Navigating Real Estate Lead Generation:
A Comprehensive Guide For Real Estate Agents
Introduction to Real Estate Lead Generation
Getting qualified leads remains a challenge for almost every real estate agent. Potential buyers and potential sellers are the leads all real estate agents need to thrive in business.
Unqualified leads are leads who are not ready to buy or sell.Qualified leads are ready to act now, and they're the gold nuggets we're all searching for among the common ore.
So, how do you generate more qualified real estate leads?
This guide comprehensively examines many strategies and opportunities Australian real estate agents can use to generate and nurture real estate leads.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Identifying Your Ideal Clientele: Buyers, Sellers and Investors
You should start by understanding your target market — you can't operate in every suburb in Australia, so who are your primary buyers and sellers?
If you want to generate real estate leads that result in sales, you need to know what you're selling to customise your offer to meet their needs.
Develop a Niche
It's an excellent strategy to define your market clearly before you attempt to generate real estate leads. As an example, here are five real estate niches in Australia:
- first-time homebuyers
- investors
- luxury homes
- holiday homes
- farms
What's your niche? Each niche will have its own lead characteristics, such as age, income, class, wealth, needs, desire and motivations.
The more specific your niche, the better you need to know your buyers and sellers. Are they downsizing? Expanding the family? Looking for a tree change?
What do they really want?
Analysing Client Needs and Preferences
Essentially, you must ask yourself, 'Who are these people?' The more thoroughly you understand them, the easier it will be to provide real estate properties to buyers and sellers that meet their needs.
This starts with having curiosity, being a great listener and establishing empathy with people. You can learn vital details by asking probing questions.
People often want to be heard, so a casual conversation can lead to a longer consultation.
A good real estate agent can nurture leads, target buyers, and start the selling process by paying close attention to their clients' needs.
Real Estate Agent Referrals
Sometimes buyers/sellers are referred to you from other agents or existing clients. And these leads are not always a perfect fit for your agency.
But do they really need a different agent? Or can you go the extra yards to find a property for your buyer/seller, even it's outside your agency? The best agents create sales leads by servicing buyer requirements.
Word of mouth can build a strong professional network and earn you a good reputation that leads to a bigger sales pipeline down the track.
Lead Generation Strategies for Real Estate Agents
Buying leads
It may be stating the obvious, but many real estate agents find it effective to buy leads directly from real estate lead companies set up to supply quality leads. Many of these are seller leads. It's certainly a fast way to generate leads.
In Australia, potential leads can be sourced through lead-generation platforms like these:
Digital Marketing Techniques for Real Estate Leads
The internet has revolutionised the way customers find suppliers and vice versa. Google ads, Instagram ads and Facebook ads have made it possible to create online advertising campaigns that target buyers and sellers in incredible detail.
Google ads can show up in the search pages of new leads who closely match your niche. Instagram ads can appear in many targeted ways.
Facebook is equally adept at providing an inexhaustible refinement of your target market. You can run advertising campaigns of diverse types.
It's also possible to run online digital marketing campaigns using banner ads on other websites that are a good fit to recruit more high-quality leads.
Social Media and Real Estate: Building Connections
A real estate agent can generate leads by engaging with potential clients on social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.
The advantages of using social media include minimal costs and unlimited potential for building relationships and connecting with more leads.
You can post about new business, highlight new listings, share success stories and use testimonials to establish your credentials as a trustworthy and authoritative leader in your real estate niche.
Consider this article about out-there agents active on social media.
Some Australian real estate agents using Instagram effectively include:
- David Walker: @davidwalkerrealestate
- Marshall White: @marshallwhiterealestate
- Belle Property: @bellepropertyau
- Jellis Craig: @jelliscraig
- RT Edgar: @rtedgar
TikTok captures a younger demographic, so if that is your niche and you're skilled in producing entertaining video content, including behind-the-scenes clips, you could work on real estate lead generation there.
Here are some tips to get started using TikTok for Real Estate Agents.
