What lead generation really means for real estate agents

You can’t sell a house before you’ve found the buyer – as a general rule in real estate, this seems obvious enough.

But locating interested buyers, and engaging them with your business for the long term, involves a great deal of work and planning.

The same goes for sellers – you want to ensure that the best new properties are coming your way, and that means locating sellers willing to engage your agency services.

In this article, we discuss the basic principles of lead generation, and share some tips and tricks that you can use to attract a higher quality of inbound clients to your business.

Why leads matter so much in the real estate game

Before a real estate business starts mailing and calling a person, they want to be sure that the person has at least a passing interest in their services.

This is especially true for real estate, where services are either quite complicated and long-term, or targeted to a very niche market – that is, people looking to invest within a specific time frame (ideally right now!)

This is why sales agents and realtors pay close attention to their lead generation activities – to ensure that they are making the best initial impression and attracting the right sort of leads for their business.

That way, when an agent begins to contact leads, there is a much better chance that the people they speak to will be ready to engage with the home buying or selling services on offer.

Techniques for generating leads in real estate

There are a variety of ways to generate and attract leads, at least in a simple sense. If you have obtained somebody’s name, email address and phone number in a business context, then you are in possession of a lead.

Most business websites will feature a detailed enquiry form for customers, which captures their lead details when they get in touch with you.

A more proactive campaign, for example a landing page promoted through social medial, can also be used to target specific audiences – though it is still up to these potential leads to make contact.

In real estate, one of the best ways to obtain new leads quickly is through residential phone listings, especially if these have been routinely checked against no-call or ‘do not contact’ lists.

These listings will help you target particular suburbs and regions, while keeping non-interested persons out of the mix and saving yourself time and money in the long run.

What’s the best way to generate qualified leads for real estate?

But before the hard yards of sales work can truly begin, some work needs to be done to qualify the best leads out of those that you’ve collected.

That way, your sales team can prioritise work with the best chance of succeeding and, of course, of bringing money in to the business.

Sometimes a phone call or initial consultation is used here, especially if the potential client’s needs are complex. But some planning at the campaign stage can ensure that more of these phone calls succeed more often, by assessing your lead’s engagement as part of the early planning stage.

For example, let’s say you have sent a small email campaign to leads from a residential listing. Within that campaign, you include a link to your website or to some special campaign materials – perhaps an eBook or document with your newest listings.

In this scenario, the campaign detects when a person actually clicks through to the links in the email, thus ‘qualifying’ them as a more engaged reader and potential client.

On the other hand, people who do not click (or indeed, do not even open the email) can be ‘disqualified’ at this stage, saving you a phone call.

Conclusion

Assessing the quality of your leads involves answering some questions at the outset.

For example: What sort of qualities does your ideal customer possess? And how will those qualities show up in their use of emails, and their overall pattern of engaging with your business?

But with the right tools at your disposal, and some planning around your inbound and outbound marketing plans, you can save yourself time and money on your next real estate sale by attracting more qualified leads to your business.