We at The Close can already feel the holidays quickly approaching! And we are gearing up for some exciting Thanksgiving season real estate ideas to market our business as we head toward 2023.
Fall is the perfect time to focus on a few marketing strategies to refill your pipeline after the busy summer rush. And who doesn’t love getting out and meeting new people as the holiday season kicks off?
We want to spread the feeling of the season, so we created some fully customizable door hanger templates in Canva for you to use in your turkey-sized marketing efforts.
12 Thanksgiving Real Estate Ideas to Kick-start Your Holiday Season
1. Themed Open House
Get creative with your open houses. Now that the market has slowed down a bit, this is the perfect time to create memorable open house events. Get together with other agents and plan a multicourse meal between several homes. For example, serve a salad at the first house on the tour, an entrée at the second, dessert at the third, etc., and give away door prizes at each one.
If you don’t have multiple homes to hold open, serve light dinner and drinks along with an additional element. In my area, waterfront properties offer things like evening bay tours and even a Blue Angels Navy flight demonstration show. Another open house featured wine and a $100 door prize. The ideas are endless if you can get creative and utilize the features in your unique area.
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2. Thanksgiving-themed Contest With Grocery Giveaway
A contest is always a winner with people in your community. You can do this at your fall festival or at any holiday vendor events that put you in front of the whole community. Have a jar full of candy corn, holiday ornaments, or anything that you can put a large number of inside a clear glass jar and entice folks to enter your contest by filling out their contact information along with their guess. It’s fun for the community, and someone walks away with $100 worth of groceries as the prize.
With the current inflation, the grocery giveaway will be a big attraction. But don’t miss out on the opportunity to chat up your contestants. Ask them about their neighborhood and see if you can’t uncover some questions they may have about the market. They may even kick off the conversation if you’re lucky.
Either way, participating in community events like fall festivals and holiday vendor events is a great way to promote your brokerage and yourself. Get your face out there in front of your fellow citizens.
3. Send Out Recipe Postcards
There are some really adorable and witty recipe postcards you can send out to your sphere or your farm, or both! Send a recipe that you love, or choose one of the preprinted recipe cards like this one from Zazzle. They have several cocktail recipes, along with traditional recipes. One of my favorites is a funny card that tries to teach you how to cook a turkey but gets a little sloppy from the many glasses of wine you sip along the way. Hilarious.
Choose a recipe that represents who you are and reflects your personality. When you send thoughtful gifts from the heart to people, you stand out.
4. Host a Holiday Craft Event
Admittedly, I’m not the most crafty person. I have my strengths and talents, but Pinterest and I have a love-hate relationship because I typically feel inadequate when I browse all the beautiful things others have the talent (and time) to create.
So what’s a non-crafty girl to do? Host a craft event, of course! In my situation, I would partner with someone who loves crafting and have that person teach how to do the project.
You can choose from so many different projects—holiday wreaths, ornaments, home decor, knitting or crocheting, food gifts for teachers—the possibilities are endless. Just check out a few ideas on Pinterest for inspo.
Broadcast your crafting event and invite people to sign up ahead of time or just have them give their information at the door. Make sure to specify if you’re providing the supplies or if they will need to bring their own to complete the project.
5. Festive Door Hangers for Homeowners
If you want to boost your visibility in your farm, there’s almost no easier way to connect with tons of people in a short time than with door hangers. Create some fall-themed door hangers with Canva, or order them preprinted. You can include a fun recipe on the back side or share some great insight for homeowners who might be interested in selling soon. Either way, your farm will love them.
We’ve taken some of the hard work out of this project. Grab our fully customizable Canva templates to create your personalized seller door hangers. We created a few for you to choose from. Use one or use them all! The fun is built in.
6. Fall Community Event
If there’s a shortage of fall events in your area, create your own. Plan an event and invite everyone in your sphere and tell them to invite someone. Grab everyone in your brokerage and have them do the same.
You can do an outdoor event and have vendors set up tables. Include your referral partners and have them sponsor your event. Have them donate gift baskets as giveaways. Serve food and maybe hire a cocktail truck to serve at your event. You can do so many things with this idea. It’s a great way to amp up your visibility in the community and give back at the same time.
