The Guide to Real Estate Lead Generation Sources
Where to get leads for new development real estate
The real estate market — especially new housing — is full of ups and downs. But there’s one thing that doesn’t change: people need homes.
Vancouver real estate experts estimate that in BC alone, there are fifteen to twenty thousand new households formed annually. That’s newly immigrated families, or young adults growing out of their parental households — and people whose housing needs have changed for one reason or another. Compared against BC’s estimated 2 million independent households in 2018, that means there is a 10% increase of new households every year.
So there are plenty of people who need new housing.
But between affordability concerns, the demographic breakdown of neighbourhoods, and types of available homes, how do you and your team find the best leads for that upcoming new development build?
Resale operates on a narrower scale, but your new development project needs a little more oomph on the lead generation front.
For your next new home or condo project, try one of these lead generation sources.
Social Media
Print Ads
Events
Lead Gen Companies
Your Database
Source #1: Social Media
Social media is still one of the newest sources of lead generation and advertising. That’s partly why it’s also one of the cheapest — because many don’t see the use of trying to generate leads from social media, it’s still a relatively untapped resource.
But the truth is that platforms like Facebook contain some of the most active and up-to-date demographic information available on the Internet. While banner blindness might lower the effectiveness of more old-school web ads (such as e-commerce ads that show up on other websites after an incomplete online purchase), social media ads have been shown to be more effective than billboards.
Ad targeting on social media can be very granular because of all the personal information associated with a profile. This is especially helpful for real estate lead generation as it allows your team to make more targeted campaigns campaigns. Focusing on the targeted demographic allows your team to make more effective ads, lowering your overall cost and making best use of your marketing budget.
How to Get Real Estate Leads on Facebook and Instagram
Real estate marketing on Instagram has been very popular over the last few years. New development teams will often use ads with images of an upcoming project, alerting their target demographic of the new build.
Instagram in particular is almost entirely image based, making it important to have visually appealing and topically appealing ads. Before choosing broad target categories to send your ad to — a practice which might waste your budget on unsuitable audiences — have the new development team do research on the target demographic.
Are there types of ads or messages that appeal more specifically to that demographic? Consider how a demographic with more established income and wealth might be attracted to luxury homes, or condos with ample parking space — or how younger, more urban home buyers might be more interested in proximity to public transit. On an interior design level, do certain styles appeal more to certain demographics? What about types of imagery on the ad itself?
It’s often difficult to immediately pin down these concepts, but that’s why it’s important to have adequate tracking and testing set up in your internal backend CRM.
If you’re working to generate real estate leads, your team should also be working to understand why certain campaigns work better than others. Use your CRM to track the marketing source of each lead that comes in. Use this information to refine your advertising and capture the interest of the buyers most suited for the upcoming project!
Make sure that your Instagram and Facebook ads are set up so that your real estate leads are correctly entered into the CRM, and correctly tagged. Use custom ratings (ie, New Inquiry, or Immediate Follow Up) within the system so that your sales agents are able to prioritize the leads and more effectively follow up with the most interested prospective buyers.
How to Get Real Estate Leads on LinkedIn
Lead generation on LinkedIn tends to be more of the B2B (businesses selling to other businesses) variety. Because of the nature of the platform, with how it’s targeted towards working professionals, there tend to be far fewer developers looking to generate leads for the residential new development projects.
This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible! However, a different approach should be used than on Facebook or Instagram.
Where those platforms are more social and individual, people on Linkedin are typically looking for information that can help with their professional lives. Instead of ads that directly talk about the new development, consider using an approach that is more focused on establishing your brand.
Upload ads about how to identify well constructed builds; or articles and videos about the hottest areas to buy a home in your city. Use LinkedIn to establish the developer brand first, encouraging prospective buyers to sign up for more information to help them with their home purchasing process.
Once the leads are aware of your brand and in your CRM system, you can send them additional campaigns to draw their attention to your next available project. This could be email campaigns, ads on other social media, or other web ads.
To funnel those leads further down into your sales process, make sure to establish your lead data process from the beginning. Use custom registration forms where possible so that you can seamlessly sync the potential buyer’s info to the CRM, and assign them to your sales team agents by priority. Leads who directly sign up for a general inquiry about upcoming builds can be added to the marketing emails to introduce new projects; ones who download a pre-mortgage checklist are likely already thinking about buying, and should be followed-up with as soon as possible with a helpful inquiry.
