The competitive nature of real estate makes finding and engaging quality leads challenging.
Higher average deal values also mean that every lead matters more. When you generate interest in your portfolio, brand or a specific listing, you must manage it carefully to have the best chance of closing.
In this article, we’ll help you master lead gen in real estate so you can sell properties faster and hit your targets sooner. We’ll explore the most effective strategies and run through some tools you can use to streamline your lead-gen process.
How to get leads for real estate
In many ways, generating leads as a realtor is very similar to other businesses: You create a digital presence, advertise your services across different channels, network in your area and research potential leads.
However, the fact that buying real estate is a life moment for many customers, real estate lead generation has an extra level of complexity.
Thankfully, the importance of this decision also opens up new lead generation opportunities. Here are six ways to get leads for your real estate business.
1. Form valuable relationships by networking with the right people
The best real estate sales professionals build strong relationships with the right people.
Naturally, you’ll want to form ties with qualified leads. These are people who:
Show buying interest (e.g., by engaging with relevant web content)
Fit your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Have the authority, need, urgency and money (ANUM) to make a purchase
Not all valuable relationships involve potential buyers, however. You can also find leads and gain their trust by connecting with industry peers.
Get to know people who share your target audience, such as:
Mortgage lenders and advisors
Lenders and brokers talk to people who are buying and selling property at the exact moments when they need professional support.
Use your day-to-day interactions with mortgage professionals to show how helpful you can be. Demonstrate your buyer-centric approach and its results to ensure your name comes up when potential customers ask for realtor or property recommendations.
Insurance providers and brokers
Like mortgage brokers, insurance professionals aim to deliver great client services. The ability to recommend a reliable real estate agent (i.e., you) helps them create more memorable and valuable experiences.
Working with insurance agents can both help you to gain leads via referrals and streamline your sales process to increase customer satisfaction. For example, when insurance is essential to a deal, you can work together to eliminate bottlenecks and keep the transaction moving.
Building firms and developers
Building firms often work with people who buy and sell property for a living. These valuable leads provide more ongoing business than a traditional buyer or seller looking for one long-term investment.
Contact local construction companies and developers, promoting yourself in places they’re likely to see. Attend relevant networking events, advertise in trade media and interact with referral sources on social media. Aim to be their go-to recommendation for real estate sales support.
As you form more relationships, keeping track will get harder. A customer relationship management (CRM) system takes care of that for you. Use one to centralize contact information, interaction records and sales performance data.
2. Expand your audience and strengthen relationships with email marketing
Email marketing is proven to get results when done well and it’s incredibly versatile.
Since email marketing is an “opt-in” channel (meaning recipients must sign up to receive your content), everyone you contact should already be a lead on some level. However, email is a great way to strengthen those relationships and create more sales opportunities.
To do that, build your email marketing strategy around informative and promotional content. Here are three campaign types you can use to create new business:
Local market updates
Real estate is a changeable market. If you help homebuyers and commercial leads keep track of average prices, interest rates and property listings, they’ll be able to make informed, confident buying decisions (and potentially shorten your sales cycle).
Up-to-date information like this will also show you’re knowledgeable and active in the industry, ensuring the audience will rely on you.
Advice content for buyers and sellers
Being helpful without pushing sales shows you put your leads and customers first. It’ll help you build the trust people need when purchasing a new home or business location.
Very few people buy or sell property regularly, so create content that guides recipients through the often-complex process. Your insights on mortgages, insurance and conveyancing will instill confidence to make leads’ buying decisions easier.
If you provide enough useful information, recipients may share your content with friends and family to expand your audience.
Enticing promotions
As a realtor, you can’t give away property or reduce your sellers’ prices. You can, however, offer deals on supporting services like consultancy and valuations while promoting them via email.
You can use email marketing promotions in several ways. For example:
To warm up cold leads (i.e., re-engage buyers who’ve dropped off the radar)
To tempt hot leads into becoming first-time clients
To generate leads via referrals (e.g., by encouraging recipients to share offer details with friends)
Optimize your email marketing efforts with a user-friendly design tool. For example, Campaigns by Pipedrive offers a simple but effective drag-and-drop email builder to help you create professional templates fast.
3. Help your audience with insightful marketing content
A solid content marketing strategy will help potential clients see what you have to offer. It aids lead generation by:
Boosting search performance. Clear, original and insightful content helps you rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), making you more visible to potential new customers online.
Encouraging word-of-mouth marketing. People like sharing valuable, interesting content. When someone shares your content, they’re marketing your business for free.
Moreover, Gartner research shows that customers are three times more likely to spend more with less regret when suppliers provide helpful information. So buyer enablement content both helps you obtain leads and increases their worth to your business.
Valuable real estate marketing content includes:
First-time buyer and seller guides
As someone who goes through buying and selling processes regularly, your knowledge is invaluable to novices. Use it to create blog or downloadable content that shows your target audience what to expect from a transaction.
Examples of great first-time buyer and seller content include step-by-step purchasing guides, transaction timelines and removal checklists.
Rental insights
Landlords with evolving property portfolios are valuable contacts for your business since they’re likely to buy and sell frequently.
Create content that shows these property owners how to navigate the current rental market, maximize yields and find new tenants.
You could write a series of blog posts to answer common landlord questions (and meet search engine users’ needs) or a more in-depth lead magnet that website visitors can download as a free item or service after providing their contact details.
Market expert interviews
Collecting the views and insights of other real estate professionals is an efficient way to create original content.
Consider interviewing people who work in different parts of the real estate industry, since each of them should have a unique perspective to share with buyer leads.
For example, you could involve:
Trend analysts
Foreclosure specialists
New homeowners
Landlords
Developers
You can present those interviews using a question-and-answer format or weave your interviewees’ comments into a relevant blog article. We did the latter in a blog post about women in sales.
