5 Ways To Generate More Real Estate Leads — The Ultimate Guide

Stephen Kolawole
5 min readMar 4, 2021

What is a Real Estate Lead Generation?

Real estate lead generation refers to the sales and/or marketing process of attracting and getting the contact information for someone who wants to buy or sell a house (a lead).

While most real estate agents have plenty of charisma and make great salespeople, too many forget about the importance of consistent lead generation for their business. They know how to turn leads into clients, but what happens when the pipeline goes dry?

That’s what I am going to talk about in this guide — generating leads for your real estate business.

First, I’ll show you how to build a sales funnel so that you can generate leads while you’re sleeping, and then I’ll show you some different ways for driving traffic to that sales funnel.

Building The Real Estate Lead-Gen Sales Funnel

The key to consistently generating leads for your real estate business is automation.

The more automated the process is, the less you’ll have to work for each lead, and the more you can focus on serving the clients you’re bringing in.

But how do you automate your lead-gen process?

The first step is to build a sales funnel for your real estate business — this is just a series of pages guide motivated sellers and buyers toward giving you their contact information, one step at a time.

For your purposes, I recommend using a Reverse Squeeze Page Funnel. This consists of just two pages, as well as a follow-up process (which is critical for agents).

The first page offers a free gift, guide, or piece of content in return for the visitor’s email address (“Get our FREE guide to selling your home for top dollar!” for instance).

And the second page is simply a “Thank You” page.

Here are a few ideas for “free gifts” you could offer…

  • Checklist for selling a home.
  • Guide to buying your first home.
  • Guide to selling a home on a budget.
  • Thinking of moving? Here’s our free city guide!
  • Guide to moving during a job change.
  • Access our house listings now!
  • Determine the value of my home!

The key is that you want your free gift to appeal only to the people you’re trying to attract.

(For example, you don’t want to offer a free guide to grooming pets… because you won’t attract the right people)

Then, when someone enters their email address to get your free gift, this tells you that they are someone who’s interested in buying or selling their home

You actually don’t need a full-blown website in order to start generating leads for your business. You just need an effective sales funnel (which literally might just be two pages and a free resource).

A sales funnel allows you to capture contact information (on autopilot) for people who are motivated, but maybe a little shy or skeptical.

You can then reach out and work your magic on those high-quality leads.

1. How To Find Real Estate Leads On Craigslist

Craigslist is known as one of the top platforms for finding real estate leads, for both buyers and sellers.

Many FSBO sellers flock to Craiglist to list their homes and hopefully find a buyer. But, as you already know, that’s easier said than done — and many sellers who’ve been listing their home for months or years might be willing to jump ship and work with an agent.

Fortunately, finding these people and contacting them is super easy.

Go to Craigslist and click on “real estate for sale”…

2. How To Find Real Estate Leads On Facebook & Instagram

Facebook and Instagram are great platforms for generating real estate leads.

You can run advertisements to buyers and sellers on Instagram and Facebook using a Facebook Business account (Facebook owns Instagram and so you create ads using the same interface).

Perhaps the best part about running these ads is how specific you can get with your targeting. You can target people who have an interest in “luxury real estate” or “buying and selling real estate.” You can target homeowners, real estate investors, or even people in upper-income brackets.

3. How To Find Real Estate Leads Through Local SEO

Imagine this.

Someone goes to Google and searches for “real estate agent in [your city]”. Your sales funnel or website is in the first few results and they click on it.

That person then learns about your business and might give you a call or opt-in to get your free gift… heck, they might even become a client.

Every month, 3,000 people search for “real estate agent near me” on Google.

4. How To Find Real Estate Leads Through Direct Mail

Direct mail is one of the most popular methods for real estate agents to generate leads.

And there’s a good reason for that — direct mail is very effective.

You can send mailers to celebrate the holidays…

5. How To Find Real Estate Leads Through Door Knocking

As a final lead-gen tactic, we’re talking about door knocking.

Look — this probably isn’t the first thing you want to do when you think of growing your real estate business. It’s time-consuming, more than a little awkward, and impossible to scale.

But that doesn’t change one simple fact: door-knocking did right can be very effective for building relationships in the community and getting your agency off the ground.

(In other words, if you’re a seasoned agent who’s already built good word-of-mouth, this tactic might not be for you — seek out more automated and scalable tactics)

However, “right” is the keyword here. You don’t want to annoy people, leave a bad taste in their mouth, or impede on their evening plans.

You want to build a little rapport, give them the ability to contact you, and be on your way — that’s it.

Here’s a simple script to consider…

What’s your real estate lead-gen plan?

You know what real estate lead generation is. You know why having a sales funnel is critical for the growth of your business. And you know 5 different ways to generate leads for your business.

Now… What’s YOUR next step?

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