LinkedIn provides a ‘long-game’ type of lead generation. These leads might not close on your current project. For real estate leads that more directly enact on a new home purchase, it might be better to start with Facebook and Instagram for lead generation — although if your team has the bandwidth, experimenting with LinkedIn is certainly not a detriment!
Source #2: Print Ads and Flyers
While a lot of sales and marketing across industries has moved towards the digital, traditional methods are still very effective in real estate.
Ads around the site of the build provide physical context of the upcoming project. For any passersby, branded fencing, ‘coming soon’ banners, and other project related advertising helps to situate your project in the neighbourhood. This can be a good opportunity to help shape the perception of the new development, especially if your early research has shown a bit of resistance around the build.
Make use of the different spaces available for ads. If the new development is in a transit-friendly location, an effective place to purchase ads might be at the nearby train stations, or on the trains which run on the same transit line. You can also lean on the demographics of your target buyer. If your build is perfect for new families, consider putting ads up around local preschools, or attractions that families with young children might visit.
For a more personalized outreach, also consider using flyers. A platform like Venngage can quickly make well-designed flyers that you can print and distribute to potential buyers. Mail flyers to neighbours in the area, to announce the development and invite them to register for the project launch. This is also a relatively inexpensive but standout way to stay in touch with registrants from previous projects, leads who make general inquiries, and even people who have purchased before.
How to Capture Real Estate Leads from Print Ads
With print ads, the most important consideration is how you can engage your target demographic. Physical ads should utilize physical locations and create a connection between the new build and the actual place where your ads are placed.
The goal of a print ad is to help potential buyers see the positive impact of the build, and visualize themselves living and thriving in the new home. This gives them the incentive to take the next step and get more information, either by going to the sales center, or visiting the project website to fill in a contact form.
It’s vital to make it as easy as possible for them to access and complete a registration. Longer URLs are off-putting and can throw off a potential buyer. To alleviate this, use a very simple URL, like spark.re/signup, or a link shortening service like Bitly, which has free accounts which allow you to make short links. Strings of random letters and numbers are more of a hassle for potential leads to remember, so be sure to customize the link with a simple phrase.
Especially when generating leads for real estate projects, which typically will have several campaigns and multi-member teams, it’s good practice to use separate registration forms for your digital and physical campaigns, at minimum. This will help keep track of which types of campaigns yield the best results; not only numbers of leads, but the percentage of leads who eventually close on a home purchase and become a buyer. Make sure that your lead forms are synced up to your CRM so that the source is correctly recorded.
Source #3: Events
Events are a more bandwidth heavy method of real estate lead generation. But we all know that in-person, face-to-face interactions are more immediately engaging and effective.
Project launches are common events in new development real estate, and work well to connect your sales team with people who are showing interest in the new build. Sending invitations to contacts from previous projects, people from the neighbourhood, and those who have purchased with you before, is a tried-and-true way to spread the word about the upcoming project.
For larger projects where you want more publicity and have the budget to match, investing in larger events for lead generation might prove well worth your time.
Of course, an event is only worth it if it helps you work towards business goals. Plenty of people have talked about ROI. The bottom line is that campaigns which don’t contribute to your end goal (ie, finding buyers for the new development) are not worth the effort, budget, and work involved.
Generating Real Estate Leads from Event Marketing
For project launch events, it’s a straightforward matter of spreading the word and inviting prospective buyers to the launch. But for bigger projects, maybe you want to cast a wider net: that’s why event marketing can be a great method of lead generation.
A striking example of real estate event marketing is WestBank’s Japan Unlayered exhibition. It was able to capture general interest while still funnelling leads towards the development project.
The event was promoted as a showcase of minimalist Japanese architecture and design, with an exhibition alongside pop-up-shops that included the wildly popular stationery brand Muji. Of course, once inside, visitors saw many pieces of architecture designed by famed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and then could register for more information about WestBank’s upcoming project — a minimalist residential tower designed by that same architect.
WestBank first drew the attention of people who are interested in that type of architecture, and then used the time when they had their attention to push forward the ‘sale’: ie, the fact that there was upcoming inventory relevant to those interests.
Not only did the event help them generate a lot of leads — the pop-up shops and exhibition were popular enough to create lengthy waitlists — WestBank was also able to enforce their brand recognition among a wider group of people.
Event marketing for lead generation is not always possible for real estate, and not always advisable. But for bigger projects and bigger budgets, it can be a great way to emphasize the developer’s brand name and generate a lot of buzz around the build.
