New agents often have a scattershot mentality.

“I have to do everything!“

That is what I did. I door knocked, mailed a farm, started a homebuyer seminar, called FSBOs and expireds, bought paid leads, worked renters, networked with investors, blogged, and spent time on social media.

The result? By trying to do everything, I did nothing well. I was not consistent because I was spread too thin.

Instead, focus on just 4 prospecting pillars, any one of which can support your goal 100%.

Then, resist the temptation to try other lead gen strategies.

List of Lead Generation Strategies for Real Estate Agents

In my article about the Hub and Spoke, the goal of lead generation for real estate agents is to build your audience. Your audience includes:

• personal relationships
• people who have eagerly and willingly engaged with you or your brand
• anyone with whom there is no intermediary between you and them
• vendors, colleagues, and even competitors you have relationships with

These are people in your CRM that you are marketing to.

Your audience is first and foremost. This includes your sphere of influence, referrals, and repeat business. Every agent has an audience, whether just starting out or a top producer.

Limit yourself to just four strategies for growing your audience.

The Four Pillars: How to Do Lead Generation in Real Estate

What is your business? Real estate?

Nope.

It’s lead generation.

You can be the best real estate agent in the world. Without leads, you will earn $0.

You can be the worst real estate agent in the world. With leads, you will earn something (even if you’re just referring them to the best real estate agent in the world with no leads).

If you want to make it in this business, you need to be a lead generation machine. That means focusing on a few lead sources that can sustain your business, and mastering them. As you will see, there are dozens if not hundreds of different ways to earn business. You can’t do them all.

Pick the ones suited to your strengths and stay focused!

These are the principles taught by coaches like Verl Workman.

You need to pick pillars that can sustain your business. Is your goal to close 30 homes this year? Then EVERY lead source should have enough opportunities to generate 30 closings a year. That puts you on track for 120 closings, and if any pillar falters, you are overshooting your target.

Work backwards from your annual goals to create weekly prospecting goals.

If you are growing into a large team or a brokerage, it is possible to add more than four pillars as your team grows. But most agents and teams should keep focused on four.

Mix it Up!

When selecting your four lead generation pillars, it makes sense to diversify between those with quick and slow results.

New agents need at least one business pillar in the “quick and free” quadrant.

The “Quick” quadrants feature lead sources you can land listings and buyers quickly and start earning money to support your business quickly.

The “Slow” quadrants feature lead generation strategies that are more desirable for the long term: lower customer acquisition costs, building a brand, and scalability. You’ll want to start developing one or two of these strategies as well early on.

Mix it up!

Countercyclical Lead Generation

A countercyclical business model is one that does well when the market is doing poorly.

Having at least one countercyclical business line can help hedge against a changing market and keep you alive during the next real estate crash.

Obvious examples include:

• working with investors
• listing foreclosures for banks
• niching into short sales

In good times, these are probably going thin businesses. But by having an established competency in them, you will be well poised to pivot quickly when the market shifts.

Consider at least one countercyclical model as part of your four pillars.

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Sphere of Influence

Sphere of influence, repeat customers, and client referrals! This is where top agents get most of their business, and must be one of your pillars if you are serious about real estate.

The majority of leads still come from referrals and repeat customers. Not PPC. Not Zillow. Not social media.

These have the highest ROI because they are warm leads with high conversion, usually involve few to no commission concessions, and have a relatively low or even $0 customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Social Media

I can only begin to scratch the surface of all the different techniques, tactics, and platforms that might be worth your time.

My main recommendation is to pick one, or at most two, social media platforms to focus on. It is tempting to start a SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram account as soon as you are an agent. While doing so may be worthwhile to brand yourself as a real estate professional, only select one for your real estate marketing effort. You will not be able to effectively manage them all.

Below are just a few social media channels. Instagram, NextDoor, Quora, Snapchat, Tik Tok, and other sites also might be great options to build an audience of home buyers and sellers.

Content Marketing

What in the world is “audience building”? There are a few components, but essentially it is content marketing, building a brand, and top-of-mind awareness.

The main effort of your content strategy is probably going to be your website and email marketing to your database.

This category is different than the others. Unlike leads you pay for, or social media on which you “rent” space, you own these lead generation methods. Facebook can’t change an algorithm and suddenly you’ve lost your leads’ email addresses and phone numbers. Those are yours.

It is my personal favorite prospecting category.

Hustling

I define hustling as those tasks that are usually free but just take your time and persistence.

Cold calling, networking events, sitting open houses, and doing the hard work of being a real estate agent.

These prospecting methods often have a lower conversion and aren’t for the faint of heart. But that is an advantage for the agent who is able to stick to it persistently. They succeed where most agents do not.

These are also some of the best methods for agents new to the business to cultivate potential leads on the cheap and lead with revenue.

Networking

Networking also has a lot in common with Referral and Sphere of Influence strategies. Making friends at your kids’ soccer practices, attending your local Toastmasters, and expanding your SOI are all ways of building a database.

I see networking as building mostly B2B relationships (lenders, investors, property managers, etc). These relationships can unlock massive potential.

Business Model

I call this business model prospecting because it is pursuing a specific niche, usually a B2B relationship from which you get leads.

These often require the cooperation of your broker if you are not a broker-owner yourself. They often involve sacrificing some of the commission in exchange for a steady volume of leads.

Paid Leads

Buying leads is the easiest way to lead generate, although it’s expensive!

Consider, if you, on average, make about $5000 on a commission, would you pay $1000 for a lead? Of course!

And that is about what the numbers work out to. Targeting a 5:1 ROI is very typical for these leads. You can see how the math adds up quickly. If you want to do 30 deals this year, you probably need to be spending $30,000 or more on paid leads.

The problem is that this assumes a good lead conversion, often about 2% for these lead types. Most agents don’t have the patience or follow-up to realize a conversion that high. Instead, they waste money and then complain that the leads were junk.

Good agents get contact information and stick with it 6, 12, or more months after the lead.

Often these leads are prospects buying or selling in a particular zip code who were captured on a landing page, either your own, or Zillow’s, or another third party like BoldLeads.

Farming

Farming is not its own category, as it includes elements of all of the previous prospecting plans. If you are farming a neighborhood, you are going to want to apply elements of all the prospecting methods above.

For example, you might send direct mail to your neighborhood, while hosting a community event, while working open houses for builders in your neighborhood, while participating in the HOA leadership, and while creating or commenting in the neighborhood Facebook group.

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Working It

Lastly, you need to implement a system for being consistent with the pillars you’ve chosen. Your CRM might have workflows that keep you on track. CRMs don’t just have to be for reminding you to call leads. Many can be used to remind you to do a task.

Browse my list of the best real estate CRMs for your business!

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Ultimate Real Estate Marketing Guides

For more real estate lead generation ideas, click into my Ultimate Guide on each prospecting method.