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Real Estate Leads

This guide is your one-stop shop for everything about real estate leads — broken down. If you’ve been looking for ways to optimize your real estate lead follow up and to sell more homes, you’re starting in the right place. Here we’ll dive into:

  • How to Get Real Estate Leads
  • Identifying the Best Real Estate Leads for Your Team
  • How to Manage Your Real Estate Leads
  • How to Optimize Real Estate Lead Response
  • The Secret to Scaling Real Estate Lead Management

 

Let’s get started!

How to Get Real Estate Leads

Your business is built off of your client base. So how do you make sure you get more of the right leads, and how do you ensure your team will follow up with those leads? A real estate CRM is the most effective tool to jumpstart your efficiency and guide your team toward closing more deals. With the backing of a tool, you can own more of your lead sources and better qualify real estate leads for your agents. Optimize your process for getting a high volume of high-fit leads, and you’re well on your way.

Owning Your Leads

Your leads are interacting with listings from many different agents across multiple websites. In order to get more high-quality real estate leads, you want people interested in your listings to interact with exclusively your information. So, how do you make that happen?

Having your own website that connects to the backend of your CRM will enable you to attract more leads and convert them into homeowners. Owning your leads within your CRM will ensure your leads aren’t distracted or enticed by other real estate agent information that seems to always be in their faces on third-party sites like Zillow or Realtor.com.

Through your website, you’ll also be able to see how your leads are responding to your listings. This new knowledge will influence your ability to source better qualified leads and serve these leads the right information, resources and guidance — wherever they are in their buyer’s journeys.

Tactics

So, what are some of the boots-on-the-ground tactics to get leads into your database? In order to really start boosting your home sales and to get the right leads, you need to get out in the community and do the work. Here are some ideas with a new spin to get leads into your real estate CRM.

Open Houses:

Open houses are a great opportunity to generate new leads and make new connections. Agents hold houses with the idea that a buyer will walk in and immediately want to purchase the home. As you can probably attest, that’s not really what ends up happening, most of the time. It is a great opportunity, however, for new agents in an area (or any agent really) to meet future buyers. Those attending an open house will have some interest in real estate and it is important for you to get their information. At the entrance to the open house, set up a computer or tablet with a landing page that connects to your CRM. Have the guests enter their email and name for more information (and for safety purposes). You’ll be able to follow up with them and nurture their interest. Eventually they’ll be buying a home and they will think of you!

Door Knocking:

Establish yourself in a neighborhood by going door to door. You can couple this effort with an upcoming open house, or strike out independently of an event. Going door to door is a great way to make a name for yourself in a community. When you’re interacting with a homeowner, ask them if they or anyone they know is considering selling in the near future. Always offer them the out of naming a neighbor, but also give them the opportunity to get more information from you if they are interested. Even if they are just getting started in the process of considering to sell, you will already be on their minds when they think of real estate; if they give you their information on this journey, all the better!

Home Buyer Seminars:

Home buyer seminars are another great way to establish yourself as a real estate thought leader. Consider partnering with lenders or interested brokers to help fund the event, then advertise however you can to get the word out. Use social media, flyers or radio ads. You might not see a lot of turnout right away, but hold these events once a month and you’ll start to gain traction as a real estate thought leader in the community.

Floor Time:

Be present for the calls that come to your office. As far as quality of leads, this lead capture method is second only to someone who’s interested in buying just strolling into an open house. These folks are calling the office looking to speak with a real estate agent. So, sign up for time on the floor, and be available to take those calls when no one else is.

Qualifying Leads

A qualified lead in real estate can mean many things. Perhaps the most important is that they are actively thinking about buying a home. A CRM offers you insight into your website and how your leads are interacting with your listings. You’ll be able to see where leads come from, which listings they are viewing, how often they are liking or interacting with certain listings, and when they last were on the site.

This data will give you a clearer picture into a lead before you even follow up, effectively giving you a leg up on competitors who don’t have this insight. As you speed to lead, you won’t be cold calling hoping to better understand what your lead wants in a home. Instead, you’ll be able to set up a saved search to send out to your leads. You can tailor that search to include homes which match the criteria you already know your leads are looking for (location, price range, lot size, etc.).

Team leads will be able to route leads to agents based off this information, as well. You know your agents and their strengths. Your CRM will notify you when a lead comes into the system that matches certain criteria, so you can then easily approve and route leads to the agents most likely to close the deal.

