Real estate business is the business of dealing with properties, consisting of land and its improvements. This means it includes dealing with the buying and selling of buildings, roads, utility systems, fixtures, and structures. When you have property rights, it means you have a title of ownership for a land and its natural resources, plants, animals, minerals, and water.
Before talking about how to start a real estate business, let’s describe the different categories of real estate.
Categories of a Real Estate Business
A real estate business involves separate types of properties. Each type of real estate has its own unique purpose. The main real estate categories are as follows.
- Land
- Residential
- Commercial
- Industrial
1. Land
Land forms the basis of all categories of property in a real estate business. It refers to a property that’s currently undeveloped. In other words, it refers to a vacant piece of land. Developers and constructors acquire land and combine it with other types of properties for rezoning it. This increases its density and increases its value.
2. Residential
Residential real estate comprises a housing for families, individuals, and other groups of people. This is the most common category involved in a real estate business. This is also sometimes referred to as the asset class because even people who are not running a real estate business are familiar with residential properties.
Within this category, there are further sub-categories. Residential housing comes in the form of single-family homes, condominiums, apartments, townhouses, bungalows, and other forms of living arrangements.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Commercial
Commercial property includes the land and buildings that businesses use to carry out operations. Examples of commercial real estate include shopping malls, office buildings, individual stores, medical centers, hotels, and parking lots.
4. Industrial
This refers to the land and buildings used by industrial companies. They are used for building factories for producing goods, providing logistics and warehousing services, carrying out mechanical productions, conducting research and development, and offering transportation. This category of real estate business requires a heavy capital expenditure budget.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Now that we know the types of properties involved in a real estate business, let’s discuss and understand how to start a real estate company, and after that, how to grow your real estate business.
Factors to Consider for Starting a Real Estate Business
Before starting a real estate business, you need to be mindful of the following factors.
1. Select a Niche
Real estate business can be very vast. You need to choose the type or category of real estate you’ll be dealing with. It’s preferable to also specify your niche even further. Decide the kind of people you’ll be targeting as your customers. For example, if you plan to buy and sell bungalows, you’ll be targeting well-settled families or slightly older couples. If you’re looking into dealing with small apartments, your customers will be younger couples who are still struggling in their careers and looking for a low-cost place to stay.
2. Do Some Research
It’s not a good idea to start any business without doing proper research on the industry and market trends. The best is to conduct a SWOT analysis to foresee your chances of getting success. Real estate business can be very lucrative, but not if it turns out to be a complete failure. When you’re dealing with so many players in the market, you need to respond to the situations that turn up faster than your competitors. This requires you to do your homework before stepping into the field.
Check out how real estate business trends change in your economy; which factors affect the prices the most; and how other players handle the lost opportunities and expand their income stream. You might as well do some more research on how to start a real estate business.
3. Secure the Capital Money
You would need a certain amount of money to invest in the beginning for starting a real estate business. Make sure you have the funds available and accessible to you. The amount of money you’ll need depends on how big you want to start. For instance, if you just want to act like a real estate agent, you wouldn’t need any capital to invest at all. But then you won’t be making big amounts of money either. As an agent, you will only earn a commission on every property sale you make.
But if you’re looking to buy houses and then sell them at a profit, you would definitely need the capital required to make the purchases. Keep in mind that a real estate business is not like running a retail store where products are easily bought and sold. Real estate takes time to sell. It is different from the consumer goods industry.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Get a Team of Experts
A real estate business usually relies on a team of real estate agents. When you purchase real estate, your agents will get you clients. These agents must have a dynamic personality who can blend in with different families to influence them to buy the property that’s offered to them.
Good real estate agents also have good connections and leads, which enable them to close deals faster. That’s why it’s important for you to have access to real estate experts before starting a real estate business.
5. Always be Ready for Change
When you start a real estate company, you’ll realize that this industry keeps revolving constantly. There are changes in the prices, in the home decor, and in the way people deal when buying or selling property. It is best for you to be always ready to see these changes so that you can adapt to the market environment easily. Other factors that will cause changes in the environment of your real estate business include the economy, natural calamities (if any), stock exchange, forex, and more. It is also important for your team of experts to be dynamic enough to be able to handle the changes.
6. Build a Website
During this pandemic, the best way to start any business is to launch it online via a website. The same you can do to start a real estate company. Creating a website is very easy these days if you build it on one of the website building platforms that don’t require you to have any coding or programming skills. One such platform is Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly
To build a basic website on Strikingly, you just need to follow these steps.
- Sign up for your free Strikingly account.
- Select from the numerous website templates we have.
- Use our drag-and-drop feature to add your website content.
- Promote your website and your real estate business via digital marketing tactics.
How to Grow Your Real Estate Business Through Your Strikingly Website?
There are actually many ways to promote your real estate business through the website.
Create social media pages to represent your initiative, and insert social media icons into your website’s footer. This will integrate all your marketing platforms with each other. Many of our users do this.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Social media marketing is more effective these days than billboards, television ads, or any other traditional form of marketing. If you can get an influencer with thousands of followers to work with, you can grow your real estate business very fast. Influencers help in spreading the word about your brand and services and charge very small amounts of money in return. Influencer marketing is a quick and cost-effective way to grow a startup company.
You can also add a blog section on your Strikingly website, and post articles there about the real estate industry. This will help you build a reputation as a real estate expert, which will in turn make it easier for you to get clients for your business. Posting articles about your business also helps in driving traffic to your site. If you make guest posts on other blogs, you can insert backlinks to your website in them, so that the audience of those blogs has a chance of visiting your site by clicking on those links.
To add a blog section on your website, click on ‘Add New Section’ and select ‘Simple Blog’.
Image taken from Strikingly
Don’t forget to add a signup form on your site, so that visitors can leave their email address there that you can use as your email list. You can send newsletters to your subscribers on a regular basis to keep them reminded about your real estate business.
When you combine these strategies with some effort to enhance your site’s SEO, your business will have a high chance of success within the first few months. To enhance your site’s search rankings, write a good site description and add meta tags to all the web pages. Use a combination of text, images, and videos in your web content.
It is important to keep an eye on your website’s statistics. Strikingly allows you to add your website to Google Analytics, so that you can have access to more comprehensive data. This data can be used to restrategize your marketing plan and retarget any advertisements you choose to run.
In case you face any issues, you can contact our support team anytime through our live chat feature. We are here to help you in every possible way to make your website building and maintaining experience better. We look forward to serving you in the long run, and are happy to be there for you on every step along the way.
