March 18, 2021
Hassan Riggs
Download My 55 Real Estate Lead Sources
Here at Smart Alto, we specialize in converting online leads into 15-Minute Phone appointments.
We also specialize in helping our clients grow their ROI, we do this by providing resources (like this one) and phenomenal training that can train you and your whole team on how to generate and convert online leads.
We also qualify leads and set 15-minute phone appointments. These phone appointments are amazing opportunities for everyday agents to actually get on the phone with a warm lead and focus on building rapport instead of just qualifying them.
When agents find out about us they always ask where our agents get their leads from, so we’ve decided to go ahead and compile the ultimate list of Real Estate Lead Sources for your convenience.
And because we know everyone is looking for something different, we’ve broken them up into 5 categories:
We had one important consideration when creating this list: It has to provide opt in leads.
Meaning that companies that provide social media services, print marketing or even a list of homeowners in an area didn’t make the cut. All of the sources mentioned here will result in leads that have raised their hand to be contacted by an agent.
“Done For You” lead providers are the preferred method of obtaining online leads for the vast majority of Real Estate Agents. The arrangement is simple, you give them money and they give you leads. This makes Done For You leads a favorite among non-tech-savvy agents and top-producers with no time to manage their own ads.
Price: $$$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Zillow is one of the largest providers of online real estate leads. They have become so ubiquitous in fact that in many parts of the country “Zillow Leads” has become the generic term for online leads in general, like Kleenex.
Because of their sizes and popularity, you will hear mixed opinions on the quality of Zillow’s leads.
Price: $$$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Many people don’t realize that Realtor.com is almost 10 years older than Zillow. In most parts of the country, Realtor.com still sells leads typically on a non-exclusive basis.
Price: $
Focus: Seller Leads
ZBuyer is primarily known for their seller leads although they have really ramped up on buyer leads in the last year or two. Their leads are primarily homeowners who have asked to receive more information on getting a cash offer for their home. This gives you an opportunity to talk to them about listing and netting more money than selling to an investor at wholesale prices.
Price: $$$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Market leader is the largest lead generation arm of Constellation Group. Market leader works by setting up a branded idx website for their clients and running Google PPC traffic to those websites. They are able to capture a consistent number of leads although it is important to note that they do consider just an email address to be a qualified lead.
Price: $
Focus: Buyer Leads
Homes.com operates a Pay Per Leads by zip code model similar to how Zillow got started. They are able to generate a certain number of leads in a given zip code, which they split between agents who pay to be one of the few featured agents in that zip code. Unlike the largest players, homes.com does not deviate far from this model which many agents like for the consistency.
Price: $
Focus: Buyer Leads
Set schedule puts a whole new spin on Pay Per Lead. They have an online portal where they aggregate leads from many different sources and you can purchase individual leads with pricing based on exclusivity, price point and location. Most leads are not exclusive but can be purchased for extreme discounts if you’re willing to compete.
Price: $$
Focus: Buyer Leads
AgentJet is one part boutique marketing company, one part idx pay per click set up. They tend to service a smaller number of agents by design and help to create a full funnel built primarily on their system that is designed to capture motivated leads and keep them coming back to your site.
Price: $$$
Focus: Seller Leads
Bold Leads is mostly focused on Facebook ads to generate leads for their agents but use a proprietary mix to help generate motivated sellers more often than any other type of lead.
Price: $$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Zurple launches home search websites for each target area that you serve. Some agents using Zurple have as many as 10 Zurple websites to target subareas within their city. Many Zurple customers purchase search engine marketing services from Zurple to ensure a steady flow of new leads each month are driven into their Zurple software
Price: $$$
Focus: Seller Leads
Curaytor is a comprehensive approach to your websites lead generation, they help you create a beautiful site and design high converting landing pages. Curaytor also makes it easy to drive traffic to these sites, the whole time providing coaching and marketing advice every step of the way.
Price: $$$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Property base will manage a full marketing funnel for you, landing pages, ads, and campaigns are set up by their professional marketing team. They are continually testing and optimizing 40+ landing pages to drive leads.
Price: $$$
Focus: Seller Leads
YLOPO is a full featured suite of tech that provides IDX Home Search, Branded Site, and superior lead nurture with dynamic listing alerts, behavioral and auto-texting, and Facebook remarketing as well as Lead Filtration, Digital Marketing Services, and Custom Ad Campaigns.
