A real estate newsletter is still one of the best ways a Realtor can engage, educate, and sell to their audience in 2023. In fact, according to data from HubSpot, 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. Of course, the challenge for busy real estate agents and brokers is coming up with new content ideas to engage their email list every week.
To help, I put together this list of 35 proven real estate newsletter ideas so you can spend less time brainstorming and more time selling real estate. I’ll also show you nine resources to get “done-for-you” content for your newsletter and wrap up with my tips and tools to make sure people read all of your engaging content.
Engaging Real Estate Newsletter Ideas
Since most of your audience has the attention span of a flea, the first goal of your real estate newsletter should be to keep them engaged. Focus on fun content like a wrap-up of cool neighborhood pictures from Instagram.
1. Open House Highlight
Showcase a few notable open houses happening this weekend. Brand-new listings tend to do best here, but price reductions, waterfront properties, and vintage homes do well too. Of course, if you have your own open houses, promote them here!
The #1 Open House Checklist Top Agents Use to Get Amazing Results
2. Local Business Spotlight
Everyone loves to be in the know about hot new restaurants, bars, or shops opening in their neighborhood. Highlighting them in your real estate newsletter will help you show off your local knowledge and give you an excuse to meet and network with local business owners.
3. Local Event Highlights
Including a calendar of upcoming events in your farm area is great, but people also love to see highlights from events that already happened. If you don’t have your own pics, head to social media or ask your friends to send you fun pictures from events that recently happened.
4. Meme Monday
Memes are fast becoming one of the most popular ways big businesses communicate with their audience. Of course, you don’t want to include too many in your newsletter. Including a meme at the bottom of your newsletter every Monday and calling it “Meme Monday” will do the trick. Never made a meme before? Canva makes it really easy to get started.
108 Real Estate Memes Realtors Can’t Stop Sharing
5. Fact Fridays
Including fun facts in your newsletter is another great way to engage your audience. Like memes, you don’t want to overdo it. Include one fact at the bottom of your real estate newsletter each Friday and call it “Fact Friday.”
6. Throwback Thursdays
You can also use the popular social media trope of “Throwback Thursday” in your newsletter and include vintage pictures of your farm area at the bottom of your newsletter each week.
7. Local Charity Spotlights
If you want to show off how much you care about your local community, highlighting a local charity in your newsletter will go a long way. Even better, it might just encourage your audience to volunteer or donate.
8. Local Instagram Highlights
Are there any fun trends or viral photographs from your farm area or city? Include them in your newsletter with a link and shoutout to the creator.
13 Real Estate Instagram Posts That Attract Clients (+ Canva Templates)
9. Home Improvement Tips
Since you want to reach homeowners with your real estate newsletter, including home improvement tips is a great idea. You can either come up with them yourself or create an infographic from articles on Home Depot’s DIY section or sites like Houzz.
📌 Pro Tip
You can also use Canva to create top-notch infographics.
10. Budget Interior Design Tips
Another topic many homeowners love (but still struggle with) is interior design. Everyone wants a beautiful home like they see on HGTV or Pinterest, but few know how to design one—especially on a budget. Curate this kind of content from sites like Houzz, Pinterest, or The Spruce and link out to it from your email.
11. Landscaping Tips
Landscaping can also be a struggle for homeowners. Including some good tips in an infographic will help them get the hang of it. Bonus points if you make your content seasonal.
The 29 Best Curb Appeal Ideas for Every Budget (Yes, Even Yours!)
12. House Hacks
I think of these as fun and thrifty ideas, like making your own window washing solution from vinegar and dish soap. You can summarize them quickly, link out to articles or social media posts, or create infographics.
13. Local Contractor Reviews
Did your client have a great experience with a contractor you recommended? Highlight that in your real estate newsletter. This will help your audience find trustworthy service providers and help the contractor get more leads. A win-win.
14. ‘This or That’ Content
This is a super popular trend on social media that you can use in your newsletter. Here’s one example of how to do it: Include two pictures of kitchens of very different styles and ask your audience to say which one they like better. But don’t stop at kitchens! This strategy can be used in lots of creative ways.
15. Polls & Quizzes
Polls and quizzes are another proven way that Realtors build engagement on social media. Including them in your newsletter can work too. Just make them super short and focused on real estate.
