As a real estate agent, your willingness to work for clients and professional understanding of the market is critical, but pairing this expertise with an engaged network is fundamental to long-term success.

Everyone’s professional network is different, but as a new real estate agent, most people start with existing family and friends. Once that pool dries up, most start asking that personal network to share their work in hopes of connecting with that first collection of clients looking to buy/sell a home. This first layer of networking provides an solid start, but isn’t enough to sustain a lasting career in real estate.

To go beyond this initial group of personal connections, most agent’s shift gears and work towards building awareness outside of their immediate network.

In our connected era, there are endless ways to expand your connectivity online, so that’s an obvious place to start, but even in today’s world of websites and social media, the value of in-person interactions should never be overlooked.

Networking and other community-driven events can expand the amount of people you’re connected with, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be actively looking for a realtor. The other fact is most people already know a realtor, so although your engaged network may be thickening, it may not lead to immediate sales necessary to keep building.

For those looking to actively connect with people who are truly in the market for a new home, open houses offer one of the most obviously opportunities to generate meaningful leads that when managed right, can lead to career-building sales. When people walk through the door of an open house, they’re basically screaming, “we’re in the market”!

Hosting open houses takes time and yes, not everyone who walks through the door will be a qualified lead, but if you’re consistently placing yourself within this opportunity zone, you will expand your engaged network with people who not only understand your services, but need to work with you to accomplish their home buying/selling goals.

This is a fundamental reason why we built OpenOpen. This simple open house scheduling platform unlocks real estate agent’s ability to efficiently host more open houses.

If you’re ready to generate more leads to sell more real estate, talk to your brokerage and let’s set you up with a free 30-day trial today!