Top 15 Ways to Generate Real Estate Leads

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.

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.

Visit Offrs.com

Networking can be a fun way to generate real estate leads, and it’s especially effective because it goes hand in hand with building your SOI. The difference is that networking focuses on connections for the express purpose of building your business. That said, the most effective networking strategies include rubbing elbows with professionals in real estate as well as people who have nothing to do with the industry.

Go to concerts, art shows, social events, virtual events, or other places where people gather. Become active with your alumni associations, join a committee at your children’s school, volunteer with a local charity, and attend fundraisers. It’s a good networking tip to attend as many of these events as possible, so make it a goal to go out at least once per week.

Be sure to review market data and trends before you go to an event, as any real estate conversation is going to include questions like, “How’s the market?” Use these questions as an opportunity to show your expertise.

While it may be preferable to generate leads through free, organic strategies, there are also real estate lead generation companies that can save you time by quickly providing you with names and contact information of highly motivated potential buyers and sellers. You can expect to receive leads by email or text, depending on which service you use. Leads may come in batches or one at a time.

One of the best services, particularly for generating buyer leads, is Zillow’s Premier Agent program. This is because it gives agents the chance to connect with homeshoppers in their target ZIP codes by featuring them on many of the most popular real estate search sites, like Zillow and Trulia.

However, Zillow’s tools for managing incoming leads are fairly basic. In addition, it’s not as good for targeting seller leads, so if your needs are more robust, consider:

• Real Geeks: This incredibly powerful service helps you capture leads through IDX websites, automatically responds to incoming leads with SMS messages, and includes social media advertising tools for additional lead capture.
• Zurple: Like Real Geeks, this service allows you to generate leads by creating websites designed to pull leads from hyper-targeted areas, but also gives you a robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chat tool to nurture incoming leads.
• BoldLeads: This service offers an all-in-one tool for generating buyer and seller leads with ultra-easy setup, integration with top CRMs, stealth voicemails, and preset follow-up funnels.
• Market Leader: Unlike Zillow, Market Leader can provide you will seller leads. Even better, you will receive a guaranteed number of exclusive leads, saving you from competing with other agents.

For a more in-depth look at each of these services and other lead generation services like these, check out our guide on the best lead generation companies.

At any given time, there are people in your farm area using search engines to find answers to their real estate-related questions. With a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, you can put your website in search results, answer common questions that show your expertise and trustworthiness, and capture new leads.

(Source: neilpatel.com)

While SEO is not one of the simplest real estate lead generation strategies, it is a long-term strategy that can consistently bring you new, highly targeted leads without ongoing time and effort. For more details on how to get started, read the guide to real estate SEO.

Although building an audience on social media requires an extensive amount of consistency and planning, it can also offer an incredible return on the investment of your time. With a strategic social media marketing plan, you can increase your reach and create a profile that displays your expertise to potential leads as soon as they click on your name. There are very few real estate lead generation methods that build the know, like, and trust factors as effectively as social media can.

(Source: Instagram screenshot of @carolinakeepingitreal)

To start generating real estate leads through social media, you’ll have to decide which platforms to focus on. Read more details about how to do this in our platform-specific how-to guides:

• Create a Realtor Facebook page
• Master Instagram for real estate
• Get real estate leads from LinkedIn

Building an audience on social media is a long-term strategy to generate organic leads, but you should also consider advertising to substantially boost your progress from the beginning.

There are two types of leads you can incorporate in your real estate lead generation strategy: free and paid. However, you’ll have the most success when your lead generation strategy includes a balance of both types. Search engines and social media can be used to generate both organic and paid leads. You can use paid advertising to get more results in less time, or combine the strategies for long-term impact.

In order to get the most out of your online advertising efforts, you will need to think of it like virtual farming, where the ultimate goal is to build your name recognition rather than immediately sell to every lead. That said, as long as you provide content that engages potential customers, these channels can be a great source for leads.

