Leads For Real Estate

First up: How do we define a Lead?

It seems obvious, but defining what we consider a lead in real estate is a worthwhile exercise. Any individual (whether a former customer, referral, or form fill out on a website) who expresses some interest in buying or selling is a real estate lead. Note this includes past customers and it doesn't include people who keep tabs on the neighbors and their home equity. The main problem is that there are far more leads than transactions in any given month. And the real ones want help now and are willing to go elsewhere if they aren't satisfied.

Common Real Estate Leads Pain Points

What are the pain points you hear from your team? "Those leads aren't any good." This usually means they spent time calling leads, got discouraged and stopped. Often this happens because they call the leads days after they were submitted. Would you do business with a contractor who didn't get back to you? How long would you wait at an empty reception desk or register at a business with lots of competition?

Real Estate Lead Intelligence Study

To help better understand the changes in online lead generation, PrimeStreet sponsored a study by T3 Sixty to look at how brokerages are handling online lead generation and conversion.

With input from PrimeStreet, T3 Sixty created a survey and sent it to a representative sample of the nation’s 1,000 largest brokerages. The results provide valuable insights into how brokerage size, lead volume, conversion rates, and technology are shaping success.

By combining these insights with T3 Sixty’s operational expertise, the study offers actionable recommendations to help brokerage owners and leaders boost their competitiveness and profitability.

This research focuses on online leads only—leads from sources like yard signs or spheres of influence aren’t covered here but may be explored in future studies. As the landscape of online lead generation becomes more complex, brokerages are considering new strategies, from outsourcing lead management to scaling back their reliance on lead provision. This study highlights the strategies brokerages are using and offers tips for improving online lead programs.

Leads are the Lifeblood of a Sales Organization

Leads are the lifeblood of a Real Estate business; without them, there are no deals, no commissions, and no growth. Staying busy year-round in real estate means always having a steady stream of buyers and sellers in the pipeline. It’s not just about collecting names; it’s about consistently finding serious prospects, nurturing relationships, and ensuring you’re the first agent they think of when they’re ready to make a move.

The market isn’t just competitive, it’s ever-changing. And if you’re not actively generating and managing leads, someone else will be. That’s why we focus on not just getting leads, but responding quickly, setting expectations, and keeping customers top of mind. A full pipeline today means closings tomorrow.

The Sales Funnel

Most of you have seen a sales "funnel"—a picture of a funnel shape where the top has a large pool of people who are sort of interested and a small stream flowing out of the bottom, which is people closing on houses. To keep the stream at the bottom going, you need to be constantly filling the top of the funnel.

The biggest mistake people in this business make is focusing so much time and energy on the bottom, that they neglect the top of the funnel and the stream dries up.

With so many people giving you advice on where to get leads, we'd like to focus on the keys to making the funnel actually work for you. A rock concert is "a large pool of people who may be interested" but trying to talk to everyone at a concert is not a cost-effective or efficient funnel.

There are three keys:

• Manage your money
• Manage your time
• Manage your customers

Let's take these in reverse order…

What You Need To Manage Your Real Estate Leads

Real estate is a service-oriented business and first impressions matter. A new lead is a potential customer virtually entering your business for the first time. What would they expect?

• To be acknowledged and greeted right away.
• To expect one-to-one time with you very soon if not now.
• To be able to get your attention quickly if they have a house to see or a question about the process.

Maintain Your Brand and Meet Expectations of your Leads

This is your brand. You are responsible for ensuring potential customers are greeted politely, their inquiries responded to quickly, and that they receive exceptional service. You're also responsible for ensuring your good agents are available to help your best customers. Do you want the person who is relocating and needs to see houses today to wait while your team is showing someone their neighbor's house because "they just want to see how they redid the kitchen?"

Measuring Lead Quality is Really Important

Finally, it's really true sometimes that "leads aren't any good" and if you aren't measuring that, you could be wasting money and time that is better spent elsewhere. There are several ways to measure lead quality - Are you able to get the lead on the phone? How many quality conversations are your agents having per lead received? What is the ultimate price per conversation (including the cost of outreach to the lead)? And, ultimately, how much revenue is attributed to each lead source?

Quality will vary, and lower quality leads might pan out if the price and cost of management is low enough. With higher quality leads, measure loss rates. If a lead source that has always converted at a high percentage but suddenly doesn't, something is being missed. This is a game of finding diamonds in dirt and avoiding every missed opportunity with high quality prospects.