Price: $$$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Back At You Media mostly focuses on offering a suite of marketing tools and landing pages that are easy to set up and are optimized for social media advertising. Their listing tool automatically publishes your listings to Facebook. Their Done For You plan is $4000/yr and promises about 100 leads total.
Price: $$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Another entry in the “Tech Suite” style of lead generation, Elevate has plans that offer Pay Per Click Leads, Landing Pages, an IDX site, a built in CRM, instant report generating tools and automated posting on both a blog and your social media. Plans include as many as 30 leads per month.
Price: $$
Focus: Seller Leads
Quantum Digital specializes in geographic farming, allowing you to build an immense amount of name recognition with homeowners in the market of your choosing. Quantum has also made it easy to run Facebook ads at the push of a button to help you capitalize on that recognition by capturing leads online.
Price: $$
Focus: Buyer Leads
TorchX will build you a IDX website and landing pages for every county, city, and neighborhood in your MLS. As a Google Premier Partner, they also have expertise in paid search lead generation. Helping you to secure PPC leads consistently.
Price: $
Focus: Buyer Leads
Diverse Solutions works by giving you an IDX plug in for your existing website and running Google PPC traffic to those websites for targeted search queries. When traffic lands on your site they are then prompted to register by Diverse Solutions Captur tools.
Price: $$$
Focus: Seller Leads
Corefact is a full suite geographic farming agency, you build name recognition with homeowners in the areas you choose. Corefact handles it all from start to finish.
Price: $$$
Focus: Buyer Leads
Z57 helps drive more traffic to your lead capture website and track their activity. And then aides in converting leads with data-driven follow up processes based on their interactions with your Z57 Marketing Suite which includes social and IDX.
Price: $$$
Focus: Seller Leads
Much like Corefact and Quantum Digital, Smartzip is also a geographic farming tool. They distinguish themselves by identifying homeowners who are most likely to move using predictive analytics and aggregate public data. In theory helping you focus your farming efforts.
Boutique Lead generation, sometimes simply referred to as “Agencies”, are a bespoke approach to lead generation. The arrangement is a little more involved than just, you give them money and they give you leads. Instead, you’ll have an ongoing relationship with this boutique and instead of just giving you leads that were just interested in talking to a realtor, they craft a funnel specifically for your brand or team. They do fit into “Done For You” but we felt deserved their own section.
Price: $$$
Union Street Media offers true omni-channel marketing to agents and offices. Their digital marketing experts build a well-rounded, personalized marketing strategy specifically for real estate agents and brokers that attracts, engages, and converts buyers and sellers online.
Price: $$
Agent locator handles everything required to ensure you get a steady flow of leads. On average across search engines & social media they claim to be able to generate leads for less than $12 per lead. With a $300 management fee.
Price: $
Client Creator allows you to offload every part of your digital marketing funnel to their service. They create 10 landing page style sites for you, customize several of your social profiles and run ads for you across all major platforms including Facebook and Google. Their management fee is only $150 so your main costs come from ad spend.
Price: $
Kevin Smullin of 2Q Lead Generation has been teaching agents how to generate leads for years. With 2Q Lead Generation he now offers his expertise as a service he generates leads at a low cost & turns them into phone appointments for you.
Price: $
Asterisk Marketing offers real estate agents lead generation services that revolve around making your website a highly profitable asset using highly specialized knowledge in PPC, Real Estate SEO and additional design service plus email marketing to aid in conversion.
Price: $$$
Cuyraytor is a comprehensive approach to your websites lead generation, they help you create a beautiful site and design high converting landing pages. Curaytor also makes it easy to drive traffic to these sites, the whole time providing coaching and marketing advice every step of the way.
In recent years a handful of very companies have arisen that generate real estate leads but instead of selling them on a per lead basis, they give them out to agents in exchange for a referral agreement. This means that the lead costs nothing to the agent upfront but can cost thousands at closing. For many agents, this is a perfectly viable trade-off and these companies have enjoyed partnerships with some of the top agents in each market. For other agents, this business model is too expensive and a poor business alternative to DIY leads.
Price: 30-35% Referral Fee
Homelight is arguably the frontrunner in the space of referral lead sources. Founded in Silicon Valley in 2012 and having raised over $200 Million since. They are in just about every US market and make an effort to prioritize recommending top producing agents to the leads it generates through expensive television and radio advertising.
