Realtors and real estate agencies need to keep a healthy flow of fresh leads coming in at all times, of both potential buyers and sellers. That’s why it’s critical to understand how to get real estate leads.
Because let’s face it: growing your business when the real estate market is booming is easy, but you also need to continue growing when things are slow.
This article will cover four real estate lead generation tips, including website visitor identification, a new tool that turns your anonymous website traffic into leads—even if they don’t submit a form!
But first, let’s take a look at the big picture.
Website Traffic and Conversion Rates for Real Estate
If you’re looking at your website traffic stats, you’ve probably noticed that the vast majority of your visitors bounce. Although that’s normal for all industries—most website visitors always bounce—conversion rates can be even lower in real estate.
According to Ruler Analytics, the average form conversion rate for the real estate industry is 1.2 percent. That’s because the average person will only buy or sell a home once or twice in a lifetime but might look at offers weekly or monthly.
People will visit your website for a few reasons. Your visitors may be:
- Researching the market before making a purchase decision (which could take from a few months to over a year)
- Assessing the value of a property they own
- Actively looking to make a purchase
- Researching real estate agents
That means that only a fraction of the visitors who come to your site are ready to engage with you. That doesn’t mean they’re not good leads. You should still look for ways to convert these visitors into leads so that you can connect with them and increase the chances that you’re the one they call when they’re ready for a real estate agent.
But conversion rates in the industry being what they are, you won’t have the opportunity to make those early connections unless you take action.
So, let’s say your conversion rates are 2 to 2.5 percent, double the industry average. What if you could increase your conversion rate to 20 percent or 30 percent?
You can do that in a matter of minutes. First, we’ll share three tried-and-true real estate lead generation tips, and then we’ll show you how to get real estate leads the easy way.
How to get more real estate leads
With an annual rate of 5.86 million units sold in the US and only moderate growth of 1.4 percent in June 2021, the real estate market is very competitive. Everyone is trying to get more leads. Here, we’ll outline one of the most comprehensive strategies to get more leads as a realtor.
1. Develop a Niche
One of the best ways to stand out is to capture the interest of those who are looking to buy (or sell) a specific type of home. Here are some niches to consider:
- Specific types of property, such as flats, houses, mansions
- Luxury properties
- Historic homes
- Housing for ex-pats
- Specific neighborhoods
- Vacation homes
- Commercial real estate
Even if you’re not an expert (yet), you could start exploring niche markets to gauge buyers’ and sellers’ interest.
2. Update Your Website
To keep fresh leads coming in, a well-performing website that is search engine and conversion rate optimized is essential. If you haven’t done that in a while, it may be time to invest in a redesign. You’ll also want to make sure you keep your listings up to date.
Add plenty of details to each listing and consider adding a blog to your site to build your credibility and increase your search engine rankings. (But remember avoid keyword stuffing and be mindful of the search intent of your visitors.)
Organic ranking can only get you so far, though, with competitors such as Realtor.com or Zillow.
3. Use Digital Advertising
Real estate being as competitive as it is, digital advertising is almost a requirement. A well-managed paid search campaign can build brand awareness and send targeted traffic to your website.
Here are some of the questions to ask before you invest in digital advertising:
- What does my target audience want? Your target audience’s needs will determine the content you use for your landing pages.
- How do they search for it? The phrases your target audience uses to search for ways to meet their needs will determine the keywords you target.
- What locations are most profitable? The areas you focus on, and their profitability will determine your geographic targeting and your bidding strategy.
You can also supplement your paid search campaign with display and social media ads to get even more traffic to your website.
Display and paid social offer additional options like retargeting, which allows you to serve ads to people who visit your website. This will give you more opportunities to win the business of your website visitors. And you can deliver more targeted campaigns with audience segmentation.
Retargeting will increase the probability of your visitors thinking of you when they’re ready to sell or buy real estate.
But, with any digital advertising platform, it’s vital to optimize your landing page. The page you send your traffic to is optimized to convert your visitors into leads. We’ve written an article that covers some landing page optimization tools you can use to do that.
4. Use Visitor Identification Software
Before you work on getting more traffic to your website, ensure that you’re going to get the most out of your advertising dollars.
The easiest and most efficient way to do that is to automatically convert 40 percent of your web traffic into real estate leads with visitor identification. This software allows you to get your visitors’ name, address and email, even if they don’t fill out a form.
A website identification tool will store this information or send it to your CRM so you can start building relationships with people who are likely to be in the market for real estate at some point in the near future.
Visitor identification software will help you move past the low industry conversion rates of 0.5 to to 2 percent, and give you the contact information of up to 40 percent of your visitors, with little effort on your part.
All you have to do is place a short piece of code on your site. Then you can integrate your visitor identification tool with your CRM or email service provider (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce, Klaviyo, or Zendesk Sell).
The software does the rest. You can also get details like the visitor’s phone number, household income, age, education level, gender, homeowner status, length of residence, net worth, marital status, and whether they have children in the house.
And, at $0.24 per captured lead with no monthly or yearly engagement, visitor identification is an extremely cost-effective way to get real estate leads.
Getting More Real Estate Leads Has Never Been Easier
Real estate is a competitive industry so getting more leads is crucial for the success of your business. But with the right strategy and tools, you can easily send more traffic to your website and turn that traffic into leads. If you’d like some free real estate leads, try LeadPost today and we’ll give you 100 leads at no charge so you can see what our platform has to offer.