Either way, this knowledge-based content will help you become an authority in your industry, showing prospects that you and your contacts know what you’re talking about.
4. Build or join a community on social media
When you use it with the right intentions, social media will help you get closer to your audience.
By mixing with your ideal customers on the platforms where they spend the most time, you can:
Show your human side to build trust
Become more familiar
Share insights to grow your authority
Learn about your audience
Regular and sincere social activity puts your name in people’s minds when they need a realtor. You’ll also be a direct message away to answer questions, offer advice and grow your relationships.
Social selling isn’t a quick fix. Don’t expect to create a page on Facebook and have hundreds of buyer and seller leads lining up to speak with you. As part of a wider real estate lead-gen strategy, however, social media is great for forming and strengthening connections.
Here are a couple of social media lead-generation ideas for inspiration:
Question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions. Make yourself available to your audience by offering to answer industry-relevant questions. An open Q&A, or ask-me-anything (AMA), session can become an informal chat, bringing your audience closer. You could do this asynchronously over Twitter or Reddit, or in real time on a live Instagram video.
Social media advertising. Paid ads (like pay-per-click, or PPC, ads) allow you to get your name in front of specific groups of people quickly. You can target prospects easily using demographic data, provided you’re using the platform most relevant to your audience. For example, if you sell large office buildings, you’re more likely to find leads on LinkedIn than TikTok.
Consider joining online communities, too. People often use these platforms to ask their peers questions. Providing helpful answers without promoting your brand overtly is a great way to demonstrate your expertise.
5. Increase brand awareness with SEO
The more traffic you can drive to your website, the more sales opportunities you’ll have.
The most effective way to generate traffic is to improve your organic search performance. That means optimizing your content to rank higher in SERPs and attract more clicks. This process is search engine optimization, or SEO.
According to Semrush’s State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report, organic search was by far the most popular traffic source for real estate businesses’ blogs (accounting for 81.02% of visits).
Real Estate traffic sources
Plenty of factors influence search performance, but generally speaking, high-quality, original and valuable content tends to rank highest. In other words: focus on answering your audience’s questions and solving their problems.
By providing up-to-date housing market information, real estate firms Redfin and Norada show up highest for the search term “real estate market trends tennessee”:
Anyone looking for information on property prices in Tennessee will likely end up on one of these real estate websites. From there, they can learn more about the properties and brokerage services available.
Use social media platforms, phone calls with clients and website analytics data to learn what information your ideal customers need.
6. Get fast results with a paid lead-gen service
Dedicated lead-generation services offer ready-made networks of prospective buyers and sellers.
When used as part of a wider strategy (i.e. with the organic methods listed in this article), these networks can help you:
Expand a small audience fast (ideal when you’re starting)
Generate immediate interest in a new real estate listing
Attract reviews to build foundations for a more organic lead-gen approach
A big benefit of tapping into an existing network like this is the availability of data. Services like Zillow Premier Agent and Zurple provide lead information like names, phone numbers and home search criteria upfront so you can follow up with relevant information.
Real estate lead-gen technology: 3 great marketing tools
Technology can help you attract, monitor and manage leads efficiently.
Some tools even offer workflow automation features to eliminate repetitive administrative tasks and create more time for strategizing, speaking to clients and closing deals.
Here are three tools to include in your realty tech stack:
Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s real estate sales CRM saves time and increases revenue by helping you keep track of deals and relationships.
Create custom sales pipelines for properties, investors and buyers. Then track all activities and interactions as you nurture leads toward buying decisions.
You can use Pipedrive to centralize all your contact data, whatever form that takes.
For example, you could log the attendees at an open house, keep track of your cold-calling efforts or store text messages from interested investors. That information is then ready to access at a moment’s notice, so you and other team members can go into any sales conversation fully informed.
Streamline your lead-gen efforts with Pipedrive’s LeadBooster add-on. This four-in-one sales tool includes Chatbot for engaging website visitors and routing leads, Live Chat for providing bespoke help quickly, Prospector for finding new connections and Web Forms for capturing lead data.
If you want leads to contact you, you’ll need to make communication easy. The best way to do that is by being available on their favorite platforms.
With more than 2.2 billion reported users, WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular communication channels. According to SimilarWeb, it’s the most-used mobile messaging app in 63% of global markets.
While email is valuable for more formal and detailed communication, a faster, more casual channel like WhatsApp will help you appear more accessible and human. For the best results, use it in tandem with your CRM.
Pipedrive’s WhatsApp by Twilio integration allows you to keep track of lead conversations without switching apps.
Outgrow
Outgrow is an app that helps marketers create personalized lead-gen content, like quizzes, forms, surveys, polls and competitions.
The tool’s biggest selling point is that you don’t need any coding or design skills. Select one of its 1,000+ templates, insert your content, add your branding and start sharing the results via social media, email or your website.
Pipedrive’s Outgrow integration ensures data flows seamlessly between the two tools.
With it, you can:
Connect all the lead data from your Outgrow content to specific lists and workflows in Pipedrive
Trigger confirmation emails to users who interact with Outgrow content
Use segmented data from Outgrow content interactions to trigger workflow actions within Pipedrive, like arranging follow-up calls.
Final thoughts
For your property business to thrive, you need a steady stream of qualified leads to nurture. The best way to achieve that is to diversify your real estate lead gen ideas. Doing so will give you a healthy mix of short and long-term results.
While ads and real estate lead generation companies are fast and simple, the biggest returns come from building strong relationships and working on your reputation over time.
Become an authority in your industry, make yourself visible online and always put your clients first. You’ll soon find lead generation gets easier and becomes more cost-effective.