Price: 30-40%
Similar to Homelight in many ways, Upnest differentiates itself in one major way: they share a portion of their referral back with the customer creating an ongoing incentive for customers to choose Upnest agents.
Price: 25%
Founded in 2014, Fast Expert aims to connect people buying or selling a home with top real estate agents. They aim to match with the agent in their registry with the most transactions in a given area.
Price: 30-40%
Dave Ramsey's following of highly engage listeners are eager to work with ELP who knows the market and has met the requirements of the ELP program. Ramsey Network vets each ELP and only allows a limited number in each market.
Price: 25%-35%
Zillow has been slowly transitioning to their flex program across America, instead of agents paying to advertise they instead distribute leads on a referral basis. Expect to see this program spread to all markets over the coming years.
Price: 25%-35%
Many people don’t realize that Realtor.com is almost 10 years older than Zillow. In most parts of the country, Realtor.com still sells leads (typically on a non-exclusive basis) but with their recent acquisition of Opcity, a pioneer in online lead to referral programs, they have begun to switch their business model to more of a referral basis.
Price: 25%-35%
Agent Pronto matches buyers and sellers to select agents based on their Agent Pronto profile, production levels, service areas, client preferences, specialties, communication, customer ratings, and other criteria.
Price: 25% - 35%
Referral exchange also matches buyers and sellers to select agents based on production levels, service areas, client preferences, specialties, communication, customer ratings, and other criteria. Referral Exchange will also dole out your leads to another agent on your behalf collecting only a small middle man fee.
Self Service advertising is arguably the biggest technological advancement for small businesses in the last decade. With major tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Spotify creating simple ad platforms that anyone can learn in a week, many Real Estate agents have been chomping at the bit to master these platforms. Some agents have gone on record as having built $100 million businesses in under 2 years using online leads alone.
Price: $
Focus: Buyer Leads
Boost automatically creates ads for every major advertising from your listings. You’ll be able to edit each of your campaigns and target audience before publishing. Homespotter’s approach to self service is to automate everything except the “Publish” button to make sure you never blow your budget unknowingly while still putting your marketing pretty close to auto-pilot.
Price: $
2.6 billion people use Facebook each month and 1.73 billion of them use it everyday. BEing the largest social media site in the world means that your ideal client is likely on the platform, with a few minutes of training most agents find they can run Facebook Ads on their own without the need for professional help.
Price: $$
Adwerx makes digital marketing extremely simple for agents, taking the guesswork out of complicated ad placements. Agents can choose to advertise by zip code, advertise their specific listings or target their sphere. All made easier by Adwerx’s point and click interface.
Price: $
Listings to leads is a suite of marketing tools including landing pages, 1 click facebooks ads and more. Making it easier for agents to create lead funnels and capture leads without much technical knowledge.
Price: $$
Google Ads are often called Pay Per Click (PPC), unlike other platforms Google ads allows you to only show your ad to people who have searched for a specific keyword of your choosing. Because most of these keywords revolve around specific home buying or selling queries, many agents consider Google PPC to be high intent ads.
Price: $$
Easy Agent Pro’s flagship product Leadsites are IDX Sites built with ease in mind, arguably the simplest UI in self service real estate marketing tools. Their sites allow you to run ads on multiple platforms and create lead magnets in a few simple clicks. With built in SEO tools, agents can also get leads via organic traffic much easier than through traditional methods.
Price: $$$
StreetText helps agents create ready-to-go Facebook ads that include capture pages, automations, text messaging and drip emails. One feature many users find most valuable is StreetTexts ability to enrich lead information using several data sources.
Price: $$
Witly is an Automated Ad Platform that aims to make it easier for agents to run Facebook Ads so they can spend less time building ads and more time generating new clients in their business. One Critical difference between Witly and self service platforms is that Witly has marketers on hand to assist you with your creative and optimize your ads when needed.
Price: $
Because of the low cast, many agents use Liondesk specifically for the Facebook tool. Liondesk offers a simple to use interface for creating Facebook ads.You can create a custom audience or use their pre-built audience lists. Likewise you can choose to automatically create ads for your listings or create your own ad creative from scratch.
