How to Generate Better Quality Leads in Real Estate

Are you paying someone to post on social media every day to advertise vacancies or generate clients for property management services? If you’re working hard on social media and you’re not getting the results you want, this article will help you get better results.

If you’re running a social media marketing campaign, your leads need to be directed to your website at some point. Since you can’t put a web form directly on social media, directing leads to your website is essential. However, you can’t just toss up a form and call it a day.

Design your lead capture web forms intentionally

If you’re like most property investors, you have a form on your website that captures contact information from potential leads. Whether you’re an individual or you run a property management company, capturing leads is critical to filling vacancies. However, your lead capture form serves a dual purpose to both qualify and disqualify leads.

Designing a lead capture form for property management

If you’re a property management company looking for clients, your lead capture form doesn’t need to be fancy with a ton of questions. However, you do need to know where their properties are located.

You can get this information in a couple of different ways. The simplest way is to create a basic web form that asks for the property address. You can see this in action on Green Residential’s website. Green Residential serves property investors in the greater Houston area, so it makes sense to ask leads to provide their property address up front.

If you have a team of people available to look through form submissions, a basic form is sufficient. However, if you don’t have time to sort through submissions to verify the address is in your service area, you can hire a programmer to add a dynamic address locator to your form.

With this addition, leads can type in the exact address, which is then matched to a database of known addresses and automatically filled in. On the back-end, when a lead is outside of your service area, you can have the system automatically send an email letting them know you don’t serve their area.

Designing a lead capture form for landlords

If you’re using a website to market and fill vacancies, you need a good web form. While a web form will capture leads, it can also be a powerful tool to filter out low-quality leads. To use your web form as a filter for unqualified or low-quality leads, you need to ask questions that will automatically segment your leads according to their answers.

For example, if you only consider tenants with no evictions and make no exceptions, add a question to your form stating “have you ever been evicted?” Require leads to answer yes or no and automatically filter out leads that answer “yes.”

Another question you could ask is credit score. Say you only consider tenants with a credit score of 650 at minimum. Create a question with a drop-down menu where each option is a range of credit scores. For example, the question could be “what is your current credit score?” The drop-down selections could be:

1. 800-850
2. 740-799
3. 650-739
4. 580-649
5. Under 580

Have your web developer program the above selections to automatically segment leads according to their answer. Distinguish people with a high credit score as a “hot lead” and simply ignore any leads that select a credit score below 650.

Disqualify leads using form questions

How many hours have you spent chasing leads who were interested, but not committed to buying or renting a home? It’s frustrating and you don’t need to waste your time. Ask questions on your web form that will tell you how ready a person is to buy, sell, or rent (depending on your business).

Set up your own parameters for determining who is ready. Have your website developer program pre-selected answers to segment your leads appropriately. For leads who aren’t ready to buy, sell, or rent, but are otherwise qualified, add them to a special email marketing sequence that sends out nurturing emails. They may not be ready now, but with an automated drip-campaign, you can persuade them over time.

Track your progress and don’t give up

Capturing high-quality leads isn’t as easy as it seems. Track your progress and make changes when something isn’t working. Over time, you’ll end up with a well-oiled lead capturing machine.