Paid leads aren’t for everyone.

Too many agents get sucked into paying for leads, but fail to get an ROI because their follow-up is lousy. I only recommend paid leads if you have a solid conversion plan

There are several considerations when considering paid lead services.

Are you focusing on buyers or sellers?

Which of the 6 kinds of leads do you want? Do you want lots of lower-quality leads with a long sales funnel, or fewer, higher-quality leads?

Are you willing to take a lower cost-per-lead but have to compete for new clients with two other agents who also get that lead?

Or are you okay if your lead service sells leads to other agents in your zip code at all?

Below are the best real estate lead providers for those ready to gas up their pipeline.

The Contenders

BEST FOR BROKERAGES / TEAMS

BEST FOR MOTIVATED SELLERS

BEST FOR NEWER AGENTS

OTHERS

Other Real Estate Lead Providers

There are a number of other paid lead services for real estate, including:

• Lead Geeks
• Movoto
• Ownerly
• ProspectNow
• Rocket Agent
• Qazzoo
• Homes.com
• Prime Seller Leads
• SetSchedule

Paid Leads from your Platform

Some quality leads may come from your website/CRM platform that you are already using.

Most real estate industry-leading platforms also offer their own paid lead services.

Running a competent AdWords or Facebook campaign is a basic skill set for these companies. These “lead generation” sites send home buyer traffic to your IDX website using forced registration to convert buyers, or a home valuation landing page to convert sellers. Some include lead generation software backends that allow you to closely monitor and tune your spending and results.

• BoomTown
• Curaytor
• CINC
• kvCORE
• Real Geeks
• Sierra Interactive
• Ylopo
• Market Leader

Real Estate Marketing Software

Marketing software is different from paid leads. Buying leads isn’t marketing. You buy the lead. Someone else is doing the marketing to get that lead to you.

These real estate software strategies are designed to support you in generating your own leads. There are numerous different marketing strategies and tools, including:

• Referral / Repeat Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing

FSBOs, Expireds, and More

The paid leads above are about paid advertising and inducing a consumer to contact you.

Alternatively, you can also get lists of leads that you engage, like FSBOs, Expireds, probates, and more.

Some of the companies that do that for agents include:

• Espresso Agent
• Foreclosure.com
• LandVoice
• REDX
• Vulcan 7

Real Estate Leads for New Agents

Before you buy leads as a new agent, you need to be realistic about your budget and your strategy.

Budget

A “good” return on paid lead spending is about 5x. So if the average commission in your market is $5000, then you reasonably might expect to spend as much as $1000 before you actually get enough leads per month to turn into a closing.

Obviously the alternative to spending money is hustling, but even hustling has a price. You’ll need to do about $1000 of hustling – spending your time and energy – to get that first closing in this example.

Big teams that know what they are doing are very happy with a 5x return. Think about it. What if you’re a big-shot real estate team leader who could spend $20,000 knowing you would get $100,000 back a couple of months later? You’d do that all day. A 5x return is great!

But that’s a lot of money for some agents starting out.

My recommendation is to budget for that kind of money upfront. I also might recommend sticking to the portals like Zillow and Realtor.com to start because those are actually reasonably hot leads.

If you don’t have that kind of money, then I recommend skipping buying leads altogether. Put together a lead generation plan that focuses on your sphere, referrals, networking, or the myriad other low-cost techniques for generating leads.

Follow Up

Now about your lead generation strategy.

These leads are worthless if you cannot follow up and convert them with persistent, quality engagement.

The ROI shrinks really fast into negative red territory when you aren’t properly engaging leads. The agents failing at this are often the same ones you will see complaining about how awful leads are on Facebook.

Get comfortable with making phone calls. Follow-up is more than just assigning drip campaigns.

I don’t recommend spending money on leads unless you know that your funnel is working. Before forking out cash, build your business by working with friends and family, or cold calling expired or FSBO leads.

At most, start with a small spend so you can tinker with your system and make sure you are engaging the leads well.

Do-It-Yourself Lead Generation

Most paid leads come either from the major portals (Zillow, Realtor.com), Facebook ads, or Google AdWords.

Perhaps you want to skip the expensive middleman and find potential clients ready to sell or buy a home. Here are some ideas on how to DIY and go straight to the client.

A great thing about building your own lead generation is that you earn exclusive real estate leads. No one else gets them.

The business is ultimately lead generation. He who owns the leads owns the business. Even if you are paying for leads now, start working on a way of earning them yourself.

Portal Leads

It would be tough to replicate a portal, though there are things you can do to compete with them.

An IDX enabled real estate website, some long tail keywords, hyperlocal SEO, and some lead-capturing call-to-actions can earn you organic leads the same way a portal does.

With Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com all involved in iBuying in some way, you too can leverage the ability to make cash offers. You might partner with local investors, or, more easily, become an iBuyer expert and offer to help submit sellers’ homes to all the available iBuyers. This is a great way to capture leads from folks interested to sell their home.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Leads

There’s nothing keeping you from running Facebook ads or Google AdWords yourself. Build a slick home valuation landing page and promote it on Facebook, or run a Google AdWords campaign yourself and show up in the top of the SERPs.

Write some lead-capturing ad copy providing a service (home valuation, home search results, market report, etc) and earn eyeballs, clicks, and conversions.

I recommend being very careful, however. Your competition knows what they are doing. And when you know what you are doing, you can spend more. And when you can spend more, it drives up the price for you, making it all the more important that you know what you are doing.

For example, professional digital marketers are going to A/B test all their ad copy. They will A/B test their landing pages. They dig into Google Analytics and Facebook pixels and track the user journey. They use cool software like Hotjar to see how their pages are converting. And that is their entire job, while you might be juggling a real estate business.

For that reason, it’s a good idea to start by copying the competition – the folks who have put in the time and research in advance.

If you want to generate leads on social media or PPC, you’ll want to keep your conversion as high as possible. The best way to do this is with a landing page. Landing pages are optimized for conversion and collecting a prospect’s contact information. When you are buying traffic and exposure, you need to be sure you are maximizing how much of that converts into actual buyer or seller info.

Conclusion

Real estate lead generation is the most important part of your business, and often the most expensive. Buying real estate leads to support even a single high-performing agent will probably set you back $1000s/mo.

Wherever your leads are coming from, they are useless without good lead nurturing. Indeed, if your lead nurturing is broken, then buying real estate buyer leads and seller leads can easily have a negative return on your money. Improving your conversion rate from 1% and 2% can be the difference between a scalable, profitable business and bankruptcy. Don’t buy leads until you have a plan in place for how to work them.

I also recommend building other pillars than just paid leads. You should have referrals and your sphere of influence, of course. And you should have at least two other sources of leads. Other lead sources like referrals or farming a neighborhood can have much higher ROIs, but take time to develop. Be sure you are building other sources of business than just the leads you are paying for.

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