Price: $$
Many CRMS on this list choose between managing your Facebook Ads for you or making it easy for you to create Facebook ads yourself. Real Geeks chose to do both creating an interface for agents who prefer DIY while still offering Facebook marketing services for agents who would rather be hands off.
Price: $$$
KV Core offers several variations of automatic advertising options, including single click posts to Craigslist, Facebook and other platforms. In Addition to self service, agents can by leads from Kv Core on a subscription basis.
Choosing the right CRM is a conversation for a different day altogether. But depending on which CRM you choose, many of them have built-in pay-per-lead tools.
It’s important to note that for most CRMs this is usually a direct integration with one of the self-service portals. And in some cases, there’s no integration but they have an agency on hand to run your ads for you..
Price: $$$
CINC or Commissions INC is the single largest buyer of Google PPC ads in Real Estate, all of these ads are managed by an in-house team that specializes in Real Estate exclusively. Meaning that your ad budget is likely to go much further with CINC than it would with other managers, CINC is however one of the most expensive CRM platforms in Real Estate.
Price: $$$
As one of the biggest competitors to CINC, Boomtown takes a similar approach by helping agents create SEO rankable websites with built in lead capture and driving traffic to those sites using a team of PPC specialists.
Price: $$$
Firepoint & Realvolve have recently teamed up to combine Firepoint's websites with Realvolve's CRM, the main lead generation comes from Firepoint's managed PPC offering which lets you set a budget and pay a small fee for ongoing PPC advertising sent to your lead capture landing page.
Price: $$$
KV Core offers several variations of automatic advertising options, including single click posts to Craigslist, Facebook and other platforms. In Addition to self service, agents can by leads from Kv Core on a subscription basis.
Price: $$
Many CRMS on this list choose between managing your Facebook Ads for you or making it easy for you to create Facebook ads yourself. Real Geeks chose to do both creating an interface for agents who prefer DIY while still offering Facebook marketing services for agents who would rather be hands off.
Price: $$$
Chime is an all in one CRM Platform that takes a technology driven approach to ad management. They use best practices and prior data to recommend ad creative proven to work best, they then automatically retarget leads who engage with your ads, and finally use AI tech to analyze ad performance and make suggestions.
Price: $$$
Founded by Mega Agent Ben Kinney, Brivity is a CRM that offers a solution for virtually every facet of a real estate business. When it comes to lead generation, brivity makes it easy to advertise across all social platforms using a feature called 1 Click Marketing which auto fills much of the ad for you in a single click.
Price: $$
Sierra Interactive is another very popular CRM with a Google Ads manager built in, one unique feature to Sierra’s PPC management is that there is no management fee for budgets of less than $2,000 per month. Meaning that with the base CRM you can run $24,000 in ads every year with incurring additional management costs.
Price: $$$
Success Websites is an entire business solution for most agents, all built on the Engage CRM by Craig Proctor, Success Websites are lead capture focused IDX sites. The total platform also offers a dedicated ads manager that will create ads on your behalf or with you depending on how involved you choose to be.
Price: $
Liondesk offers a simple to use interface for creating Facebook ads.You can create a custom audience or use their pre-built audience lists. Likewise you can choose to automatically create ads for your listings or create your own ad creative from scratch.
Price: $$$
Delta Media Group positions their CRM, Deltanet 6, as a solution for brokerages to offer to it’s agents. Among many traditional CRM features, Deltanet 6 allows agents to create and manage ads and budgets through an easy-to-use interface in the CRM.
After looking at this checklist you’re probably thinking, if its that simple why isn’t everyone buying leads from these sources.
Well it’s not that simple, lead generation is just one part of the equation, the other massive part of the equation is lead conversion.
Taking those leads from just a name and number and turning them into active clients.
We have built Smart Alto to leverage the most effective form of communication for lead conversion- Texting, with Humans that connect and convert better than any algorithm on the market and deliver results in a way that allows our clients to close more deals by leveraging 15-minute phone appointments.
Smart Alto is the clear choice for anyone generating online leads!
That means whether it’s 2am or 2pm, our team will give you the peace of mind to know your leads are being engaged and properly taken care of. So if you’re a busy agent or running a growing team who don’t have time to recruit, hire, train and retain an ISA, then I invite you to schedule a demo with Smart Alto today.
The Smart Alto Appointment Setting System guarantees your team never misses another sales opportunity.