearly 15,000 members and covers all aspects of real estate in California.

Or, if you specialize in something more specific, like commercial real estate in Los Angeles, you may benefit from joining a group like Los Angeles Commercial Real Estate.

This only has 1,766 members. However, they fit your market and location perfectly and are a more valuable audience.

👉 Create a LinkedIn business page

Once your personal LinkedIn profile is optimized, you need to create a profile for your brokerage.

Much like your personal page, ensure that your business looks professional by using high-quality images for your profile icon and banner.

There are also a few other things you can do:

Tell your brokerage’s story in the “About” section

The first thing people will read on your brokerage’s page is the About section—so make it count.

Provide all the information that potential clients need to decide if you are the right brokerage for them.

Be sure to include details like:

Where you are based or operate.
The types of property you specialize in.
The services you offer.
Your certifications.
Your contact information, including your website, address, email, and phone number.

Use your banner to sell your expertise

The banner on your brokerage’s LinkedIn page is a great way to highlight your strengths.

Real Estate One has chosen to focus on being named one of the top places to work in Michigan. This will attract great agents on LinkedIn and show prospective clients that the company is caring and considerate:

Here are some other ideas to improve your marketing using your banner:

Include a call-to-action (CTA) to guide users on their next steps after visiting your business page.
Highlight the number of years you have been in business.
Tell people how many sales you make per year.
Explain what makes you different from other brokerages.

👉 Run LinkedIn Ads

Now that you have a business profile, you can run paid LinkedIn advertising, which can make your content reach even more potential clients.

If you have the budget, you might want to spend some money investing in paid advertising on LinkedIn.

According to research by the social media management tool, Hootsuite, LinkedIn ads reach 15.3% of the global population over 18 years old. Additionally, LinkedIn ad reach has grown by 8.4% in the last year and is continuing its climb.

This means there is massive potential for you to reach a large pool of prospective clients through paid advertising on this social media platform.

LinkedIn paid advertising offers precise audience targeting. When you run a paid ad, you select your desired audience from a range of demographics, including:

Location: You can target people in your area who may be looking to buy or sell real estate.

Job title and seniority: This allows you to target LinkedIn users who potentially have a higher income and can afford to purchase a property.

Age: LinkedIn allows you to target people in the age group most relevant to your real estate niche. For example, if you’re selling properties in a new development near a university, you may want to target younger users.

In the example below, commercial real estate company CBRE ran a LinkedIn Message Ads campaign to attract entrants to their photography competition, which was aimed at making their company more customer-centric:

Source: LinkedIn

Content to Share on Your LinkedIn Business Page

Once you’ve created your business page, it’s time to start creating valuable content to share.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn users typically prefer to see curated business-related content.

There are four main ways to post content on LinkedIn. They are:

Feed posts: These can be up to 3,000 characters long on your company’s page. Posts are flexible and can include images, slideshows, videos, and more.

Articles: These can be up to around 17,000 words long. However, the ideal length is about 600 words. Use this format when you want to cover topics that are too detailed for a post.

Events: This is the space to share information about and promote your upcoming externally-hosted events.

Documents: You can upload extended documents, such as explanations of real estate regulations in your state, and it’s also useful for sharing PDFs, like property brochures.

Here are some examples of the types of content that will help you generate leads on LinkedIn:

☑️ Skills and milestones

You can create feed posts that share the skills that make your real estate agents stand out.

This can include:

🔍 Being great at finding properties with unique features.

🔍 Staying within the client’s budget.

🔍 Excellent ability to close deals quickly.

For example, this post highlights an area of expertise that Marcus & Millichap’s senior vice president has in the hospitality industry:

You can also share important milestones for the brokerage. For example:

🏆 Number of successful sales.

🏆 Employee growth.

🏆 Number of years in the industry.

Showcasing your employees’ skills can help you gain authority and win the trust of potential clients because they will see that your brokerage is good at what it does.

Below is an excellent example from Surterre Properties of a post that showcases an employee at a brokerage:

☑️ Industry news

LinkedIn is a great place to show potential clients and other real estate agents that you have a finger on the pulse of the latest industry trends. Use it to keep them up to date on topics like:

🗞️ New government policies that impact real estate.

🗞️ The latest mortgage deals.

🗞️ Changes in the average house price.

Here’s a good example from Advent Properties. This post is effective because it gives their view on a challenge facing their target customer. It also compels readers to engage further by linking to a blog post that provides solutions to the problem:

You can also share compelling real estate content that you’ve discovered online that may be relevant to your audience.

