Researching best real estate lead generation isn’t fun. In fact, it’s pretty tough. I mean, there are so many companies who claim to be the best in lead generation for realtors. But which ones actually work? You need best lead generation for your Realtor business but don’t know how to find it? Well, your search ends here because you’ve found the best piece of information on the web…
Real estate lead generation methods for new agents. This is a general overview of how to get leads for real estate, how to generate leads in the real-estate industry and best real-estate lead generation tools. Checkout this article if you are a new agent that needs some help in starting out and getting clients.
Lead generation is known in business as a method of driving traffic to a business or promoting a product or service. Similar to sales leads, the usual term for these are new leads. In lead generation, there has been a surge in the use of the internet to reach more individuals and companies with the products or services that they provide. Real estate is no stranger to this technique.
Real estate companies want to collect as many prospects as they can, so they can call on them later. However, the problem is that by the time the leads get to a real person that is interested in buying or selling a home, they are no longer hot. The real estate agent then has to work hard and sell those people, which is what their job is all about. If you are an experienced agent and you’re looking to generate leads as a new agent, I think this guide will help you.
How We Chose the Best Real Estate Lead Generation Websites
Generating and closing quality leads is the essence of the real estate business. Online services that can support those efforts, bringing to bear sophisticated software tools and features, are becoming an increasingly important item in a real estate professional’s arsenal. There are plenty of companies offering a wide variety of features and packages in this space; we evaluated the best on the three most important core criteria.
Lead Management Features
Leveraging lead generation effectively means tracking the data connected with incoming leads, identifying them in terms of the key applicable market segments, and taking note of (and ranking or scoring) the likeliest lead-to-conversion prospects. Collectively, these are lead management features, and we recommend software that executes on as many such features as possible.
Marketing Features
Lead management is at its most effective when it’s paired with marketing initiatives that can maximize visibility and bring in targeted traffic. For that reason, we looked for sites that provided marketing tools such as email marketing and campaign management and branded advertising.
Reports
Lead management and marketing features yield the most value when it’s easy to evaluate how your audience is responding to your efforts, which campaigns are the most effective, and what kind of prospects are showing the best conversion rates. Detailed reports are the key, helping real estate professionals measure and improve their use of lead generation.
SharpSpring
SharpSpring is lead generator software offering a fully rebrandable platform, behavioural email automation, website tracking, and in-built CRM system, among others. SharpSpring offers easy to convert and highly attractive landing page templates.
Highlights:
- Includes in-built call tracking for connecting with offline leads
- Automation is simple to implement
- Zero long-term contracts
- Dashboard provides all you need to run the tool
- Excellent customer support
Cons:
- Social publishing such as SEO or social recommendations unavailable
- Progressive profiling feature absent
- Currently lacks a forward/back navigation button
- No visual work-flow builder
Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is quality lead generator software with about 125,000 users. The web-based tool and real estate lead management software is specifically designed to aid small businesses in building effective business-customer relations while generating leads.
Highlights:
- Features marketing automation, social media, email and lead generation tools
- Marketing and online sales solution specifically built with small and midsize businesses in mind
- Personalised coaching services to get you started
- Easy to use
- Simply click and command diverse options from mass messaging via text to automatic emails
Cons:
- A/B testing unavailable
- Minimal customisation if any
- Setup requires some amount of experience
Pardot
A part of Salesforce company, Pardot is a lead generation software designed for businesses with a significance focus on B2B (business-to-business) marketing and sales automation. It’s superb for agencies seeking to enhance Salesforce CRM insight and efficiency.
Highlights:
- Includes a lead deck offering real-time updates on prospects’ activity
- Customisation feature to help tailor the tool according to requirements
- Integrates superbly with Salesforce CRM
- Great customer training and support
Cons:
- A/B testing available but only for Pardot PRO users
- API access also reserved for PRO users
- Trying to restructure wrongly done campaigns almost impossible
REDX
REDX is our best-priced option because of its a la carte pricing with no setup fees, which allows you to pay for what you want and nothing more. Its monthly prices are reasonable and you can combine leads for a more robust prospecting campaign. It was founded in Utah in 2003 as a solution for providing expired leads to real estate agents and has since been used by over 50,000 agents in both the U.S. and Canada. REDX provides lead data to agents for prospecting. It’s specific to the real estate industry and uses aggregate data from public records to source leads. Every lead that they provide includes contact information.
REDX focuses primarily on seller leads and includes pre-foreclosures, expired listings, for sale by owners, for rent by owners (FRBO), hard-to-find contact information for homeowners, and its Power Dialer feature, which helps you contact more sellers quickly. It offers online training, tutorials, and unlimited customer support.
REDX features include:
- Multiple types of real estate seller leads including expireds
- Geo-focused leads
- Full range of training and support
- Prospecting platform
- Help with lead conversions and lead management systems
- Leads are verified against active listings and the Do Not Call list
- Scripts built into the system
Agents can start using REDX right away by contacting customer support and watching tutorial videos for additional help. Pricing varies depending on the lead source. For example, for sale by owner (FSBO) and pre-foreclosure leads are $39.99 per month, GeoLeads are $49.99 per month, expired leads are $59.99 per month, and FRBOs are $79.99 per month. You can add the Power Dialer for $99.99 per month. There aren’t many reviews out there, but the ones that exist are positive and highlight that the expired leads are current and updated.
Market Leader
Market Leader is our top choice for real estate lead generation companies because it offers robust features, offers buyer and seller leads from multiple sources, and can be set up easily. The company was founded in 1999 in Bellevue, Washington, and it helps over 250,000 customers with leads, education, and customer support. Industry leaders such as EXIT Realty, Better Homes and Gardens, and Re/Max all use Market Leader.