16. Highlight Beautiful New Listings
This one’s a no-brainer. Anyone who signs up for your newsletter has at least some interest in real estate, so they will naturally love to see stunning or noteworthy listings. Waterfront homes, unusual listings, or property that sold for a very high or low price will definitely be of interest.
📌 Pro Tip
If you want to make sure your newsletter actually gets read, use a full-featured and affordable email marketing platform like Mailchimp. Mailchimp will save you time, stress, and money with free templates and a suite of marketing tools to help you send better emails and track your results.
17. Local Market Updates
This is the data and analysis that much of your audience signed up for. Just make sure to present the content in an engaging way, maybe with an infographic.
Hot Off the Press: What Today’s Housing Numbers Mean for You & Your Clients
18. Interest Rate Watch
With the housing market so uncertain recently, updates on where experts think interest rates are headed and why will be very useful information for anyone even thinking of buying or selling a house.
19. Quarterly Market Wrap-up
How your local market performed over the last quarter is crucial data for your audience. It might not tell them where the market is headed, but it will tell them exactly how it performed, which is almost as important. Sign up for your local Realtor association’s market updates so you’re among the first to get the numbers.
20. Yearly Market Wrap-up
A yearly market wrap-up is another great way to keep long-term subscribers interested in your real estate newsletter. Homeowners stay in their homes for an average of five years, but a summary of the last year’s performance might help them decide whether or not to make a move.
21. Interview With a Mortgage Broker
If you have a lot of potential first-time buyers on your list, an interview with a mortgage broker is a great way to educate them, and hopefully give you fewer questions to answer if they eventually become leads!
Does the Market Hate Everyone or Just My First-time Homebuyers?
22. Interview With a Real Estate Lawyer
Lawyers have a wealth of knowledge that your audience might want to know. If you can get a local real estate lawyer to break down complicated housing questions, your audience will love you for it.
23. Answer Real Estate FAQs
Think of this one as interviewing yourself. What’s something that almost every new client asks? You may be able to answer enough common questions that any leads you get from your email list won’t need to ask them when you first meet!
24. Define Real Estate Terms
Giving quick, easy-to-digest definitions of common but misunderstood real estate terms is a great way to create more educated leads! You can define common terms like an FHA loan, or more obscure ones like a 1031 exchange.
131 Real Estate Terms & Definitions Your Clients Expect You to Know in 2023
25. Local Government News
Sometimes even small changes in local governance can have a big impact on real estate. Zoning changes, modifications to the building code, or the construction of new parks or highways can mean big price swings for homeowners and buyers.
26. Bust Common Buying & Selling Myths
This is a fun way to educate your audience and make it seem like a game. Think up common mistruths you hear about buying or selling real estate and use your expertise and data to correct them.
27. Sneak Peeks of Your New Listings
Have a fresh new listing that’s about to go up on the MLS? Including a sneak peek preview in your real estate newsletter will help drum up interest. You can also announce price drops to boost a listing that’s been sitting on the market.
28. Highlight Your Just Solds
Your track record as a Realtor is the main reason people hire you, so highlighting listings you recently sold is a great way to show it off. Bonus points for including some interesting information about the sale.
29. Brag About Your Awards & Accomplishments
If you win any awards or close a record number of deals, your email list should be the first to know! Just make sure not to brag too much and always remember to thank anyone who helped you along the way. Including a line like, “I couldn’t have done it without my amazing clients—thank you!” might help.
30. Get a Testimonial From a Real Estate Client
Ask a happy former client to provide you with a testimonial. You could even do a brief interview, asking what went well in the process and in what ways you served them in obtaining their real estate goals.
14 Real Estate Testimonial Examples to Inspire Your Referral Marketing
31. Snippets From Local History
Similar to Throwback Thursday, you can highlight an interesting part of your neighborhood’s history. Images are great here, but also interviewing older members of the community is a great way to engage with your audience.
32. Rent vs Buy
Have a lot of renters in the area? An article on the advantages of purchasing property can go a long way in prospecting for leads. The National Association of Realtors has a library of resources that can be helpful in illustrating the rent vs buy argument.
33. Seasonal Homebuyer Advice
Offer advice to your former (and future!) clients on how to maintain their homes. Some easy wins include spring cleaning, winterizing, cleaning gutters in the fall, and power washing all of the pollen off during allergy season (year-round in the South!)
34. Real Estate Investment Ideas
Maybe your former clients are happily settled in the home you helped them buy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their property-buying days are over. Offer advice in investing in real estate and become the one who can help them in any future endeavors.
