If you’re a real estate professional, you can teach real estate courses online. In today’s LMScast Chris Badgett will help you get started with an overview of the top 3 online courses residential real estate brokers and agency owners use for business growth.
People are changing the way they buy and sell properties, and the internet is driving that change. If you understand the importance of the internet, social media, and web presence you can help other agents and brokers catch up.
Offering online real estate courses will generate leads, build relationships, and establish you as a market leader. You can offer free courses or charge a fee. Your first step is to decide which sales activity you want to focus on. Inbound activity involves creating content, while outbound is about prospecting and gathering contacts, and relationship activity involves scaling those vital connections.
You can create a course for people selling their own home without an agent. A for sale by owner (FSBO) course will establish you as an expert who is willing to share your knowledge. You’ll also gain clients who decide not to sell their home themselves once they see what’s involved in the sales process. They’re likely to hire you because they took your course and that connection is made.
First time buyers also need guidance through what will likely be the most expensive purchase of their lives. By offering a course to help them you aren’t directly soliciting their business, but you may gain it anyway through sharing your real estate buying wisdom.
A third approach could be an in-depth course on selling for maximum profit, covering staging, repairs, marketing, presentation, and everything else they need to do to aggressively sell for the highest possible return.
These courses don’t need to be large-scale projects or take forever to put together. The main thing is to get it done and available. You’ll help other people by teaching them some of what you know, and you’ll sharpen your own skills in the process. Plus, creating your courses with the beginner in mind will help you better communicate with your clients on every level. Your courses can even be a teaching tool for your own organization.
Finally, you’ll need a delivery system for your courses known as a learning management system (LMS). Our LifterLMS course development platform is a great choice, and our Boost service will get your courses online in as little as five days. Go to LifterLMS Real Estate Courses for more information on the top 3 online courses residential real estate brokers and agency owners use for business growth.
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Episode Transcript
Chris: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking about how you can use online courses to grow a real estate business. If you’re a real estate broker, an agency owner, or entrepreneur-minded real estate sales professional, you can use online courses to help grow and survive in this day and age, where the consumer buying behavior of property and how people approach sales and purchase real estate is rapidly changing with the internet.
I think it’s important to note that there’s a lot of real estate players who are kind of old-school in how they operate. They may not be leveraging the power of the internet, social media, having a web property that is desirable and attractive to their market, and they may be resting on their laurels of past relationships that they’ve had with their market and their established market share. But it’s important if you’re up and coming or looking at long-term survival in real estate business to look at new and interesting ways to grow, generate new leads, secure your position in the market, and so on.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about how you can use online courses as a method to generate more leads, to position you as a market leader, to build relationships. In sales, as we know, there’s three types of sales activity or marketing. There’s inbound, where we create content. Creating an online course is definitely about creating content and attracting leads. Then there’s prospecting or outbound, where we go out and we try to elicit relationships in business and that sort of thing. If you’re going to prospect, it’s nice to have something to point them to besides raising your hand and just making a direct offer to work together. The other one, of course, is relationships. We all only have so many hours in the day, so if we’re going to … And you can only scale your time so much, so if you want to scale your relationships, it’s important to look at ways to use technology and things like online courses to do that.
I’m going to give three examples of online courses that you could use to grow a real estate business, and it really checks all the boxes of that inbound, outbound, and relationships methodology for sales. The first course I want to talk about is a course for for sale by owners, or FSBOs, as we call them. Why would you ever want to make a course for someone who’s thinking, “Hey, I don’t need a real estate company or a agent or a professional. I’m just going to sell it myself.” Well, the answer is simple. You really want to give before you take, so giving back to your community by taking your time to help educate people who are trying to sell property by themselves is an important step. It can build relationships. You’re creating content.
You can reach out to people who are obviously trying to sell by themselves and prospect to them and be like, “Hey, I don’t want to try to convince you to hire me to have my company represent you. I just want you to know about this great, free resource. Check out my online course, For Sale by Owner: How to do it successfully.” What that does, a lot of things. Maybe if someone’s new to the for sale by owner activity, they’ll realize, “Oh, this is actually a little more complicated. Maybe I need to hire a professional.” Who’s that going to be? Well, maybe it’s the guy who helped me understand, or educate me, on the process. It’s a positioning tool in that way.