Market Leader offers a guaranteed number of exclusive leads each month and it never sells the same lead twice, so you won’t be competing with another agent for the lead. Market Leader sells leads from its site Housevalues.com, which attracts prospective sellers when they’re trying to value their homes. A second source is Leads Direct, which is a pay-per-click advertising campaign targetted at consumers who are looking for home listings.
Market Leader offers the following features:
- Both buyer and seller leads
- Marketing automation
- Customizable website
- Mobile app
- Integration with Market Leader systems
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
Getting started with Market Leader is easy. All you have to do is create a profile, customize alerts, and add and organize your contacts. The company’s pricing varies based on how many leads you sign up for. Normally, you’ll pay a cost per lead and a monthly fee for other services such as CRM.
The company has also introduced its Market Leader Professional, which includes a fully integrated lead capture website, CRM, and marketing center to seamlessly engage and manage leads. With this service, you can capture powerful insights in the CRM when visitors register on your website and leverage automated marketing to send relevant listings.
Overall, Market Leader has positive reviews; agents like the platform’s exclusive leads and report that the service is easy to use and helped them grow their business. However, there are also some common complaints about the company, including that leads aren’t always reliable and customer service is sometimes not helpful.
BoldLeads
Bold Leads is based in Chandler, Arizona and is active in supporting their local community. It has helped 6,000 real estate agents across the U.S. and Canada. The company offers a vast array of features for producing great buyer and seller leads, which is why we named it our runner-up. It also offers comprehensive customer support and training, so you can get to know the system and get up and running quickly.
Bold Leads only provides exclusive leads to agents. It places ad campaigns on platforms such as Google and Facebook and then draws customers who click on the ads to customized real estate websites where they provide their contact information, which then gets sent to the agent in that area. You can contact and organize your new leads from the built-in CRM.
Bold Leads features include:
- Buyer and seller leads
- Automated follow-ups
- Software coaching, like video training
- An all-in-one platform with its own CRM
- Text concierge and email templates
- Lead engagement indicator tools
Bold Lead offers customer support, training, and coaching, as well as videos to get you up and running, learn how to accept and manage leads, and become familiar with the platform. In addition to a monthly budget for purchasing leads, expect to spend more for market reports and other features. Generally, reviews indicate that customers are satisfied with the company and like its lead system. However, some customers said it’s difficult to cancel and found some of the buyer leads to be poor quality.
Realtor.com: Best for Lead Generation & Advertising Combo
Overall Score: 4.43 OUT OF 5 i
- Multiple lead generation products and options
- One of the most-used real estate industry apps
- Instant push notifications for each new lead
- Many ZIP codes are unavailable
- Can become expensive
Additional Features
- Use Connections Plus to purchase exclusive or non-exclusive leads in your ZIP code
- Use Local Expert to create and run paid ads on Realtor.com and Facebook
- Advantage Brand displays your branding on your Realtor.com listings
- Use Top Producer for free, single-property websites and a CRM to manage leads
- Automated lead follow-up
- Customer support via online form or phone
- Customer review rating of 3.2 out of 5
Realtor.com is a real estate marketplace website and mobile app with around 86 million monthly users, making it a great place to be seen by active homebuyers and sellers as well as other real estate pros. In order to take advantage of that traffic, Realtor.com offers multiple lead generation products, like Connections Plus for lead list buying, Local Expert and Market Reach for multi-platform ad campaigns, and Top Producer for real estate lead generation websites.
Between all of the products offered by Realtor.com, you can choose whether to focus on buyer leads directly from the platform with Connections Plus or run ads on the Realtor.com app, Facebook, and Instagram. This enables you to benefit from working with this massive platform, whether you’re targeting homebuyers or working to sell a listing for the highest price.
Listing ad (Source: Realtor.com)
Customer Reviews
Reviews for Realtor.com are difficult to sift through since many are actually from homebuyers. However, the majority of professionals who left reviews are happy with the service and functionality, and said the leads were more likely to convert. However, other users said costs added up quickly and that customer support was unable to help them. For a platform with better customer support, try Placester or Propertybase.
Pricing
Pricing isn’t listed on Realtor.com, and lead prices vary by ZIP code. Third-party sources report that Realtor.com-generated leads cost anywhere from $200 to $1,000.
What Is a Real Estate Lead Generation Website?
A lead generation website is an online portal that provides prebuilt software tools focused on generating closable leads in a chosen industry. Real estate lead gen sites are therefore focused on the kinds of software and data tools, reporting, and customer relations functionality that help real estate agents find success. These sites help real estate professionals generate and host their own lead capture-optimized homepages, in much the same way that blogging and marketing portals host webpages for companies seeking tools to optimize web pages serving those functions.
There are a number of factors that a lead gen website can bring to bear on the task that go beyond the general evaluation criteria we discussed at the beginning of this guide. These include:
- Branded advertising
- Email marketing tools
- IDX functionality (see below for more detail)
- Lead database, scoring, and segmentation
- Mobile app availability
- Pipeline management tools
- Reporting and analytics
You’ll see mention of many of these kinds of tools in the above product reviews. These are the core of a solid lead gen website, and the more of these bases a given website covers, the more flexible a tool it’s likely to be. Note also, however, that some companies may focus on a specific niche and manage to deliver solid value within that specialty.
Conclusion
Generating leads for real estate is different for everyone. When people ask me about lead generation companies, I let them know that there are so many different options out there that it’s impossible to say which one is best. My advice to others trying to figure out how to find the best lead generation company is to read other review.
Now that you have gone through the emotional roller coaster of screening, finding and booking your first appointment, I am sure that you are dying to know what to do next. Lead generation for realtors is a constant process. You must make an effort to do lead generation every day as it generates future business. Here are some ideas to help you on your lead generation journey.