9 Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies to Start Today
Kawakawa House in New Zealand, courtesy of Herbst Architects
Residential real estate is going through some monumental changes at a scale never seen before. More than 2 billion new homes will be built before the end of the century, meaning 2 billion new houses will be sold in that timeframe. Consequently, innovative real estate tech offerings are entering the marketplace in record numbers, offering real estate developers and marketing teams new and exciting options when considering how to build real estate lead generators.
Proptech investment grew 766% between 2014 and 2019, and that pace will only increase. Today’s real estate projects have more opportunities than ever before and face more competition. Real estate marketing teams must work smarter and harder to promote their projects and draw in valuable real estate leads.
In this article, we will look at how to generate leads for real estate by leveraging digital assets and strategies, combining traditional skills and the latest technologies to make the most significant impact. Plus, we’ll give you the best real estate lead generation ideas to try out.
Why is digital real estate lead generation so important?
The digital space is primed for the real estate industry, offering tools and tactics that put your properties in front of interested buyers, wherever they are. Here’s why a digital strategy is key if you want to generate real estate leads.
#1 – Potential Buyers Are Looking for Property Online
Research shows that 98% of UK house hunters start searching for a new property online. This trend is reflected worldwide, with US research showing that real estate searches on Google have grown by 253% over the past four years.
This is the age of the digital house hunt, with property portals and websites often being the first platform for a potential buyer and seller to meet.
#2 – Improved Buyer Targeting Increases Qualified Leads
When you have a billboard, brochure, window or banner advertisement, you have limited control over who sees it. You have to hope the right buyer comes to you. Digital marketing strategies put you back in the driver’s seat by allowing you to take your marketing materials right to the people who would be most interested in making a property purchase.
Social media ads, paid search ads, and organic SEO assist you with generating leads in real estate based on a wide range of factors, including geographic location, income, career, purchasing habits, interests, age, and much more. These online promotions act as a digital real estate agent to drive attention to your offerings.
#3 – Cost-effective Digital Marketing
To generate leads, real estate digital marketing is more affordable than traditional advertising, with very reasonable and controllable costs associated with paid search ads and social media ads. Online marketing tools also allow you to access high-impact tech for a little or no fee, so you can create videos, animations, virtual tours, 3D experiences and more without much effort or expense.
When combined with the ability to target this advertising to the right audience, the return on your investment is exponential, giving you the best opportunities to generate real estate leads that pay off.
Villa Mandra in Mykonos, courtesy of K Studio.
How to Generate Leads in Real Estate
Idea #1 - Build a Compelling Real Estate Blog
You can capitalize on local real estate lead generation by marketing your neighborhood or destination and your specific property through social media content, real estate blogs, video and real estate websites.
This kind of content can focus on educating your potential clients about the kind of lifestyle they’ll be able to have when they buy with you. It might cover everything from schools and transport links, local sights and attractions to local restaurants and bars.
As real estate professionals, it is important to look at it through your customer's eyes and ask yourself what they might value. Might it be valuable for them to know about your local vegan cafes or different coffee shops where they can work from or catch up with friends?
Your property is more than bricks and mortar – it’s a life your client will have in this new area. Focus on building quality content that integrates your keyword research. Digital is an opportunity to build a vision of this lifestyle in technicolor. Your real estate blog is the ideal platform for generating leads real estate marketers seek.
Case study
While selling Itz’ana Residences, we built a sense of the local community through digital content by featuring interviews with local characters and fellow buyers. This helped create a sense of trust in the project and increased digital engagement and real estate business.
Idea #2 – Create Stunning Real Estate Video Marketing
As far as real estate lead-generating ideas go, video is one of the best ways to generate real estate leads because the online space is primed to deliver it – and because clients love it. In 2020, 96% of consumers increased their online video consumption, with 90% saying they want to see more video content from brands and companies.
By 2022, more than 82% of all online traffic is predicted to be video, so it’s no surprise that YouTube is the second largest online search engine, with 3 billion monthly searches.
For a highly visual product like real estate, video is a win. It can be used in several high-impact ways, including virtual property tours, live-streamed sessions, and even 3D experiences. It’s the perfect way to help people visualize themselves in a property, explore amenities, and experience it without having to leave the comfort of their own space.
What’s more, it creates a solid online presence for your personal brand. Consider buying or renting a 3D camera for real estate, as it opens the door to an endless amount of highly engaging and interesting content. Need more information on how to get real estate leads from videos? Learn the specifics of real estate video marketing by following this link to our blog.
Idea #3 - Develop a Comprehensive Strategy for Search Engines
Real estate marketers can make the mistake of focusing solely on social media ads when real estate SEO strategies present such enticing and overlooked opportunities. This is understandable, as the hopes of quick ROIs are exciting, but it is not how lead generation real estate marketing works. If you fail to get a great response, your budget is gone, and efforts exhausted. However, building impactful real estate SEO is still one of the top ways to generate real estate leads that can deliver for years to come.
When comparing real estate to hospitality, there are far more opportunities within real estate marketing than most other industries. This might be because most real estate projects have a shorter time window to sell their homes, rentals, or other assets.
Even with that, most projects sell for at least two years and then there are resale opportunities. So it warrants the 6-9 months it takes to build a high-impact real estate SEO strategy. Take a look at our best ideas for real estate social media marketing for a more in-depth look at specific social media platforms and their role in how to generate real estate leads.
Let's look at some keyword search terms. “Caribbean real estate” has 50% more volume than “Caribbean hotel”, yet the keyword difficulty for the latter is 50% more difficult (58 Vs 39)! Furthermore, 39 means it’s very achievable to compete in the top spots for the real estate phrase, whereas 58 would be very difficult.
