The real estate industry is large and growing, that’s why there are so many small companies popping up to try and get a piece of the pie. It’s all about finding the right niche or area for your business. Finding the best lead generation for realtors may not be easy but once you find it you’ll see that it’s not that hard at all to get started.
When you want to know more about the best real estate lead generation, the first thing that comes up in your mind is the providing of valuable information. In fact, they can be a bit overwhelming and even seem to have nothing in common with one another. Your worry subsides immediately if you do as much research as possible. In other words, this resourceful article on free real estate leads provides a lot of valuable information which helps people, who are unknown to this field, with making more income and providing more services for their clients.
Realtors will love this app. It helps them capture leads for future visits, perform consultations and personalized tours. The app allows re-connecting with a previously met client, helping to restore the emotional connection that might have been lost over time.
Realtors and Home Buyers, you’ve found your source for high quality leads. We can provide you with contact details who are looking to buy or sell homes and properties. We have been in the business of generating real estate leads in your area for years now.
Ways to Generate Real Estate Leads
1. Host an Open House
When an agent opens a property to the public for a certain amount of time, potential buyers can tour the open house without an appointment. Anyone who walks through the door is a potential lead. However, you need to intentionally capture leads from an open house by doing more than leaving a sign-in sheet and a pen by the door.
Start by engaging with visitors as soon as they walk in. Make them feel welcome, even if they were just curious neighbors and not current homebuyers. Always be prepared with a few options to gather your visitors’ email addresses or phone numbers. You should also bring printouts of market information and business cards with your contact information. In fact, you could even use a QR code generator to encourage visitors to save your contact information to your phone.
An open house is a face-to-face audition in front of potential new clients, one of the few opportunities for you to meet someone face-to-face and have a chance of becoming their exclusive real estate agent. If you aren’t sure how to get started, check out our more comprehensive article on how to host an open house.
Pro tip: Even if you don’t have your own listings, you can volunteer to host open houses for other agents in your brokerage. If you do, remember that your number one job is to sell the open house you are hosting. Move the conversation to similar listings only if they’ve made it very clear that they aren’t interested in the open house. Confirm with the listing agent beforehand to ensure that you can keep each lead who walks in the door.
2. Ask Your Sphere of Influence
Your sphere of influence, or SOI, is a term that refers to all of the people you know. Family, friends, colleagues, teachers, hairdressers, baristas—pretty much anyone you’ve ever met goes into the SOI bucket. Your SOI can be an incredibly resourceful place for leads, both from your actual connections and from their contacts and referrals.
To gain leads from your SOI, reach out regularly. You can do that through a text, a short, personal email, or even through Facebook Messenger or an Instagram DM. Your friends may know you are in real estate, but that doesn’t mean they’ll remember to call you when the time comes to sell their home. They may think you only do rentals, not sales, or that you only cover one neighborhood when you cover the whole city. Even your family needs reminding.
When asking for leads, don’t be overbearing, but don’t be shy, either. Let people know you’re always happy to help answer questions without obligation. Make them feel comfortable coming to you without making them feel like they have to hire you if you do. Connect with people first and, if it leads to business—great, but don’t sweat it if nothing comes of the effort in the beginning.
You may not see an immediate payoff, but don’t give up since your SOI will play a part in generating some of your best and most rewarding real estate leads. There is nothing more flattering than someone calling you because someone else had a great experience working with you.
3. Farm Your Neighborhood
Farming for leads means you’ve focused your efforts on a particular area or neighborhood to increase your name recognition in that one place. You can do this through mailers and community involvement. If your name is out there, you increase the chance that someone will call you when they need a real estate agent.
Farming can be challenging for new agents since there might already be an established agent in the areas you want to target. Don’t let that stop you. Some people prefer to work with newer, hungrier agents instead of those more established.
Try sending postcards introducing yourself with sales and market data—your brokerage is likely to provide you with a certain number of cards for free. You can also purchase magnetic mailers that give leads a reason to hang your contact information in their house. The recognition you get from farming helps facilitate real estate lead generation for both buyers and sellers.
Learn how real estate farming works and how to identify the right farm area in our guide to real estate farming.
If you prefer to take a more automated approach, Offrs.com and SmartZip both offer predictive analytics tools to find the next big real estate market to focus on. Accessing this data can give you context and allow you to target areas with higher chances of conversions. SmartZip offers more back-end analysis than Offrs.com but is twice as expensive.
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.
Zurple
Zurple was founded in 2009, is headquartered in Hunt Valley, Maryland, and is owned by Constellation Software. The company is our choice for best automation because it offers leads as well as integrated CRM and other automated tools that make contacting and maintaining leads easier and more efficient. Zurple’s automated responses are personalized and data-driven and intelligently engage with clients on your behalf.
Zurple is end-to-end software that captures leads and converts them into conversations and then into clients. It optimizes your marketing budget by only targeting your specific area and can even target specific sub-areas within individual zip codes. You can use Zurple’s targeted ads and combine them with your own leads from places like Zillow. Zurple will personalize emails from your email address to contact leads about houses they’ve already been looking at.
Some of Zurple’s features include:
- Buyer and seller leads
- Automated, personalized, and data-driven emails from your email address
- Integration with Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com
- CRM
- Complete online profile of each lead
- Lead contact alerts
Zurple is easy to set up and it offers all the tools you need, including creating and customizing your ads and website, as well as a CRM to manage your leads. It has a blog and success center resources to help you get started. You must put your information in to see pricing and availability in your area.