It also just builds goodwill and relationship in the community. It also really helps you, as a business owner, sharper your saw in what it takes to sell property because when you’re teaching, basically, a non-professional, someone who doesn’t have their realtor license or has gone through specific real estate sales training, you really have to start with the beginner’s mind and teach that person how to sell property, all the steps, soup to nuts, A to Z.
That’s why a for sale by owner … Those are just some reasons why that course is one that you should make. You don’t have to take forever to do that. You could create the video content for that course on your iPhone while you’re sitting at an open house, just as an example, or if you’re a little more moneyed up or have resources, you could bring in a film crew and really create a nice, polished video course, and create PDF documents and downloads to aid that for sale by owner.
The next one is a first time home buyer course. This is where you’re educating the newbie, “This is my first time buying a house.” People are often a little overwhelmed; they’re stressed. We’re talking big dollar amounts. Obviously, the purchase of real estate is usually the most expensive purchase of somebody’s life. There’s a lot to learn about the industry with mortgages and inspections and what to expect working with realtors, and so on, that just like the for sale by owner, when you educate the first-time home buyer in a way that you’re not just pitching your services, but really trying to help them understand the process and what it takes to buy the home and things to watch out for, things to do to position yourself in a good position for the negotiation.
These things are really important, and when you do that and really give your all to helping that first-time home buyer, you’re positioning yourself as the expert. You’re building goodwill. You’re creating some nice marketing content. Then the really cool thing about the first-time home buyer, as well, is they’re often younger, which means they’ve got a lot of life ahead of them. They’ve got friends who are just coming to their first-time home buying situation, usually. There’s a lot of potential for future referrals of not necessarily directly to your business to represent that buyer, but just to your brand for the go-to source to understand the home buying process, which then positions you for the future, where you may or may not get the client, but it’s a great way to get back to your market and become top of mind when someone is considering hiring a buyer’s agent to represent them.
The third one is just to jump over to the other side of the real estate equation. I’m just talking in terms of residential real estate, here. How to sell for maximum profit, sort of like a first-time “how to sell your house” course with a focus on getting it done, getting it done effectively, and for the best potential profit outcome for the seller. There’s a lot of things, as we know as professionals, that go into selling property. There’s concepts around staging. There’s some repairs that we may want to do before we put it on the market. There’s some repairs we may not want to do before we put it on the market. Creating good description, the importance of photography and video tours, and all these things to help educate that seller about what needs to happen to sell that property.
Just like for all the others, we’re creating good content that educates our market. It helps us be top of mind. It helps us, as sales professionals, position ourselves as experts, sharpen our saw on what it takes to sell a home, and it could even be a teaching tool for other agents in our office, like, “This is how you can help your selling clients get the best value for their property,” and so on.
Just to recap, if you’re a real estate business owner, a real estate broker, or a real estate agency owner, as they like to say in Australia, there’s there online courses that you should consider making. There’s more, but if you’re in the residential real estate market, the first one is a for sale by owner course, a first-time home buyer course, and a how to sell for maximum profit course. Like I mentioned, you can create video lessons around this. Break it down. Build a real process; don’t just do an information dump and like a two-hour video or something like that. Really build an online course with multimedia content, PDFs, text, images, audios, downloadable things to help them, and package that … That’s the raw materials you need for an online course.
Then what you need, is you need an online course delivery system, or a learning management system, as it’s known. That’s one of the things we did, is we help people who, they’re the experts, and they’ve got their course materials together, but they really need help with that whole piece of getting it online either as a paid course or as a free course, as a web property that people can go to to get that course. It’s not about just slapping a bunch of stuff on YouTube. You really want a true online course delivery system.
If you’re interested in having a professional like us help you with that, I’d encourage you to check out LifterLMS.com/real-estate-courses. That’s LifterLMS.com/real-estate-courses. That’s going to enable you to … We could launch your site within five days. That’s what we do, and if you go check out that page there, I’ve got some more information for you about how all that works. Yeah, just go to LifterLMS.com/real-estate-courses if you’re interested in finding out more. I do wish you the best in your real estate business. As the internet continues to evolve …