You’d think that with the amount of real estate sold from the Caribbean and the importance of generating real estate leads online due to buyers largely overseas, this SEO outlook would be very different. It reeks of opportunity, and the same attractive stats can be found for real estate marketing in other destinations from Cabo to Vail.
With home buyers using search as their primary method of discovery, isn’t it worth looking at how real estate SEO can drive targeted lead generation for real estate?
We invite you to learn more about our real estate digital marketing services.
Villa Chameleon in Bali, courtesy of Word of Mouth House
Idea #4 - Create Marketing Materials That Generate Leads for Real Estate
We’ve seen so many projects that focus too much on cheap mailers and aggressive cold calling, trying to force as many eyeballs in front of a property as possible. But this isn’t how to get leads in real estate, as conversion trumps volume, and conversion comes down to your real estate marketing quality.
There’s a lot to be said for building a more professional and robust marketing package before any sales push to ensure that your real estate marketing strategies have a tangible impact on generating real estate leads.
Taking the time and hiring the right expertise can allow you to build your project’s unique brand and a foundation of incredible marketing materials that capture your project’s unique personality. These form the foundation of all your marketing initiatives, from your website and advertising to your site tours, and can increase conversion rates at every touchpoint.
Incorporate the experiential elements of your offering into your marketing materials by speaking to the multi-sensory details of day-to-day life within your project. Look at how we achieved this when we created Ka’ana Resort’s Four Perfect Days brochure.
Idea #5 – Ensure You're Social Media & Mobile Friendly
Whatever marketing content you put online should be fully compatible with mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. So far in 2021, smartphone traffic alone accounts for 52.2% of all Internet traffic worldwide, more than 50% of YouTube views, and 88% of local searches.
The move to mobile was strong before the pandemic, but the events of 2020 pushed this into overdrive, with mobile marketing seeing the biggest growth for marketing agencies and their clients. This data suggests that mobile-friendliness is how to get leads for real estate transactions, and beyond.
For luxury real estate development marketing, mobile compatibility is less about mobile commerce and more about ensuring that digital marketing materials are available and designed for mobile visitors. Responsive websites that are fully viewable and functional on different devices, browser compatibility across iOS, Android and other platforms, enabled voice search for Siri and Google Assistant, and more are all essential.
The best way to get real estate leads from your website is through lead-capture forms that are easy to fill in on mobile, linked to your social media pages, and designed and crafted for your target audience.
Image courtesy of Ignant Architecture.
Idea #6 – Love Your Local Real Estate Area
Geographic location is a crucial element in real estate marketing, as people are not simply buying a property but buying into a specific area. When someone searches for a luxury apartment or commercial building, they want something within a set location. Therefore, their search is likely to be “luxury apartment in South Beach” rather than non-location based.
Improving your local search optimization (local SEO) needs to be a priority to capitalize on this and bring these leads to your offering. This will help get your content into those all-important search results, pushing it above your competitors and placing it front and center for the client, so you’ll be top of mind.
Idea #7 – Speed It Up
It’s also a good idea to compress images and minimize heavy, interactive website images to prevent pages from loading slowly. A slower-loading page may not seem like a big issue, but it’s a serious hurdle for consumers and search results. Google has said that initial page load speed is a factor search engines use for ranking websites, and this can affect your search engine optimization (SEO).
Slow load times also impact consumer engagement with your website and digital content, which ultimately negatively impacts your sales. After just 5 seconds, website conversions drop by around 4.42% for each additional second of page load time, and after 10 seconds the mobile visitor bounce rate increases by 123%.
Digital marketing and web design specialists can help you balance high-quality visual content, mobile compatibility and other elements to ensure the visual experience is excellent as well as accessible and fast-loading.
Idea #8 - Buy Qualified Leads for Potential Clients
It might sound almost simplistic, but in a world of data collection, there are an increasing number of avenues to buying targeted real estate leads. No matter which way you go, effective lead generation for real estate requires an investment of capital, thought, time or all three. If you don’t have that capacity, the option to purchase leads might play an important part in your strategy.
Major real estate websites that dominate search traffic, such as Zillow.com and Realtor.com, all offer paid opportunities to get sales leads. While the cost per lead can vary from $20 to $250, whether it’s a sound investment for you probably depends on your location and the other opportunities available to you.
Buying data from real estate lead generation companies is not something we recommend without carrying out research and due diligence. You might get bogus data relevant for expired listings. Still, under the right circumstances, lead lists could bring value to your process.
Idea #9 - Strengthen Relationships with Your Target Audience
Relationships are everything; as big of a role as online real estate marketing plays, we must never underestimate the benefits of who you know. In the long run, focusing on giving the very best customer service and support will help you grow your business and your reputation since delighted customers will provide favorable evaluations and recommendations.
Showing them your degree of involvement in giving them a personalized experience, whether online, over the phone, or at open houses, is a wonderful approach to stimulate further interest and urge them to take the next step toward making a choice.
VR House in Guadelejara, designed by Alexanderson Arquitectos. Image courtesy of ArchDaily.
Effective Real Estate Lead Generation for a Digital Age
At Proven Partners, we specialize in real estate advertising and marketing strategies for luxury residential and mixed-use developments. Like all elite real estate marketing companies, we bring the expertise, guidance and experience needed to generate high-value real estate leads and bottom-line results. Review our real estate marketing services to learn more about how we can provide practical, effective digital marketing strategies that position your real estate offering right in front of your market.