With the right lead gathering methods and the right qualifiers built in, you can get better, higher-fit leads directly into your CRM today, and start selling more homes.

Identifying the Best Real Estate Leads for Your Team

Your agents came to you to provide them with the tools, the best real estate leads, and the guidance to help them excel in their ability to sell homes and grow their business. So, give the people what they want! You can become the master of lead generation and identifying the right leads for the right agents by turning to your tools to help diversify, organize and prioritize follow up.

Diversify Lead Sources

It’s easy as a team lead to focus in on one type of lead source; purchasing leads mainly from Zillow or another lead source where leads are actively raising their hands to speak to an agent about a property seems like a no-brainer. These leads are further along in their buyer journey and want to talk about real estate right now, so why wouldn’t you go all-in on that one lead source?

Well — like most things in life — balance is actually the underlying tactic to success. One of the biggest industry secrets that team leads often forget is to always diversify your lead sources. You never know when that one source you’ve been relying on is going to dry up or when the price will skyrocket. So it’s in your best interest to not become dependent on one type of lead. Leads that come from Google, PPC or Facebook might require a longer nurture cycle, but they are cheaper and well worth the time investment as well.

Variety is the spice of life, am I right? The same goes with your lead sources. When you diversify, your agents will have varying sales cycle lengths to work with and a way to amplify their closing ability through working with multiple types of clients. This will be especially important as you build your team and recruit more agents. You’ll need more viable leads in your pipeline at any given time and need to diversify the source to get the best price for the amount and quality of leads.

Organization

So, how do you organize your information for all these different lead sources and make sure you’re returning on your investments? You’ll need a real estate CRM to give you insight into the numbers behind each lead source, the number of deals closed per lead source and the overall ROI you’re seeing for each lead source per agent.

Lead Type

Once you’ve diversified your lead pool, prioritize your leads and distribute them to your team of agents. High-fit leads will look different in different contexts. You and your agents should keep your eyes peeled for the key indicators that signify a lead will be a home run for a certain agent.

These indicators will be a variety of both qualitative and quantitative information. Has someone talked to the lead on the phone? What’s their personality like? Would a specific agent be an obvious fit for this type of lead? You know your agents’ strengths. Help them play to those strengths by offering them the leads they’ll be able to mesh with. After all, closing deals is all about channeling the service mindset whenever possible.

The quantitative intelligence will require tools to gain behavioral history on your leads to see where they are at in their buyer’s journey and how you should prioritize them based on that.

Organization

You can gain this intelligence by using real estate CRM technology. You’ll be able to look into lead activity to gain a full picture that will help you to prioritize leads as high-fit leads. CRMs enable your team to use filters to find out some of these key indicators:

  • Last login
  • Register in last 3 days
  • Favorited properties
  • Number of properties viewed

 

These filtered indicators will show which of your leads are thinking heavily about real estate. If someone is matching all of these high-fit criteria, they should be a follow-up priority for your agents that day because the truth of the matter is, if they aren’t buying from you, they’ll be buying from someone else — and probably soon.

Knowledge is power. The more you know about your leads, the better able your team will be to serve them the information and home-buying experience they are looking for.

How to Manage Your Real Estate Leads

Once you’ve done your boots-on-the-ground work and leads are (ideally) filling your system, your voicemail and your time, you’ll need to consider how to best manage these leads to make sure you are properly following up with each in a way that will serve them and nurture them through their buying journey. This effort traces back to the goals your agents are setting for themselves and that you are setting for them. Give your team clear expectations for deliverables and they will have a better idea of how to prioritize their leads and keep multiple balls in the air at once.

Goal Setting

In order to optimize and maximize how much business your agents bring in, you’ll need to give their ambition some direction. Drawing clear parameters will also help you provide your agents with better service.

Consider, first, setting a minimum for monthly sales, to make your expectation for results clear. You can then check in with each agent in your weekly one-on-ones on to discover how they’re tracking toward this goal, allowing you to give direct advice on how and when to increase their sales activities. Creating this level of accountability and direction might sound harsh when compared with business-as-usual, but the truth is, both you and your agents are investing in each other. A shared perspective will hold you both accountable for each others’ successes. If your expectation is that your agents sell two homes a month and you know your close rate is 10 percent, then as a team lead, you know your agents need to have 20-30 leads coming in a month to maintain the necessary volume needed to close two homes a month. You and your team should also aim to maintain a mix of leads by incubation period. A mix of long- and short-term leads will help you establish safe padding for future months to come.