35. Guide to HOAs
Is there anything more mocked than a homeowners association (HOA)? Your audience is sure to click to read horror HOA stories, but it’s also an opportunity to provide really helpful information to potential buyer clients.
Where to Get ‘Done-for-You’ Real Estate Newsletter Content
Sources for done-for-you content are easier to find than ever these days, but finding great content to share with your email list isn’t easy. Here are our favorite sources for engaging or educational prepackaged content to include in your newsletter:
| Content Source | Best For | Monthly Price |
|---|---|---|
| Keeping Current Matters | Prewritten content for email newsletters, social media, and blog posts. | $39.95 |
| ACESocial | Real estate articles you can custom brand | $40 |
| Coffee & Contracts | Attractive email templates and graphics | $54 |
| Content inspiration and connecting with locals who want to share photography | Free with attribution | |
| Infographics about interior design, house hacks, and real estate | Free with attribution | |
| Realtor Magazine | Market data, surveys, and high-level overviews of the real estate market | Free with attribution |
| Zillow | Market data and trends, listings to highlight | Free |
| The Spruce | Fresh content about interior design, cooking, and home tricks and tips to link to | Free with attribution |
| The Close | Real estate memes, jokes, and interesting real estate facts | Free |
4 Crucial Tips for Real Estate Newsletter Templates
Of course, getting someone to open your email is only half the battle. If they don’t take the time to read your marketing, then you might as well not send it. In 2023, people are more distracted than ever before, so if you want them to take two minutes out of their day to read your email, you need to make sure it looks good. After all, you’re competing with Instagram and Facebook for their attention.
Here’s a quick guide to creating attractive newsletter templates your audience will actually want to read.
1. Use a Professional Email Template Builder
While it may seem easy, organizing the text and images in your newsletter into a readable, attractive design is actually very difficult. In fact, there is now an entire field of graphic design called user experience dedicated to just that. But there are plenty of options that don’t require you to possess this expertise yourself.
Check Your CRM for Design Tools
For most agents, using the template builder in their customer relationship manager (CRM) is probably going to be the easiest way to quickly create great-looking emails. Lone Wolf’s Propertybase, for example, uses the industry-leading Salesforce CRM to power its system. That means you not only have an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop email template builder (pictured above), but can access hundreds of templates via Salesforce plugins.
Create a Custom Mailchimp Template
If your CRM doesn’t offer email templates and you can’t afford an all-in-one solution like Propertybase, you may want to create newsletter templates with standalone email marketing software like Mailchimp. They have hundreds of email templates to choose from, and if you can’t find one you like, you can easily buy templates for Constant Contact from professional designers on ThemeForest.
2. Go Easy on the Images
Since it’s so easy to create beautiful emails these days, many agents go overboard and add tons of images, GIFs, and videos to their newsletters. This can be a huge problem because they will load slowly for some users, and generally clutter up your actual message. After all, you want your leads to hear, “I’m a talented market professional you want to hire” not “I’m someone who bombards you with pictures.”
As a rule of thumb, only use one or two images in each email. If you’re sending a video, you should make that the only visual in your email. Remember, your goal is to get them to watch your video. Adding distracting images to that email will make them less likely to watch.
3. Use Buttons for Your Links
Some agents shy away from using buttons in their emails because they think they’re too salesly. But buttons just make it easier for your readers to click on your link for two reasons. First, because they’ve been “trained” to click on buttons by social media, and second because buttons are way easier to press on mobile than tiny text links.
4. Always Include a Play Button for Videos
Even if you’re not able to embed a video in your email, you should still include a play button. An easy way to do this is to take a screenshot of your YouTube video before you hit play and link this image to your video.
Tools to Create Your Real Estate Newsletter
Here are five tools to help you build your newsletter.
| Newsletter Tool | Best For | Monthly Price |
|---|---|---|
| Canva | Creating DIY graphics | Free-$15 |
| VistaCreate | Simple DIY graphics creation | Free-$10 |
| Mailchimp | Email marketing software | Free-$20 |
| Unsplash | Stock images | Free |
| Coffee & Contracts | Email graphics that align with fresh social media posts for Instagram Reels, Stories, and more | $50 |
Bringing It All Together
Have some real estate newsletter ideas that yield high open rates and tons of client engagement? Let us know in the comment section.
Add comment