Australian real estate businesses active on TikTok include:
- Harcourts: @harcourtsinternational
- LJ Hooker: @ljhooker
- McGrath Real Estate: @mcgrathestateagents
SEO for Real Estate: Optimising for Visibility
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation , can generate leads through the clever use of keywords and phrases on your website. Real estate industry websites will often use location as a critical way to distinguish their offering from other real estate professionals.
That means adding the suburbs you cater for into — not just your web page content — but also your website meta descriptions, headings, alt text for images and online listings.
Web developers and content creators are a helpful resource and agents can also find plenty of information for free online.
Email Marketing: Engaging Potential Clients
Real estate agents also find email marketing campaigns to be a good method to generate real estate leads. This begins with gathering contact details, including emails from prospective clients at open house events.
You can email as part of ad campaigns or marketing pushes for specific properties, as well as regularly as a monthly or quarterly e-newsletter.
You can often highlight successful sales, including client testimonials, case studies and profiles of new agents. Some of these items will be new content on your website and the email will be drawing attention to potential clients to get them to visit your site.
As traffic to your website is one factor that influences SEO rankings , you can see how email marketing campaigns can work to lift your visibility in your market and assist the lead-generation process.
Offline Lead Generation Tactics
Remember life before the internet? If you're old enough, you'll know that there are other ways to generate leads in the 'offline' world.
Networking and Community Involvement
Many real estate agents are naturally good networkers, which helps in this profession. If you're active in your local community or local chamber of commerce, you'll be meeting local businesses as a natural part of being a good local citizen. The fact that you might also generate leads is a bonus.
It's also true that your direct contacts may not generate quality leads, but through good word of mouth and referrals, you may develop more leads.
Your past clients may speak highly of you to potential clients. It beats cold calling with phone calls.
Service organisations are another good source to generate leads, and they include:
- Rotary
- Lions Clubs
- Kiwanis
- Soroptimist International — empowering women
- Rotaract — empowering young people
Traditional Advertising and Direct Mail Strategies
Digital natives may forget that traditional advertising can also be an effective way to generate real estate leads. These options include:
- billboards
- print ads
- posters
- radio and TV ads
- direct mail
Of course, it doesn't have to be either/or — digital marketing can be reinforced with a print ad or a radio spot.
Direct mail remains a common method of getting a steady stream of new clients who can shift through the sales funnel from being a potential lead to a qualified lead.
Many a real estate business drops flyers into mailboxes to recruit potential clients by listing the sale prices of neighbouring homes and offering free valuations.
A real estate business might also produce other types of direct mail, such as calendars, note pads and fridge magnets. The tangible presence of these items may be seen for months in a potential client's home.
As a way of generating real estate leads, sometimes the old ways are just as effective as the new.
Using Technology in Lead Generation Strategies
Just because traditional methods of generating leads, like open houses and real-world advertising, can be effective doesn't mean you should ignore the potential of the latest technologies.
Real Estate Websites and Landing Pages
As real estate professionals, ask yourself if your website is optimised to generate real estate leads.
- Are you using a pop-up chatbot to engage with visitors and convert new clients into qualified leads?
- Are you using a pop-up forms request to gather visitor contact details, which can be used to nurture leads?
- Are you actively using Google Analytics to take advantage of the smart data that can help you refine your lead-generation strategies?
- Have you created landing pages that specifically market a property to turn your website into a lead-generation platform?
- How good are your photos and videos and website mobile responsiveness compared to your rivals?
CRM Systems for Managing Real Estate Leads
CRM or Customer Relationship Management, is a vital part of lead generation and management. With CRM, you can record all your interactions with a lead, add reminders to follow up, use data to segment leads into categories and allow personalisation of your communications.
One consideration when choosing a CRM tool that suits you is the level of automation offered. AI elements and sophisticated software mean it is possible to have automated lead generation strategies that can automatically handle aspects of lead generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing and lead management.
Automating tasks can free agents from manual handling, giving them more time to convert leads.
Virtual Tours and Digital Showings
Once upon a time, it was impossible to have open houses without buyers and real estate investors walking through the door.