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7. Fall Firepit Homebuyers Event
I love a good campfire. So, hosting a fall fireside chat is a great way to get people in a comfortable and fun setting to talk about homebuying fears. You can actually do this for homesellers too. Bring takeaway materials for your guests to help reinforce your message after the event. And don’t forget to bring the s’mores!
8. Host a Family for Thanksgiving
There’s never a shortage of families in need around the holidays. You can locate a family to adopt by calling 2-1-1, which is the human services hotline. You’ll be connected with a local organization that can help you sponsor a family.
Then, host a food drive to gather donations from your community. Promote your food drive on social media, through mailouts, at your local church, and with your referral partners. And don’t forget to reach out to your sphere to let them know about your food drive. You will be amazed at the outpouring of donations from everyone.
9. Charity Networking Event
You can also organize a charitable event with your networking partners. Feel free to reach out to a local restaurant or other business to work together on this. Organize an event to raise money for a local charity by charging a small donation at the door. Or sell tickets to the event in advance.
If you want to help a specific group, e.g., homeless veterans, first responders, teachers, homeless families, wounded warriors, children with food insecurity or disabilities, elderly in assisted living, military families of deployed members, etc., contact organizations in your local area. You can Google any of these groups listed, and you will get a list of local organizations you can reach out to for guidance.
Use your imagination. There are so many different ways you can go with a charitable networking event like this.
10. Thanksgiving Recipe Contest & Exchange
Recipes are personal and to share with friends and family. Today’s tech tools make it even easier to find and share recipes with friends, colleagues, and just about anyone.
Why not use technology to create a holiday recipe contest with all of your sphere? Share a link to an app like Recipe Keeper and have anyone with a great recipe enter it in the app and share it with you. You can enlist the help of your friends, family, and even other agents (hint: this is a great contest for the whole brokerage), making and sampling the recipes. You might even do some live videos on social media of everyone’s reaction to the recipes.
Have others help you decide on the winners and give away fun prizes that you know people who like to cook will enjoy. The $100 grocery store gift card will always be a motivating giveaway, by the way.
After the contest, you can create a cookbook with all the recipes you received and share them with everyone as a promotional piece. Now that’s a win-win.
11. Host a Thanksgiving Meal
This is a great way to partner with a local restaurant in your community. Get with a restaurant owner and plan a Thanksgiving menu. Invite the whole community to come enjoy a free Thanksgiving dinner and ask for “suggested” donations. All the proceeds will go to a shelter or food organization that you and the restaurant owner agree on ahead of time.
If you want to do this without a restaurant, find a location, like a local church or a lodge, and have your coworkers help you prepare all the food. Then, just like above, have a “suggested” donation amount posted. You’ll be raising money for a great local organization and doing some good for your community at the same time.
12. Host a Cooking Demonstration
I love cooking at Thanksgiving, but not everyone enjoys it. In fact, it can be extremely stressful. That’s why I love the idea of hosting a small cooking class to teach people how to make a classic Thanksgiving dish. You don’t have to go crazy – pick one dish, like dessert, and go from there. Make a classic Thanksgiving pie, like pecan, pumpkin, buttermilk, or cherry. You can even go with cheesecake. Or choose a classic side dish like baked macaroni and cheese, candied yams, green bean casserole, or traditional cornbread stuffing.
If you’re good at cooking these dishes, you can do the cooking yourself. But if you’re not so great in the kitchen, partner with someone in your office who is great in the kitchen or a local chef. You can also partner with a local restaurant and use their commercial kitchen.
Have interested people preregister for the demonstration to capture their information. Be sure to mention that spaces are limited. This is the perfect opportunity to create conversations while working together to achieve your cooking goals. You might even learn a new dish for the holidays!
Your Take
These are just a few of the many Thanksgiving real estate ideas you can use right now to market your business. But this is just the tip of the turkey’s neck. The holiday season is such a fun time to market yourself. It’s the time of year when all the feels come to the surface and we’re all just a little sweeter on the inside, like buttermilk pie.
What unique and fun Thanksgiving marketing have you tried in the past or are planning on doing this year? I would love to hear about them. I’d love to update this list in the future to include your ideas!
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