Wondering how to generate real estate leads during the holidays? Follow our 5 best Halloween real estate marketing ideas for agents to grow your business in the fall of 2019.
Now that summer is over and the housing market is expected to slow down, real estate agents should get particularly creative to beat the tough competition and succeed with real estate lead generation. Halloween is one of the best times of the year to experiment with your marketing strategy and try unique real estate marketing ideas.
To help you out with your Halloween 2019 real estate marketing plan, we’ve talked to a few of the top real estate agents and brokers in the US housing market as well as some marketing experts to see what has worked for them throughout the years.
So, pull your favorite candy over, light up your Jack O’Lantern, and enjoy our top 5 Halloween real estate marketing ideas for agents in 2019:
1. Themed Open House
A Halloween themed open house is the most popular of all real estate marketing ideas to capitalize on this spooky holiday. It was pointed about by nearly all agents whom we talked to. Katie Jones, a real agent and investor with Agape Investing, sees holding a Halloween open house as a great way to increase foot traffic to your property listing. After all, everyone is out on Halloween.
Depending on your budget and the level of Halloween real estate marketing efforts you are willing to put, there is a range of things you can do. For example, Brad Pauley, Broker and Owner of Pauley Presley Realty, suggests going all in and organizing a haunted open house. In addition to staging the home for sale with cobwebs, you should also dress up in a spooky outfit.
However, you don’t have to go over the top to attract new real estate clients on Halloween 2019. Sometimes something as simple as providing candy and decorated cookies and placing some décor inside and outside the house for sale can be enough, according to Ashley Baskin, a licensed real estate agent who serves on the Advisory Board of Home Life Digest. Michael Kelczewski, a Realtor with Brandywine Fine Properties Sotheby’s International Realty, emphisizes the need for all open house-related real estate marketing ideas to make parents with children feel comfortable as any holiday-related method of drawing attention to a listing registers psychologically with real estate leads.
Related: 10 Open House Ideas for Real Estate Agents
Jenna Muir, a connected home specialist for Reviews.org, shares another tip for organizing a Halloween open house. She advises real estate agents to play a Halloween movie in the living room as a great way to break the ice with potential homebuyers.
Regardless of which open house idea you decide to go with, don’t forget some real estate branding. You can staple your business card to the candy that you are giving out to children, or you can design and make your own candy bags with the logo of your real estate business.
2. Halloween Themed Home Staging
Another top Halloween real estate marketing idea for agents is related to staging your houses for sale. Ben Mizes, CEO of Clever Real Estate, says that selling in the fall, especially during Halloween, is very different from selling in the summer or winter. One way to generate new real estate leads during this tricky time of the year is to stage your homes for sale with Halloween-inspired decorations in order to create a festive atmosphere.
Depending on whether home staging is at the center of your Halloween real estate marketing strategies or you have other things planned out as well, you can decide how crazy to go with it. Once again, you can choose anything from a fully haunted house to a few spider webs, carved pumpkins, and some candles.
Related: 20 Home Staging Tips for Real Estate Agents
Once you have decorated your real estate listings in the spirit of Halloween, there are a few different things you can do with them. First of all, don’t forget to hire a photographer and take some photos of your newly staged home. These will make for great Halloween real estate postcards which you can send by mail or email to your real estate prospects. We will come back to these real estate marketing ideas in a bit. Second, you should definitely organize as many house showings as possible while you have the home staged for Halloween. While a Halloween-decorated house for sale will be particularly attractive for families with small children, all your real estate leads will appreciate the extra effort you put into getting into the holiday spirit and will be more inclined to buy a home from you. Third, related to #1 of our marketing ideas for real estate agents, you can host an open house on Halloween. The whole neighborhood will be out with parents accompanying their younger kids for trick or treat.
In addition to handing out free candy (which is a must for Halloween), you should also come up with some free gifts that will add up to your unique real estate marketing ideas and make you stand out from the rest of the crowd giving away free chocolates. Make sure everything is branded with your name, real estate agency logo, and contact information. These real estate marketing materials should help with your long term lead generation strategy too.
3. Halloween Events
If you want to get really creative with your Halloween real estate marketing strategy, here are a few ideas for you.
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Host a Halloween Office Party
Donovan Hosch, a real estate agent at McAtee Realty, suggests to hold a Halloween event at your office and offer some valuable (not money-wise) items to your real estate clients to encourage them to show up. Moreover, your own colleagues and staff will appreciate your efforts as they also take part in the fun.