Manage Your Resources Lead to a Better Opportunity Cost

The drawback to a big top-of-the-funnel is that it requires you to spend most of your day talking with new potential customers or trying to reach them. Most, even from good lead sources, will not buy a house with you this year or possibly forever. If you spend all day working with people at the top of the funnel, it leaves you with little time for the active buyers. If you don't, you may find yourself without active buyers later.

How do you effectively divide your time? Most CRMs have some form of auto-response emails. Think of those as the sign at the restaurant that says "please wait to be seated." If nobody is around to seat you, there is a time limit you're willing to wait. Studies from lead providers and consulting firms who do "secret shopping" of brokerages consistently find long delays in response time and that this is a serious source of frustration for both customers and agents. Customers think they got a "bad agent" and ignore late/inadequate responses, which leads agents to think they got a "bad lead" and the reality is neither is the case.

Manage Your Money

Lead quality in this industry varies from around 10% (one in ten) to less than half a percent (1 in 200). Unfortunately, the cost to generate or buy leads doesn't vary that greatly. So the trick is to make sure your marketing efforts are paying off.

Marketing falls into two main categories - direct and branding. Direct is paying $X for Y number of leads or clicks to a website. Branding is paying $X to ensure Y number of people see your business name with the idea that, at some point, they think of you when they decide to buy a house. You need to do some of both, you need to measure both, and you particularly need to be measuring the most expensive - direct.

These measurements may be deceptive. You may think that the social media campaign that resulted in dozens of leads was a sweet deal. But, did any of them close? How many are even looking at houses with you? If you know the answer to those questions you can spend more on it and make more, or divert that budget to a better-performing source.

Reporting by lead source is really important - how many leads did each produce, how many resulted in conversations, how many are progressing toward closing?

Keep reading to see some ideas on how to generate leads. But always keep in mind the most important element to leads is your ability to manage your time, your budget, and your customers' expectations so that the stream at the bottom of the funnel is always running.

1:1 Consent Law on Leads… It’s not happening (yet)

In 2024 a 1:1 consent law was proposed - passed - and then paused here in 2025. It would require real estate agents to obtain explicit permission before contacting leads, changing how outreach must be handled. With the law currently on hold for one year, there’s no change in operations.

Best Practices for Reaching Out to Potential Clients

Though these rules are not yet in effect, it’s good to review best practices for reaching out to potential clients—things like:

• Checking your lead source
• Cultivating relationships
• Timeliness of outreach
• Clarity in messaging

Why Not Just Hire an ISA?

Why not just hire an ISA to do this? Consider the full-time employee—you get 8 hours of their time a day, five days a week, and you need to account for sick days, vacations, and holidays. The cost is hourly and grows with benefits. If they aren't on duty, someone on your staff needs to perform their functions. When they are on duty, they need equipment and software that accurately tracks their activity and enables them to hand ready customers to ready agents. If you don't have that now, you need to buy it or contract for it.

Basically, when accounting for the overhead, human resources, and training, you're really making a decision on ROI. Will an ISA deliver you the highest ROI on your leads? If they will, then by all means. But if not, then maybe finding an alternative solution is in your best interest.

Our representatives are available over 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and every holiday except Thanksgiving and Christmas. The cost is often less than the price of one full-time ISA, and their performance software, hardware, and reporting tools are included in the cost of the program. From years of testing, we have developed text and call scripting that works so you get the benefit of those learnings as well.

Getting Leads

In our experience with lead gen for real estate, we've found the best leads are the ones you generate yourself—the customer wants to speak to you specifically. The best leads start with your website and outreach to your community.

Ways to Generate Leads

• Targeted Marketing: Social media paid ads, Search Engine Optimization, and email marketing drive buyers to your website.
• Content Marketing: Blog posts, videos, and downloadable assets are ways people find their way to your website while researching a particular topic.
• Community Engagement: Sending postcards, sponsoring local events, and putting your face on outside ad spaces are ways to ensure members of your community recognize you and think about you when they decide to look for a home.
• Partnerships: If you can work with local loan officers or other professionals who work with homeowners, they can help introduce you to people entering the market.

Buying Leads

Agents can also spend to either create or buy leads. Often these are ads that a potential customer responds directly to with their contact information, or you can buy leads from sources who run such ads.

Examples include:

• Social media ads with their own lead form.
• Portals or other real estate search sites that show listings but are independent of any specific broker or agent.
• Companies that will mass market to your area, identify people interested in buying or selling, and then either sell the lead to you for a cost per lead or make a referral to you and you pay a percentage of commission on closing.