Those days are gone.
Now, you can stage virtual tours online. Not only can you depict a property in all its visual glory through dozens of high-res images, but you can effectively let people 'walk through' a property online. An exclusive buyer overseas could even inspect investment properties without leaving their French armchair.
This technology gained added urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic when visiting an open house was a potential health risk. With VR (virtual reality) and 360-degree videos, potential clients can see a property online at their own pace and time, pause where they want, turn around and scan up to the ceiling or down to the floor.
These interactive features are a helpful resource to convert leads.
Companies offering these visual solutions include:
Content Marketing for Real Estate
Blogging and Article Writing: Establishing Authority
You may be lucky to be the only agent in your local market, but that doesn't automatically mean you're a market leader. Your authority can be raised through other means, like content marketing, which all help with generating leads.
Typically, 'blogging' means writing a 'blog post', just web jargon for an article. That could be anything from 200 words up to 2000 words.
Agents who regularly update their blogs fill them with useful articles about the home buying process, information about mortgage lenders, tips on choosing banks or the importance of getting an expert report on a property Before You Buy.
Through a blog article or a video you might learn, for example, how BYB inspection reports help buyers gain trust in the agent. This means that even if they're not the successful buyer of the property, they are still likely to use them for future transactions.
The more authority you create through sharing your knowledge, the more you can drive traffic to your blog and convert leads.
Video Content: Engaging Potential Clients Visually
Video is now an essential tool for real estate lead generation. In fact, it's worth reading the statistics about real estate videos (from the USA) — here are just some of the highlights:
- 73% of homeowners are more likely to list with a real estate agent who uses video
- real estate videos drive 157% more traffic to your website
- 58% of buyers want to see a video of a home they're looking at online
- people who watch the video of a property are 174% more likely to purchase than those who don't
- 403% more inquiries are driven from listings with video
You can use videos for agent introductions, neighbourhood tours, client testimonials, behind-the-scenes, lifestyle tips, educational content and property walkthroughs. Drone videos are becoming more widely used.
Here are some examples of effective Australian real estate videos.
Learn how to make a real estate video that will go viral.
Here are 27 TikTok real estate videos to inspire you.
Most agents who use video have a YouTube channel, as well as sharing their videos across other social media sites. Some Australian real estate businesses using video extensively include:
Podcast
Why not start a podcast about your real estate knowledge if you're not shy of media attention? It's obviously a lot of work, but the results could be very effective in generating leads for the right people.
As an example, here's a podcast on property, The Upshot Podcast.
Building Partnerships and Referral Networks
Collaborating with Local Businesses and Professionals
You could ask yourself, 'Could I collaborate with other related businesses to improve my lead generation?'
This could include any one of a number of real estate-related professions:
- gardening services
- builders
- mortgage lenders
- staging specialists
- photographers
All of these people could become part of an active partnership and referral network where prospective clients can be recommended within your network.
Developing a Referral Program
A referral program formalises and incentivises your professional partners and happy clients to refer leads to you. It's up to you to design a program that works but typically, offers include discounts, rewards, gift vouchers and referral fees.
You can encourage repeat business and loyalty with a referral program, and the word-of-mouth benefits include more leads as well as an engaged network.
As one example, Frasers Property has a referral program with a reward of $2000 for a successful sale.
Independent Inspections
An independent building inspection report service like the one offered by Before You Buy (BYB) could become a vital part of your collaboration. 85% of report buyers buy or bid on the property.
Efficient agents can weed out 'tyre kickers' who attend open homes because the people who download the report are the ones who are ready to buy. Just as importantly, 25% are ready to sell if you find them a property that fits the brief.
Many top sales agents find that getting a BYB report upfront has the following benefits:
- mitigate risks
- instil buyer confidence
- identify serious buyers
- avoid delays
- provide customer service
BYB also offers pest and pool inspection reports and strata reports. They can help agents capture leads via their text messaging system, and they can qualify the leads and integrate them into the agent's CRM.
This lead generation optimises agent efficiency and allows the creation of buyer/seller lists to be sent directly to the property management team.