Customers have mostly positive things to say about the company. They appreciate that leads are converted into clients. However, some users think that the interface needs to be updated.
Google ads
Google ad is a powerful tool you can use as a real estate lead generation idea. With Google ads, you can advertise your real estate business on the search network, display network, Google shopping ads, video campaigns, and apps campaigns. However, one of the Google ad formats for lead generation is the Google Lead form extensions. It is a type of native ads designed to help you drive leads directly from the mobile search results page, as users search for products/services or when they type in search words on Google.
Google Lead form extensions are ads that are designed to attract users with a call to action in a responsive form under the ad. The lead form extension is created in Google ads and then added to a campaign in search, video, and discovery. When a user sees and clicks on the ad, they see a form pre-filled with their Google account data and a call to action to submit the form. You can thereafter download and manage the leads from Google Ads or integrate them with a CRM or Email marketing software to quickly move them to a place where you can contact them right after they opt-in.
This makes it one of the best real estate lead generation ideas. You can customize the Google lead form extension to fit your real estate marketing goals.
Below is an example of a Google Lead form extensions 
For a detailed post on how to create Google Lead form ads to generate leads for your real estate business, check out this post – Google Lead Form Ads: The Complete, always-updated Guide to Google Lead Generation.
LinkedIn Ads
According to HubSpot, LinkedIn is 277% more effective for generating leads compared to Facebook and Twitter. This is because LinkedIn is a professional network. One of the best real estate lead generation strategies is using the LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. LinkedIn Lead Gen forms just like the Facebook and Google Lead Gen forms extension are mobile-optimized ads that allow advertisers to collect leads on LinkedIn without directing them to external landing pages. It comprises a form that is pre-filled with the user’s information. When a user clicks on the ads, the form pops up and then they can click to submit it. This increases users’ experience, reduces friction and increases leads.
Below is an example of a LinkedIn Lead Gen form.
For more information on how to set up the Lead Gen form, read this post – Everything you need to know on LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.
Zillow Premier Agent
Zillow Premier Agent is our review’s best real estate lead generation company for finding buyers because it offers leads that are generated directly by Zillow, most of which are buyer leads. It is part of the real estate powerhouse Zillow Group, which was founded by former Microsoft executives in Seattle, Washington, in 2006. It’s the most well-known real estate lead generation company on our list.
Zillow is one of the first sites that many potential homebuyers use, so it makes sense that you would purchase leads here. Real estate agents pay Zillow Premier Agent to be featured on certain pages, which include placement on listings and personalized websites. So, when customers are browsing for homes, they will see the agent’s information and be able to make contact. This is a bit different than how the other lead generation companies work.
Some of Zillow Premier Agent’s features include:
- Buyer and seller leads by zip code (mostly buyer leads)
- CRM
- Customer support and training
- Phone call introductions to leads in your area
- Personal webpage
- Branding across Zillow’s sites
- Marketing templates
You can get started with Zillow Premier Agent by getting in touch with a member from the support team who will go over your marketing budget and desired area and help you navigate the site. Pricing for Zillow Premier Agent varies depending on the area, average home price, and competing agents in that area. There’s no monthly minimum or signup fee.
Offrs
Offrs is our best choice for seller leads because it has online home evaluation tools and predictions for potential home sellers to become leads as well as a built-in CRM to keep track of your new leads. It was founded in 2014 and is owned by Constellation Data Solutions Inc.
When the company was launched, the founders found their first clients by knocking on agency doors and convincing agents to sign up individually. The site is specifically focused on sellers and aims to connect those customers who currently want to sell their home, and those who will want to sell in the near future, with agents who sign up for leads. It uses proprietary predictive analytics tools to predict who will become a seller lead.
Offrs has the following features:
- Seller leads (current and predicted)
- CRM
- For sale by owner leads
- Expired listing leads
- Apps to access leads and location-based homeowner data
- Template builder
To get started with Offrs, you can schedule a 30-minute session with a specialist to learn more about what the company offers, its pricing, and how to set up a lead generation system and apps. It also offers custom options for brokerages with agent rollout and apps for every agent.
It has mixed reviews with some customers receiving quality seller leads that they closed and finding the software easy to use. However, others didn’t receive any leads or any that were qualified or even looking to sell their home.
WHAT IS LEAD GENERATION FOR REAL ESTATE?
Before we really dive deeper into these 10 strategies, lets go through what exactly lead generation is in the realm of real estate.
Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting prospective buyers into leads with a vested interest in your company’s product or service. In real estate, generating leads comes with its own set of challenges, including finding the best software and sites to use and employing various customer experience strategies.
To put it simply, the same rules of marketing that apply to a variety of industries are relevant to the field of real estate, and lead generation is a crucial element of a real estate marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Adding a strong lead generation program to one’s real estate business is one of the most significant processes that can be added to achieve increased profits. Lead Generation for Realtors provides the tools and materials needed, along with step by step instructions and lessons for all aspects involved in the successful implementation of a lead generation program in any situation.
Reaching out to people about the houses we’re trying to sell isn’t the only way of lead generation for realtors. Another method is using social media and cold calling. But one which is really popular among real estate agents, is lead generation for realtors.