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Organize a Halloween-Related Contest
Engaging the local community in your real estate market is an important part of your long term marketing and lead generation efforts. Shannon King, a licensed real estate agent at Island Living Homes, proposes a pumpkin carving contest for your clients. An efficient way to organize this is to make it part of your real estate social media marketing strategy. For example, you can have people post photos on your real estate company’s Facebook page and the community votes for the best-looking or most original Jack O’Lantern. Alternatively, you can have a live contest in front of your office the day of Halloween or the weekend before.
Real estate agent Ashley Baskin has another idea for engaging the community through your Halloween real estate marketing activities. She suggests to post on your social media channels that you are having a house decorating contest with a gift for the winner. You can use this opportunity to connect with the community on social media and gather email addresses of potential real estate leads. And it all makes sense since you are in the property business after all!
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Hold a Halloween Costume Parade
Shannon King has more Halloween-related real estate marketing tips for agents. In her experience, hosting a neighbourhood Halloween Costume Parade with music and judging for the best costume can do miracles for your real estate business.
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Sponsor a Halloween Dog Parade
After all, the sky is the limit when it comes to real estate marketing strategies of agents, whether related to holidays or not. For instance, Christine Kim, President of Climb Real Estate, shares that they host an annual Halloween Dog Parade for their community in Northern California’s Mission Bay. If that’s not among the most unique real estate marketing ideas for Halloween, we don’t know what is!
4. Email Marketing Campaign
While having all these live events on the occasion of Halloween is a great marketing strategy for real estate agents, they might not always be a feasible option. Let’s face it, the life of an agent is busy enough as is with generating real estate leads, communicating with prospects, appraising homes, closing deals, and everything else. In this case, some of the more traditional real estate marketing approaches might work out too.
Ashley Baskin reminds real estate agents to bring the suspicion of Halloween to their email marking campaign. She recommends trying a drip marketing campaign in which each email ends with a fun Halloween riddle that provides suspense on what the next email will contain.
Some of the most popular digital real estate marketing tips for agents for Halloween also include sending out the professional photos of your Halloween staged homes for sale which we mentioned above. These unique Halloween real estate postcards can give a new twist to some of your older listings. According to Michael Kelczewski, themed marketing campaigns are a great way to spruce up stale listings before the holiday winter season.
Related: 6 Real Estate Agent Tips for Surviving the Holiday Season
Shannon King shares that her real estate team includes a list of all haunted houses in the local housing market along with a list of the best neighborhoods to trick or treat in their October newsletter.
Worse goes to worse, if you are not feeling particularly creative this Halloween 2019, you can still send a simple “Happy Halloween” email using a readily available email template to your old real estate clients and new real estate leads. This should not take more than a few minutes to set up.
5. Halloween Direct Marketing
Despite all new trends in real estate marketing, agents should not forget about the old strategies such as direct mail. Megan Meade, Marketing Specialist at Software Path, considers Halloween to be a great excuse to use a traditional approach to reach out to new real estate clients as well as to provide existing clients with some recognition in an eye-catching way. It can be something as simple and old as sending them trick or treat candy with an offer of what “tricks” your real estate company has to offer when buying or selling a home. This could include a little discount or a special offer too.
Among his real estate marketing tips for agents, Khabeer Rockley, Director of The 5% Institute, recommends a lumpy mail strategy over other Halloween real estate marketing ideas. His suggestion is based on the sad fact that people – including potential real estate leads – stand over the garbage bin when opening regular email, throwing out anything that looks like a sales pitch. Lumpy packages which contain an item in an unbranded envelope get people curious and willing to open the package to see what’s inside. Real estate agents could place a cheap item such as fake vampire teeth to help their potential clients dress up for Halloween. Alternatively, they could have an education piece – for example, 5 tips to help you dress up your home for Halloween. This little something must finish with a call to action including your real estate business’s phone number and email address as well as a gift such as a free appraisal offer.
Similar to any other Halloween real estate marketing ideas for agents, direct mail can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Ashley Baskin says that both Halloween-themed real estate marketing flyers and sophisticated goody bags left in a client’s mailbox or on the homeowner’s doorstep could work.
With these 5 Halloween real estate marketing ideas for agents, you should be all set to capitalize on the profits which this holiday offers. The main one constitutes an opportunity to generate new real estate leads to keep your business going in the winter season.
Once you’ve generated leads from your Halloween marketing campaign, make sure to qualify them faster than ever with the online tools which our Mashboard offers. To start your 14-day free trial with Mashvisor and subscribe to our product with a 20% discount after, click here.