Follow Up

Your next step to providing better lead management for your team is to enable a greater lead follow-up plan. There are a few key components to success, here. To begin with, your team will need the right tools to better configure, organize and connect with leads. Real estate CRMs are one of the best ways you can provide these tools for your agents. They’ll be able to organize their follow up by lead source and recent activity, all within a daily task list with notes included. Your agents will be better able to juggle more leads and better able to follow up with them to drive stronger sales activities and close more deals.

When you’re lead routing to your team, you should also seriously consider your agents’ strengths. If one of them is better in rural areas and lives close enough to a lead to go out and show homes, then you should route leads in that area to that agent. Playing to strength is generally a good rule of thumb, but when it comes to newer agents, you should consider their overall training and capabilities when you send them leads to work.

Greener agents should work the more difficult leads to follow up with (the leads that have come in through PPC or Facebook instead of the people raising their hand asking a question). If you start agents out on the easier leads, they won’t have the experience dealing with the more difficult leads — which will hurt them in the long run.

Strategy

Once you have your team goals and your necessary tools for better real estate lead follow up, you’ll want to consider the best strategy to follow in order to provide your leads with exceptional customer service. As much as automating certain parts of follow up is valuable, real estate is still a service industry — which requires personal touches. You can’t just set up a lead on a drip campaign and wait six months expecting to sell that person a home. They need to be on the right program, and your agents need to interact with your leads on a regular cadence.

Educate your team on how to gauge where a lead is at in their buying journey, how to best meet them there, and how to put them in the right follow-up program. Real estate agents will be quick to shorten the program in order to push the sale, but that usually isn’t realistic. Go over the indicators for where a lead could be in their journey, and encourage your agents to be more in tuned with where their leads are at. They’ll be able to provide better service and will be a better agent for it.

How to Optimize Real Estate Lead Response

Are your agents feeling sluggish about their follow up? Do you send quality leads over their way, and never hear about the outcome? Your team knows the importance of speed to lead, but they seem to be having trouble getting to the leads in the right timeframe. There are steps you can take to optimize your agents’ real estate lead responses. Start by setting the right expectations in weekly meetings, then consider if they have the proper process, tools and strategy to multitask.

Process or Tools? Or Both?

As your agents’ team lead, you should look into where your agents are experiencing trouble. What’s getting in the way of their success? How are agents receiving news of a new lead? If you’re emailing them about new lead information, how can you be sure they are checking in when they need to? Additionally, how are your agents setting aside time to accomplish follow up? They might be using a designated time in the day to reach out.

That method can be effective for regular follow up. However, what happens when a lead comes in who requires an immediate response? Your agents might miss out on the opportunity to be the first to connect with that lead. Studies have shown that the importance of speed to lead can’t be overstated. Leads will end up working with agents they speak with first. CRMs with IDX enable your agents the visibility into how your leads are interacting with your site. They can see who was active recently as well as who is favoring homes. These sales activities are a vital way to decrease your speed to lead. If your agents have this visibility, then they can reach out as soon as they see someone interacting with a home. Catching leads while they are thinking about real estate is a crucial way to break the layers of red tape in real estate, cultivate better relationships with your leads and sell more homes.

Combine to Streamline

In order to help your agents improve their follow up, you’ll need greater insight into their activity. You’ll also need a better way to communicate the lead’s current place in their buyer’s journey. Piecing together technology to get what you need for lead routing, communication and follow up hinders your ability to see true activity.

What you need in order to effectively understands leads is a CRM that combines all activity into one platform. A real estate CRM that connects you to your agents’ activity will show you how they are following up with the leads. You’ll get insight into how soon agents are calling leads, how persistent they are being with their follow up, and how many deals they have running at once. This visibility will also enable your agents greater control over their leads. Once you source the leads, you can send them to your agents. They’ll be notified of all the information they need to know — on a central dashboard.

As your business grows, it will become of more importance to provide your team with repeatable and scalable processes and tools so they can follow up with more leads, close more deals and make more money for themselves and for the team. A real estate CRM will give you and your agents a huge leg up on your competition and enable them to do more with less effort overall.