In this video, a leading McGrath real estate agent talks about why he wouldn't sell a house without a BYB independent report.
Lead Nurturing and Follow-Up
Nurturing a lead is the process of engaging with your leads to earn their trust, develop the relationship and hopefully retain them until they buy or sell a property.
Effective Communication Strategies
It goes without saying that how you communicate with people is essential to success. That means being professional, responsive, empathetic and personal at all times.
People appreciate prompt replies and information on request. They value you observing correct etiquette in all forms, including texting and the use of emojis. Automated replies should not suddenly change the tone or disrupt your nurtured rapport.
Converting Leads into Clients: Best Practices
All leads are not created equal. Good clients observe a disciplined approach to qualifying leads. Ask yourself:
- do they align with my expertise and niche?
- are they genuine buyers/sellers?
- are they financially/legally able to complete the deal?
- is there a timing factor that could encourage a decision?
Building Trust
Before You Buy inspection reports can be used by both buyers and sellers, multiplying the opportunities to generate leads.
Sellers using BYB reports develop more trust in their agent as all parties are aware of the playing field. Often, the agent is able to facilitate a quicker sale due to the greater transparency offered by a BYB inspection.
Experience shows that many sellers turn into buyers, meaning more lead generation for the successful agent.
Focus On the Best Quality Leads
Sorting the wheat from the chaff is always essential when qualifying leads. You should focus on the high-quality leads who are ready to act. It doesn't mean you should ignore your other leads, but using the 80/20 rule, you should spend 80% of your time on the best 20% of leads.
Before You Buy offers a free, customisable, white-labelled post-OFI SMS service called BYB assist which integrates data on who downloads a report, asks for finance help and more with the agent's own CRM to show buyer intent signals. Tools such as this can really help you know who to focus on. By automating your comms and marketing outreach, you can maintain the other leads with less frequent attention and communication.
Reach Out to Expired Listings
Not everyone uses a real estate agent. Homeowners without agents are in the For Sale By Owner (FSBO leads) category. These 'expired listings' can become expired leads when their sales fail.
As part of a strategy to generate real estate leads, this area could be very effective for the right agent. An abundance of empathy could see your leads growing, especially if you're skilled at 'turn-around' ideas that could result in sales.
Measuring and Analysing Lead Generation Efforts
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Real Estate Lead Generation
It makes sense to measure your efforts — this means you can spend more time and resources doing the things that work for you.
What do agents consider the key performance indicators (KPIs) for leads?
- number of leads generated
- lead conversion rate
- average time to conversion
- return on investment (ROI)
- customer lifetime value (CLV)
Tracking these KPIs will help you refine your strategies and improve your lead conversion success.
Using Analytics to Refine Your Leads Strategy
Google Analytics is perhaps the most widely known tool for analysing data, click-through rates and engagement, but there are many other tools, and some CRM programs come with these tools as standard.
AI is also helping agents to discover patterns and identify best-performing marketing channels through mining your database of leads.
Importance of Building Your Personal Brand
Every agent has a personal brand, whether it is conscious or not. A vital action to pursue is to define your values. If say, you want to position yourself as trustworthy and someone who takes integrity and transparency seriously, you should find ways to reinforce that impression.
Getting upfront property inspection reports from Before You Buy is an excellent way to present your key point of difference in a market. It demonstrates that you have nothing to hide and respect the buyers as much as the sellers.
You could easily become the market leader in the 'integrity and transparency brand' space. This strong brand position could be a lead magnet to attract more prospects. It also benefits from earning the trust of sellers who can become buyers in the future.
In this video, a Josh Phegan agent talks about the transparency benefits of increased buyer confidence and trust from using Before You Buy inspection reports.
Did you know buyers who've been offered a Before You Buy report by an agent are more likely to choose them as an agent when they are selling? (25% of buyers are also sellers).
Why? Because their brand has been established in the market as credible and transparent.
Also, unsuccessful buyer data is captured through the inspection process, meaning that agents can market them similar properties in similar areas.
