Millennial homebuyers have entered the housing market with a bang. Overtaking baby boomers as the largest generational group in America, they are now the largest group of home buyers. As a realtor, marketing to millennials should be one of your top priorities.
Understanding Millennial Homebuyers
Sometimes labeled “Generation Y,” Millennials are people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s. They surpassed 72.1 million people as a group in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. With the hard core of Millennials aged 26-41, many of them (or at least those who can afford it) are starting to buy their first home and invest in real estate for the first time.
How to connect with millennial real estate prospects
Millennials love their technology. They grew up with high-tech gadgets, desktop computers and smart devices. When marketing to millennials, be aware that they are more likely to respond to online marketing and communications efforts than to newspaper ads, flyers, and postcards. While you may have a physical office at your brokerage or home office, don’t forget to take advantage of a virtual office online as well. This will allow you to interact with potential millennial home buyers online, whether through social media, email, Skype, SMS alerts or other means.
Some of the most effective options for targeting millennial homebuyers (and others) are shareable blog posts and short videos. Today, many agents write their own blogs and post videos from their smartphones to social media sites that can be seen around the world. As more and more people “like” their home listing video tours or share them on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok or Instagram, the potential viewership growth rate is almost limitless.
Sales Technique for Marketing to Millennials
Tech-savvy millennials also tend to have very short attention spans. The famous AICDC (Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire, and Closure) sales technique — first developed by Dale Carnegie’s professional sales course decades ago — still applies to marketing to millennials. Try using the following AICDC sales strategy on millennial real estate prospects, keeping in mind that the very first step may be the most important.
- Attention: First, you need to grab or capture your prospect’s attention as quickly as possible.
- Interest: Once you’ve captured their attention, pique their interest by asking lots of probing questions to uncover their key needs and interests before offering solutions.
- Conviction: Next, gain the client’s belief, or strong favorable opinions, by offering them evidence to support beneficial claims, such as testimonials from past clients or exceptional housing prices.
- Desire: Then continue to stoke the customer’s “fire” (or desire) by showing them solid housing data numbers, inspiring videos, or great open houses that support your claims.
- Closing: A high percentage of sales professionals are reluctant to ask for the customer’s closing. But if you don’t ask, the customer cannot give you a very favorable “yes” answer after showing their interest, desire and belief in the product or service you offer.
Marketing to millennials can be tough, but it’s worth it. To grow your business successfully, remember to focus at least some of your real estate advertising efforts on this powerful target market.
McKissock apprenticeship is the nation’s first online real estate school, providing continuing education and professional development courses to hundreds of thousands of real estate agents nationwide. As part of the Colibri Real Estate family of leading educational brands, McKissock apprenticeshipas well as its sister schools Real Estate Express, Real Estate School, Allied schools, The Institute of Luxury Home Marketing, Schools of the Côte d’Or, The Rockwell Institute and Hondas Education Group, helps real estate professionals achieve lasting success at every stage of their real estate career. Learn more about mckissock.com/real estate.