Some of the best opportunities for generating leads through online advertisement are:

• Facebook and Instagram advertising: This lets you create ads and target specific geographic areas, people with special interests, or people you’d like to be working with. Social media can drive people to your website, and you can use ads to promote the special events you have coming up. Advertising with Facebook allows you to reach people on Messenger, Instagram stories, and the News Feed.
• Search engine advertising: The most well-known services are Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, which let you target keywords and feature your listings at the top and bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) in a way that is designed to appear like the rest of the search results.
• Google My Business: When you create a business listing using the free Google My Business service, your information, such as your name, phone number, and link to your website, will populate the entire right sidebar of the screen.
• Local community pages: These are dedicated landing pages that can be linked with internet exchange data (IDX) feeds and display homes for sale in a specific target market. This makes them a great tool to include in your listing marketing plan.
• NextDoor: NextDoor is another social platform that provides message boards where neighbors chat about issues, look for lost dogs, and talk about local concerns. However, its Neighborhood Sponsorship tool also offers you the chance to promote yourself in pop-up ads as users scroll through content for between $100 and $1,000 per month.

Targeted mailing focuses on people who meet certain criteria, like a good credit score or high-income households. Mailers, like a postcard or newsletter, or bulk electronic marketing, like email or text messages, allow you to reach even more potential clients than you can through networking alone. While you can create your own targeted list, you can also buy address lists from third parties to speed up the process.

Click on the tabs to learn more about the ways to send targeted messages:

An agent referral happens when you connect another agent in a different market with one of your connections. When you send a referral to another agent and they close a deal, you can expect to be paid a percentage of that commission, usually between 25% and 45%. If you receive a referral, the same rules apply, and you’ll pay a percentage to the referring agent. You can make connections on your own or use a referral service.

For example, you can use a referral service like Fast Expert, which connects active leads with real estate agents. Fast Expert allows you to choose buyer or seller leads and filter the leads by ZIP code. Agents only pay if the lead results in a successful closing, and a 25% referral fee is only applied in these cases. According to the company, there is no setup fee, monthly fee, or startup costs.

Agent-to-agent referrals provide an excellent source for relatively passive income. The more referrals you send to other agents, the more likely you are to get referral checks when people close deals.

When you host an event and offer an experience, you position yourself as an expert and place yourself in front of potential clients. Try hosting a tour of the area where you sell or an educational event at one of your listings. You could also host a “neighbors-only” open house as soon as you list a new property.

Experiential marketing allows potential clients to meet you in person and get to know you in a pressure-free environment. By giving them a chance to get to know you in person and feel comfortable, you increase the odds of being hired or recommended. Follow up immediately to thank them for coming.

Examples of experiential marketing include:

• Sponsored happy hours
• Panel discussions with real estate professionals
• Invitation-only open houses with cocktails
• Tours of your market area

Creating a landing page allows you to market something specific and unique, separate from your brokerage. After you create your landing page, drive traffic to it by posting or advertising it in networking groups, on social media, or on search engines.

Capturing leads is as simple as building your own destination page with a contact form and call to action. Our review of the top real estate website builders is a great place to start.

Although it seems like people prefer texts and emails to phone calls, talking to someone one-on-one is still highly effective. When it’s done properly, cold calling old acquaintances or leads who have fallen through the cracks can recreate a relationship that potentially generates new leads and new referral sources. The key to a successful cold call strategy is a thorough and natural real estate cold calling script.

Expired listings are properties that didn’t sell during their first appearance on the market. You can usually find the expiration date in the listing details for a property on your multiple listing service (MLS). Searching for expired listing leads can be a great way to showcase your ability to sell challenging houses.

It is worth noting, however, that the minute a listing expires, sellers are typically inundated with calls from agents who want their business—so expect competition. Why? The odds of converting a frustrated seller are higher than finding new business from a completely cold call.

However, if you’d rather be out selling instead of spending hours searching through MLS records for leads who may not be motivated to list again, consider REDX. REDX is a real estate prospecting platform designed to connect agents with qualified niche leads, like those with expired or preforeclosure leads. And while REDX does have a setup fee, it’s offering Fit Small Business readers $149 off the setup price when you click the button below.

Visit REDX

Property owners who list their property without an agent typically choose this path for a reason, and usually it’s the opportunity to save money. For this reason, for sale by owner (FSBO) leads can be harder to covert. However, in time, many FSBO sellers come to realize how much work is involved with selling a house.

While it’s impossible to know when they’ll be ready to throw in the towel, it never hurts to let an FSBO know you’d be thrilled to help give their listing some added exposure. Read more details on how to find FSBO leads and prospect them successfully.