Relationship between Inbound Lead Generation and Your Brand
If you think of an outbound lead as someone you or your sales team have initially contacted, an inbound lead is a prospect motivated to contact you by some marketing content you've created.
That could be a social media post, a poster, an online quiz, a digital ad, a billboard, a blog or a video. In other words, engaging content that has sparked a response, with the result being an inbound lead getting in touch with you.
Inbound lead generation and brand are inextricably related. With hundreds of agents to choose from, an inbound lead consciously or unconsciously chooses an agent whose brand engages them because it makes you seem confident or comfortable or trustworthy or energetic — whatever your brand is.
If you've spent the time to develop a brand voice, brand story and brand values, all of your marketing content should reflect those. Your overall brand presence, as reflected in your blogs, videos, emails and so on, will convey your brand to your target audience.
The stronger your brand, the stronger your inbound lead generation.
An example of inbound lead generation
This guide to real estate lead generation is a good example of inbound marketing. You've probably found this guide on a BYB landing page, their blog or via social media or a digital ad.
BYB's offer of a comprehensive lead generation guide is tempting enough for you to enter your email address in order to download the guide.
Along with learning about lead generation in general, you're also learning about the value of Before You Buy's independent inspection service, as well as these key benefits for better lead generation:
- BYB helps agents capture leads via the BYB assist text messaging system
- BYB validates these leads as warm or hot (identifying quality leads) and integrates them with the agents own CRM
- This lead validation allows agents to prioritise which leads to focus on for maximum efficiency
- BYB's data capabilities allow agents to create buyer/seller lists and send investor leads to the property management team.
Adapting to Changing Market Conditions
The days of cold-calling past clients to generate referrals are probably over. You'll get far more deals from a highly entertaining video. Can you go viral?
Perhaps you can find a new and fun way to answer questions about buying and selling real estate posed by people online.
The industry is evolving and new forums, media and technologies are shaping a new generation of buyers and sellers. As an agent, you must adapt as the market changes and find new ways of listing leads.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Summarising Key Takeaways
Generating more leads begins with a solid personal brand and an understanding of your niche. Knowing your target market and using traditional and digital strategies to generate leads will lead to better results.
Time-honoured networking skills and traditional marketing like direct mail will never fade. But embracing the digital world means building a great website and using social media and email marketing. If you can master blogging and videos, you're ahead of the pack.
Finally, a good CRM will be worth its weight in gold by doing the heavy lifting of managing and nurturing your hard-won leads.
Why and How to Implement Strategies to Complement your Lead Nurturing
You can't do everything — no one can. So the key to lead nurturing is to develop strategies that work for you. The answer to 'why' is because lead nurturing is vital to your success and you need strategies to make it personal, efficient and effective.
The answer to 'how' is to reflect on each type of strategy below and then assemble a mix of those that suit your strengths and weaknesses. Every agent will be different in their approach, as it should be. Make it work for you.
Brand strategies
Establish your personal and business brands, focus on your niche and identify a target market you can service. When you consider your prospects, seek a good alignment with your brand.
Offline and online strategies
You can adopt both offline and online techniques to gather leads and play to your strengths and skills in choosing what to focus on. Online will include digital marketing, social media, SEO, landing pages, virtual tours and email campaigns. Offline will embrace traditional advertising and direct mail.
Analytical strategies
You need a plan. Set clear goals and objectives that you can meet on a regular basis. Measure your success through KPIs that provide meaningful evidence of your progress.
Lead nurturing and management strategies
Manage and nurture your leads using CRM software. Build a marketing plan that highlights your brand success and creates trust and confidence across your clients and leads. Develop your authority through blogs, presentations and videos.
Networking strategies
Remember to be generous with referrals. If you remain true to your brand values, word-of-mouth will spread about your service. Creating a referral program encourages repeat business. And networking should be going on in the offline world through community involvement as well as in the online world through your socials.
Want to Learn More About How Before You Buy Can Help You?
- reduce risk
- increase buyer confidence
- identify serious buyers
- avoid delays
- and improve customer service