Source #4: Lead Generation Companies
Lead generation companies are common in B2B industries (where businesses market to other businesses), because it’s a surefire way to collect a large amount of relevant leads. Companies like Lead Fuze use aggregate data to find the names and contact information of people who fit the criteria set by the user.
This can include demographic information, but typically lean towards categories around employer, the industry they work in, and job title, among others.
These companies are less useful for real estate purposes, whether for new development or resale, simply because our target buyers are individual consumers, and we’re more interested in their lives outside of their work. Not to mention, there are regulations around unsolicited promotional content — be sure to check out your local regulations. Canada, for example, has CASL, and the EU has the by-now infamous GDPR.
However, using something like Lead Fuze for real estate leads isn’t a total loss, if you have the bandwidth and budget to spare.
After your new development research has identified the most qualified target demographic for the build, consider using a lead generation company to identify people who fit into that niche. For example, if your build is particularly suited towards young professionals in business, you can list some of the major businesses in the local downtown, filter by age, and use the resulting list as the starting point to run targeting marketing campaigns. Or use the email addresses to create look-alike campaigns on social media, showcasing the upcoming development and how conveniently located it is for downtown access.
As always, be sure to properly track the results of your campaigns, and adjust as necessary for the best results!
Source #5: Your Own Database
While not exactly lead ‘generation’, looking into your own past databases of buyers is a great way to begin building out your lead list for new development project marketing. Being able to take advantage of an existing database gives you an advantage when you start marketing for the new home build. After all, people who were interested but didn’t purchase from a previous project might still want to know about the new one. And someone who purchased before might be open to another!
In Spark’s CRM, companies have access to all of their previous projects, and can even upload legacy data to make sure they have it in one place. Admin-level users are able to compare projects to get a better idea of how things are faring between builds, and send out emails to leads from all projects. This is especially useful when announcing new builds and the like.
Remember that maintaining communication with leads and buyers is a great way to enforce your brand and curate a positive experience — this makes your sales messages more engaging once you’re ready to announce a new project for sale.
Exporting Leads to Another Database
For many new development companies, it might be prudent to simply own your data. This doesn’t necessarily mean taking your marketing in-house, but simply ensuring that you’re able to access data that you already have for your sales purposes.
If you don’t have access to previous projects, getting ahold of those leads can be difficult (especially in cases where you used an external marketing agency), but it isn’t impossible. You may have to negotiate access to the list with your agency, or see if you can add a user login to the software. In extreme cases, the database may have been wiped — it depends how long it’s been, and whether the agency in charge of it keeps old data.
If you’re importing your buyer data from another software, it’s important to make sure to preserve as much of the information as possible. This will ensure that your new database has all of the requisite and contextual information, which makes follow-up much easier. This is especially important if you’re contacting a lead from another project.
For most CRMs, importing from a file is typically straight forward. Basic information such as name, contact information, etc, is of course a must-have. Custom tags such as buyer rating is also very useful, because they’ll give your sales team an indication of how far the buyer went down the sales process — and what might have stopped them from committing to purchase previously.
If there’s no way to have the ratings transferred alongside the rest of the profile, one workaround is to split your list according to rating, and importing one at a time.
For example, pull a list of all the leads that have a “willing to write” rating tag, but no closed inventory deal or contract attached to their profile. Export this, then import it into your new database. Repeat for different combinations to maintain the rating categories. You may not be able to select a rating from the import window, but you can mass change the rating on the members of this list import.
This might be a bit complicated, and overwhelm your team, depending on the size and bandwidth of your organization. Some software solutions, Spark among them, offer comprehensive customer success services which include import help — be sure to reach out to see if this task is something that you can hand over to the professionals.
How to Succeed in Lead Generation for Real Estate
There are a lot of elements to lead generation, especially for real estate.
Regardless of what source you choose, it’s vital to maintain good data standards. That means tracking your lead sources (where did they come from?), accurately marking whether or not they eventually close on a deal (how did they perform?), as well as any information as to why a lead didn’t purchase (where did it go wrong?). A well-structured CRM should be able to provide the majority, if not all, of these tracking and management features.
Successful lead generation in real estate is about finding the most useful lead sources, and focusing your efforts on capturing qualified leads that are the most likely to close. Instead of spreading your team too thin, it’s best to start with a variety of sources, and then pivoting your resources onto the best performing few. Test multiple campaigns over different sources, and capitalize on the ones that get you the best results for the upcoming build!
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