Multitask

As your business grows, your agents will need to follow up with more leads while maintaining their personable approach and the service mindset. In order to facilitate their growth as agents and their ability to scale up their own business, you will need to provide them with the proper tools, guidance and process to accomplish more follow up with leads. Shaving off real estate lead response time in the way of efficiency and visibility by use of a CRM will compound your teams’ experience and skill — and enable them to help more people find the perfect property.

The Secret to Scaling Real Estate Lead Management

You invest so much time and energy into your business as a team lead. You wear all of the hats right now, and you look great in all of them. You’re the agent that crushes deals, the administrator that organizes which agents get which leads and the coach that meets weekly in one on ones to discuss strategy.

You’ve been hustling for a while now and your agents rely on you to put the work in but…are you wondering where the breaking point is?

If you find yourself wondering where those weekends, those nights with family and friends have disappeared to, then it might be time for you to take a step back to re-examine the best way to grow your business.

I know letting go is hard to do but… you can do it!

I say this with confidence because I know the real secret to effectively scaling your business is to make the leap from working in your business to working on your business. So, what does this entail?

Let Go of Buyers

Making this switch is not an all-at-once kind of thing. You need to smoothly transition from doing everything in your business to focusing on the key pieces that facilitate growth. The first step to stepping back and scaling up is to let go of working with buyers.

Buyers are way more time consuming than sellers. Dropping buyers can be hard for some team leads to swallow. Buyers are how you built your business! When you really think about it though, you’ll realize how much time you’ll gain back into your day when you aren’t showing people houses after 5pm every day.

But there’s more to it than just getting time back into your day. Your team might have started out small — just two or three agents working closely under you. The culture when you started out was collaborative and cooperative, but as you’ve added agents to your team this isn’t as clear. You need to focus on building the trust with your new agents and facilitating their ability to sell. There can be a competitive perspective when the team lead is still working with buyers. Focus on helping your agents to grow by providing them with the leads and guidance they’ll need to succeed.

Give your agents the room and opportunity to build their skillset and to sell more homes. If you’re worried about the pay-cut that might come when you stop working with buyers (because you are on-fire with your clients) think instead about how the work you are putting back into your business and your agents will quickly and easily make up for the loss and improve profit ten-fold.

Inspect What You Expect

So once you’ve taken a step back out of the business to work on the business, your perspective will shift. You’ll be able to focus on getting better results from your agents by providing better tools and guidance.

Strategies, like the Rule of Three, require a lot of follow up, and agents require more help from team leads when it comes to proper real estate lead management so they can follow up on leads quickly and efficiently. You’ll be able to hold more weekly strategic meetings to check in with agents and their numbers, ensuring they’re on track. You’ll also be able to inspect the numbers behind your agents and the leads they are pulling in and the deals they are closing.

A good rule of thumb is to inspect what you expect. If you expect your agents to follow strategies like the Rule of Three and follow up with leads across multiple platforms, multiple times a day, then you need to have a way to check in on whether or not that expectation is being met.

Do you ask your agents in weekly meetings how it’s going? You can — and you should — but perhaps even more important than that is having the right tools to visualize success. You should be digging into the software behind it all. At this point, a real estate CRM is a necessary tool for your team to really be able to scale, grow and meet their potential, all while seeing the results in your reports.

CRMs allow you to see how each agent is tracking toward their goals and how they are interacting with leads. You’ll be able to go into each one-on-one meeting with real suggestions based off of your research. You’ll be able to better support and target different agents’ needs.

Recruit!

The further you get away from working in the business, the more you will want to focus on your recruiting efforts for your team. There are a lot of pieces that go into this. You need to make your team attractive to potential agents both through showcasing current successes and through offering the kind of guidance, lead generation and tools that prospective agents will be looking for in a rockstar team.

Recruiting is especially important as you grow your business, because you never know when agents might leave your team. It happens often! If you want to avoid setbacks and focus on increasing your profit, you’ll need to make up for these losses and eventually be adding agents to help with the growing number of leads coming into your pipeline.

Make the Leap

Trust me. Change is scary, and I get that, especially when it comes to taking a step back from something you’ve invested in so heavily. The truth is, your team will have room to soar if you give them the room, the tools and the guidance to do so.

You got this. Make the leap!