Have you ever wondered what a typical real estate agent sees in their email every day?  If you did, make sure you ad property blasts to your list.  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get at least 4 emails from agents in town telling me about their great listing and how it would be perfect for my buyers.  I’ve been trying to understand this phenomenon for a while now and here’s what I’ve come up with.

It Started With Real Estate Coaching

Many, many years ago, real estate coaches would tell their real estate agents that the best way to get that house listing sold is to tell other agents about it.  The thought was that they didn’t know your listing was available, and since they control the buyers, if they didn’t know, the house couldn’t be sold.  I think this would be relevant sometime around 1985.  This was well before the internet and Zillow didn’t exist.

Potential Home Sellers Believe It

Let’s say shrewd Mr. Real Estate Agent is in a listing presentation with Mrs. Home Seller.  When Mr. Real Estate Agent says, “Mrs. Home Seller, if you list with us we are going to personally email every real estate agent in the MLS to sell your home”, it sounds very impressive.  For one, it sounds like Mr. Real Estate Agent knows everyone in town.  It also sounds like every other real estate agent in town is looking forward to receiving this listing message from Mr. Real Estate Agent.  The fact is, real estate agents get so many emails, no one is looking at your listing.

Real Estate Marketers Needed Something To Sell

At some point, when people figured out that sending mass emails was a good idea, some enterprising real estate agent decided to hatch a plan.  They would offer a service that would allow agents to email their listings to every real estate agent all at once.  A fee could be charged for this wonderful invention and it would get that agent out of having to sell real estate 24/7.  If you know that real estate coaches are pushing the idea that you need to get to buyer’s agents, and you know that potential home sellers might actually believe that, it’s a pretty good bet that there will be a marketplace of real estate agents looking for that product.

So, we have three ideas on why we see a plethora of real estate listing blasts directed right at random real estate agents, and they are all pretty good ideas, so what’s the change?  Why are email property blasts irrelevant in today’s real estate marketplace.

Email Is Free, But No One Is Reading It, Because It’s Free

Remember “you’ve got mail” from AOL?  Wasn’t that awesome to know that someone mailed you electronically and you didn’t even need a stamp?  That was somewhere around 1992.  Twenty plus years later, and our email inboxes are overflowing with all kinds of garbage.  This is in spite of the fact that there are plenty of spam laws on the books.  When you buy a product, you are added to their email list.  When you inquire about a home or a car or a loan, you are automatically added to someone’s email list.  I’ve written about my email approach in the past.  I still struggle with it.  Half of the email you get goes directly into spam, and it’s still too much email!

Potential Home Buyers Now Lead Home Search

Back before the internet home search portals, real estate agents had all the information on every home available.  This is why it was so important to get your listing in front of agents who had buyers.  In 2019, I’ve found that home buyers lead the search 9 times out of 10.  With my own home buyers, I will often get a text or email or call about a listing that just came to market directly from my buyer!  They are excited and want to use real estate agents as a counselor to buy the property, not necessarily find it.

I personally don’t use email blasts in my marketing of homes for sale.  If a buyer really needs that sort of marketing, I’ll do it, but I just know that it doesn’t sell houses.  When an email listing does get through the spam folder, I just delete them.  I never seem to have the right buyer for the property that is being emailed about.

One idea that I think makes perfect sense is if an agent for the seller of a home needs to get some information out there about a property that I otherwise wouldn’t have known.  For example, let’s say a house has been sitting on the market for a number of days, and the seller is now offering a bonus to the buyer agent who can get a deal done.  That’s something worth emailing about. Another way I could see emailing of listings that would make sense is if an buyer agent was known from working in a particular area of town. Then they should get an email, provided it’s relevant.  As an example, I constantly get emails about properties for sale at the Lake Of The Ozarks.  I don’t have any buyers in St. Louis for those properties, and if I had a buyer actively looking in that area, I have real estate agents at the lake that I would refer my buyers to.

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