The best real estate lead generation system doesn’t just produce the most leads.
No, the best systems go beyond just real estate investor lead generation software. They organize prospect files, automate outreach and follow-up, help you analyze deals and coordinate your entire team.
Ultimately, the best real estate lead generation systems help investors turn leads into profitable deals.
As you compare seller lead generation tools, keep the following goals in mind to come up with a system that works for your real estate business.
What Is a Real Estate Lead Generation System?
Some investors work with real estate agents or wholesalers to provide them with seller leads. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, it won’t score you the best deals.
After all, deals listed publicly on the MLS sell for market pricing by definition. And wholesalers take the best meat off the bone of an off-market deal.
So, active investors looking for the best off-market deals have to go out and create them. That means marketing to distressed or disinterested sellers, qualifying leads as you make contact, following up with them, getting to the closing table and then measuring the results of your campaigns.
The best real estate lead generation systems create a repeatable, scalable process — rather than a collection of disconnected spreadsheets, contact lists and marketing applications.
What Should a Real Estate Investor Lead Generation System Include?
Your goal is to create an all-in-one real estate lead generation system. A system that lets all of your team members coordinate without any leads falling through the cracks.
So, you ideally want a real estate lead generation platform that combines raw lead data, list stacking tools that identify the best leads, and then automated marketing outreach to those leads. Marketing campaigns could include direct mail, email outreach, cold calling, SEO, paid advertising and more. But that’s just the beginning.
Once leads start responding, the best lead generation systems help you track all communications and put them on automated follow-up campaigns. Each lead is precious and cost you money and time, so you need to close as many as possible to keep your business profitable.
Automated drip campaigns help you nurture relationships over time, even if the seller doesn’t immediately schedule an appointment or agree to move forward. All of your team members should be able to pull up any lead file at any time to see every communication exchange that ever took place with them.
The best seller lead generation tools help you convert opportunities into transactions. Better yet, they automatically track the exact cost and profitability of each one, to calculate the ROI of each of your marketing campaigns.
Lead Quality > Lead Quantity
Outbound marketing costs money and/or time. From direct mail to cold calling to online ads, it costs you to put yourself in front of prospective sellers.
So which is better: 10,000 vaguely-targeted leads or 1,000 high-probability leads?
The best platforms for real estate investors target motivated seller lead generation. That includes distressed owners of course, such as those in foreclosure, tax sale or divorce. It also includes disinterested owners like those who inherited properties or leave their vacant properties unkempt.
Unless you’re targeting short sales — which is a narrow and difficult niche — you also need the property to have substantial equity in it.
If only there were a way to filter your leads for two or more of these factors. Oh wait: it’s called list stacking. By finding the overlap among your various lead lists, you can identify the highest-likelihood leads and target them first with your limited marketing budget.
Ideally, you also collect leads from multiple sources. That can include pulling lists such as foreclosures and tax sales, physical scouting such as driving for dollars, and inbound marketing through ads and SEO.
You’ll also want your real estate lead generation platform to include skip tracing, so you can actually contact the best leads on your list.
Combine Marketing Channels for Best Results
Beyond combining different sources of leads, it also helps to combine different marketing channels.
Imagine someone gets a mailed postcard from you. They glance over it for 3.5 seconds then throw it away. A few days later, they see one of your Facebook ads. The next day, they run a local search for selling their house for cash and your seller website appears first. They think to themselves: “That name seems familiar.” They click through to your website, see your testimonials. Then they back out of your website and look at your Google Reviews.
Only then do they pick up the phone and call you.
Research by RAIN Group sales training found that prospects need an average of eight touch points from a company before they even contact you for a conversation. The best real estate lead generation systems let you seamlessly combine marketing channels while tracking all communications your team has had with each lead.
CRM: Beyond Real Estate Investor Lead Generation Software
Yes, of course you need a real estate lead generation platform. But that’s the beginning, not the whole kit and kaboodle.
Once you have a list of leads, you need to market to them. Once you reach out to them, you need to track which ones respond, and what they say. Then you need to follow up with them relentlessly until you either give up on them as a dead lead or they sell their property to you.
Whether they sell to you or not, you need to track which closed deals came from which marketing channels, so you know the ROI of each one.
That’s a real estate CRM. Beyond a real estate lead generation platform, a holistic CRM automates every part of the process for you. In fact, some of the best real estate lead generation systems and CRMs even include native AI agents that can make and answer phone calls on your behalf, and update lead files within the CRM based on those calls.
Performance Tracking, ROI, and Scalability
Imagine you send a thousand direct mail postcards to pre-foreclosure leads, another thousand to tax sale leads, and another thousand to abandoned homes you found by driving for dollars.
Which one performed best? What kind of ROI did you earn on each?
You’ll only know if you track the performance of every lead in your CRM.
By doing so, you discover that two of your closed deals from those mailings came from the pre-foreclosure list, one came from driving for dollars, and none came from the tax sale leads. You give it a few more months to get a large enough sample size, but the pattern holds. After six months, you discover you’re earning $5 for every $1 spent on pre-foreclosure leads, $3 from driving for dollars leads, and breaking even on driving for dollars leads.
Should you keep doing all three?
In your market, it’s clear where you should double down on and where you should scale back. You can then earn more profit for every marketing dollar spent, and keep scaling your business profitably.
But you only know that because you tracked the performance and ROI of each lead.
Specifically, your real estate CRM should track your cost-per-lead, cost-per-acquisition, lead-to-deal conversion rate, your team members’ response times and your revenue and profit per marketing channel. Know those, and you know how to scale your business to the moon.
How to Choose the Best Real Estate Lead Generation System
What is the best lead generation system for real estate investors? How do you evaluate it?
Start by assessing real estate lead generation platforms on the following traits:
- Lead Quality: How motivated are the seller leads? How many actually lead to conversations? To appointments? To closed deals?
- Ease of Use: The most robust real estate lead system in the world is useless to you if you can’t figure out how to use it. Find the best balance of features and usability as you evaluate platforms.
- Automations: The best platforms include intelligent automations for lead follow-up. In fact, the very best incorporate AI agents to field phone calls and keep all your lead files up to date for you, helping to keep your team lean.
- Integration: Can the prospecting, outreach, CRM and reporting all operate together?
- Measurable ROI: Does the platform automatically track the profitability of each marketing channel for you?
As you compare seller lead generation tools, look for an all-in-one real estate lead generation system that remains user-friendly and intuitive.
Is an all-in-one lead generation system better than using separate tools? Yes, but only to the extent that it does each function well. Take advantage of free trials to test drive lead generation tools and CRMs before committing long-term. (Psst: REsimpli offers a 14-day free trial.)
From Seller Lead Generation Tools to a System
Real estate lead generation involves more than just buying lists. The best real estate lead generation systems are exactly that: an entire ecosystem that gets leads all the way from “list data” to “closed deal.”
You don’t want disconnected platforms that require you to manually move data and update multiple CRMs. The less time you waste messing around with disparate online systems, the more you can spend building relationships with sellers, walking properties and closing deals.
Look for real estate lead systems that combine accurate prospect data, multichannel marketing, centralized lead management, automated follow-up and measurable results. Any implicit bias aside, REsimpli was designed from the ground up to do all of those things holistically. Take it for a spin with a free trial to test it out for yourself.
