We recently participated in an event that put our real estate company in front of hundreds of graduate students relocating to Fort Worth in the summer. I prepared as much material as possible in advance for the event, but was also really eager to just get it under my belt. Planned in conjunction with a welcome orientation on campus, the housing fair was the last stop of the day for the students. We were armed with the following:

Pull Up Banner

Caricature Artist

Postcard

Landing Page

Facebook Contest

The pull up banner is a great way to reiterate branding. Since I plan on doing a lot of speaking events, this will get used frequently. I knew Ben the artist from a previous event I’d been to and he was wildly popular for us too. He drew pictures of people while they waited to talk to us or register on the computers. I made a postcard tailored to the event which included a unique landing page url. The landing page included a welcome page and unique tabs which displayed properties for lease and sale within a few miles of the campus for easy reference. We brought extra computers so people could check out the website and register for our contest. We ran a Facebook contest in which users who “liked” our page and wrote a comment like “I can’t wait to move to Fort Worth” were entered into our drawing. We gave away tickets to a Ben Folds concert (featuring the Fort Worth symphony orchestra), a $100 gift certificate to a local restaurant, and a $50 gift card to the nearby theater.

This event was fun and I’ll definitely do more of them.  A majority of the people went for the apartment communities, but we were still able to engage with dozens of potential home buyers and renters. Most people had basic questions about the neighborhoods and average prices of homes in the area and our conversations progressed from there. I’m going to bring a substantial amount of print material for the April event as I noticed a lot of people just wanted to take information and then leave. I’m also going to bring a TV and use air play with the Ipad to demo our IDX live so a group of people can watch. This is the kind of event where you talk to someone for a few minutes, hand them a card and say “Here’s my card, call me when you’re ready to start looking at homes.” Honestly, I would much prefer an event which was specifically designed for housing so that I could spend more time talking to people and answering questions.

There is tremendous opportunity for the real estate agent or brokerage to participate in events like this one. We are already working with several people that we met and I think with a few tweaks we can make the next one even more successful.