Starting a real estate sales practice could be quite a risky business. Commonly, real estate agents would go days without closing a sale, receiving a phone call from a prospective home buyer, and all the time the expenses and bills keep coming. However, success at real estate generally results out of maintaining fundamentals, such as: knowing all the information about your area or property, getting home buyer leads, and developing real estate referrals.

A key aspects of real estate sales is word of mouth. Most property buyers looking for a new home, office or any real estate, usually approach family and friends to ask for recommendations for a good realtor. Also, most real estate owners or homeowners selling their real estate will go to the same network to ask for brokers who can help them sell a property. Unlike blockbuster lawyers or specialist doctors, there is no ready information available that calls out the skill and experience of a particular broker.

Word of mouth referrals to real estate agents are more significant because they can give direct contact to someone seriously considering buying a home. This gives a real estate agent access to his main target market, whereas regular advertisements through the media would have a very wide audience, but not the actual people wanting to buy homes or properties.

It is good that real estate referrals are such a “direct-to-market” lead. Because there is another aspect to the business: Property acquisitions are almost always the one most expensive purchase that a family would make. So, although referrals give you persons interested in buying a home or property, buying decisions are not always quick or a sure thing. The sheer cost, location, design, need for repairs or renovations, ease of mobility or transport, and a multitude of other decisions are considered before a buyer commits to a house.

But then, after all this consideration, when a broker manages to deliver a satisfactory sale to a buyer, then the broker will be awarded with a wider and perhaps more enthusiastic referral to other potential homebuyers. This would widen your referral network, and expand your file of potential contacts for referrals.

The high price of your product also means that even if only a fraction of your referrals translate to actual sales, the income and commission from these sales are already considerable. Maturing in the business will teach a broker the ways of cultivating and screening referrals to further improve sales and growth.

Therefore, we should understand what most successful realtors and brokers know -- that Real Estate is a business of relationship. Regardless of the current external or economic conditions, the most adaptable method of generating ready revenue is through building a real estate business by developing relationships to cultivate referrals.

Several strategies or techniques can be used to build a strong referral-based sales business. But when you look closely, all these require that you stay in touch with your network regularly, preferably once a month.

It would be most helpful to plan out different methods of maintaining contact with your network on a monthly basis. The different ways of keeping in touch are: personal visits, telephone calls, handwritten notes or short letters, periodic newsletters, news and updates through email, client thank-you cocktails or parties, sending postcards, sending birthday/special greeting cards, organizing house-warming events, promos or contests.