For example, BarkerWest uses LinkedIn to share interesting blog posts about various topics in the real estate industry, like sustainable development:

This keeps followers interested in your content and motivates them to engage by sharing or liking relevant articles.

☑️ Guides and helpful content

As LinkedIn is used more for professional purposes, it is a great place to post guides and other useful content.

Most people only buy or sell a property a handful of times in their lifetime, so they’ll be unfamiliar with the process. Providing a guide on LinkedIn will be helpful for them and a great way to generate leads.

Below is a good example from Coldwell Banker. They have created an app that allows people to compare factors like property prices and general quality of life in different cities in America.

This allows them to either check what impact a move to a new city or state will have or to help them find their ideal location.

☑️ Publicize your events

Use your brokerage’s account to share news about upcoming events like open houses or educational seminars.

Here’s a good example from Finfellas. They are hosting a webinar on securing financing for property investments:

This is useful content for people looking to buy an investment property. It’s also great for generating leads because a webinar:

Captures contact details from the attendees and can target them with future marketing campaigns.
Allows the company to meet attendees digitally and build a closer relationship with them
Gives them an opportunity to showcase their expertise.
Can include calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout the webinar and use it to drive qualified leads.

Take a look at this guide to setting up events on LinkedIn and getting the most out of them.

☑️ Highlight employee performance

Similar to sharing skills, highlighting employee performance shows off your brokerage’s successes and your appreciation for your staff.

It also improves your employees’ morale, which makes them more productive and more likely to stay with your company. This helps retain valuable, experienced people.

These posts can be as simple as telling your clients about the person and what area they specialize in.

Other things you could highlight include:

👏 Closing their first deal.

👏 Making the most sales in a month.

👏 Receiving excellent customer feedback.

Here’s a good example from Maryann Dingam’s feed:

3 Social Media Trends You Need to Know about in 2024

Social media is constantly evolving, and it can be hard to keep up with what is trending and what isn’t.

Here are three trends that are not only popular right now but that will likely remain a core part of any LinkedIn strategy for years to come:

1. Authenticity

Your target audience sees hundreds of social media posts each day, most of which are highly promotional adverts.

Modern consumers are searching for authenticity from brands. This involves posting content that makes your brand more relatable and shows the human side of your business.

Users want to see the people behind your brand, read relatable real-life stories, and see how you’ve impacted people’s lives.

2. User-generated content (UGC)

User-generated content is created by people on social media and posted on their personal profiles.

Sharing this content to your business profile on LinkedIn can be highly effective as this is what audiences love to see.

There are two types of UGC you can leverage on your own social media:

UGC created about your brand

An example of this would be if someone posts a photograph of themselves receiving the keys to their new home that you’ve helped them buy. You could share this on your LinkedIn page to show the human side of your brand and how you can help potential clients find their dream homes.

UGC that is relevant to your brand

You can also share content to your LinkedIn page that hasn’t been directly created around your brand. For example, if someone has created a short video on tips for selling a home, you could share this on your page.

3. Less self-promotion

There’s nothing wrong with sharing the odd post that hard-sells your real estate services. However, constantly promoting your brand is no longer the best strategy on LinkedIn—or any other social media platform, for that matter.

Ensure that the content you share on LinkedIn is a healthy mix of promotional posts and insightful, helpful, useful, and valuable information.

Expand Your Brokerage’s Reach with LinkedIn

Joining LinkedIn can be the first step to generating real estate leads and finding new clients for your brokerage.

But hundreds of connections, referrals, and leads don’t appear overnight. You need to engage with people, create high-quality content, and grow your professional network consistently.

By following the tips and ideas in this article, you can make the most out of your LinkedIn profile.

Automate Your Real Estate Business So You Can Focus on LinkedIn Marketing and More

LinkedIn marketing will take time to get right, but it’s well worth the effort.

Give yourself the time and space you need to focus on excellent LinkedIn content and make connections by automating your real estate business.

Transaction management software is designed to take tedious and time-consuming tasks off your plate so that you can focus on effectively marketing your business and closing deals.

Paperless Pipeline is a purpose-built tool designed to automate your entire process and take the headache out of managing transactions, storing documents securely, and calculating commissions.

You can try Paperless Pipeline for free by visiting our website. We won’t tie you into any agreements or ask for your credit card information—that’s how confident we are that you’ll love our software.