Finding high-quality real estate leads is getting tougher and tougher, and traditional methods don't cut it anymore. The success of a real estate business revolves around working smarter, leveraging available data and automation for precise outreach.
Here, we've curated 7 actionable and result-oriented strategies to help realtors get more real estate leads without endless cold-calling or heavy reliance on paid ads.
1. Build a Lead Magnet That Attracts Buyers and Sellers
A great lead magnet doesn't stop attracting customers, but also gets the right leads addicted to your real estate offerings and converts them to returning clients or investors.
Investing in real estate is a significant financial commitment. So, your lead magnets should provide valuable, timely, and relevant resources to help potential customers make financial decisions. Examples of high-converting real estate lead magnets include:
- First-time buyer guide.
- Location-based market reports.
- Webinars about investment opportunities and risks.
- Home valuation tools.
- Site-by-site investment risk analysis reports.
- A list of the cheapest house auctions.
- Region-based government policies on property ownership.
- Neighborhood comparison charts.
Your lead magnet should provide such value in exchange for contact information, such as emails, phone numbers, names, addresses, sites, rental or lease interests, tourism and travel preferences, and more.
You should also promote these lead magnets via relevant channels where the target audience can see them. This could be through dedicated landing pages, social media, chatbots, or email opt-in forms.
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2. Automate Lead Follow-Ups to Convert More Prospects
Once you capture the leads, nurturing them is another important aspect on its own. Research by Invesp reveals that 80% of new leads across companies never convert into customers. Conversely, this report also shows that successful lead nurturing can generate 50% sales-ready leads at a 33% reduced cost.
A successful lead-nurturing strategy builds a relationship with the customer at every stage of the sales and marketing funnel, from the first investment decision throughout the customer journey.
Once a lead downloads the resources you offer, you should nurture them with an automated email sequence involving:
- Following up with the leads on the resource they downloaded.
- Providing further resources for a seamless onboarding experience.
- Offering valuable investment opportunities.
- Convincing the lead to check out new listings.
- Inviting leads to open-house inspections or virtual tours.
You can develop more captivating sequences as far as your creativity can take you. For example, a follow-up email for resource download could be:
If you need some inspiration, LuxuryPresence has valuable sequences and email template ideas suitable for nurturing real estate leads.
APSIS' survey reveals that 77% of marketers admit that automation has increased their ROI. To maximize potential gains on leads, consider automating the email nurture sequence with real estate Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) like Real Geeks, Follow Up Boss, or Hubspot.
3. Web Scraping to Acquire High-Intent Leads
Rather than passively waiting for leads to find and engage with your property offerings, you can extract property owners' profiles and reach out to them directly. Real estate websites like Zillow, Idealista, Airbnb, Redfin, and Realtor.com are among the top data sources for real estate leads.
That said, manual lead sourcing is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and unscalable. On the other hand, automated data extraction tools can pull thousands of contact records in minutes without losing track of desired customer profiles. And that's why web scraping is one of the top areas that real estate companies turn to for quality leads.
Despite the value, scraping real estate lead information can be challenging because many data sources block scrapers with anti-bot measures. However, competitive companies use dedicated scraper APIs like ZenRows' Real Estate Scraper API to bypass scraping limitations, save costs, and boost efficiency and data reach.
The scraper API returns readily available structured data in JSON format, containing the rent or leasing agency's name and contact information, among other relevant property information.
One of the key advantages of using a scraper API is that it removes the need to parse elements manually. This makes it more reliable, as you can focus on getting your leads without worrying about technical scraping logic.
You can also connect ZenRows' Real-Estate Scraper API with no-code workflows like Clay, allowing you to auto-schedule scraping jobs with zero programming requirements.
4. Run Highly Targeted Social Media Ads
Social media is a natural channel to obtain quality real estate leads and reach out directly to potential buyers. Examples of social platforms to promote your ads include Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter(X).
Although social media content is usually diluted, adequately clustering users based on their interests, follows, engagements, location, posts, and comments makes your ads more effective.
For instance, you can run advertisements to target leads who post comments about traveling and tourism. Depending on your real estate services, you can also fine-tune your campaign by grouping targets into first-time buyers, downsizers, or long or short-term investors.
To make your social media ads more effective, use captivating call-to-action (CTA) and ad creatives like banners and 3D graphical presentations of your properties. Your ad content should convince leads to view your services and make purchasing decisions, or show interest by filling out opt-in forms that collect their contact details.
Another effective advertisement strategy is influencer marketing, where you partner with real estate influencers to promote your brand. This way, their trusted fans can see your offerings and make actionable business decisions.
5. Partner With Local Businesses for Referrals
Referrals remain one of the oldest yet most effective ways to generate new leads for real estate investments.
According to Referme IQ, referrals trigger 82% of real estate transactions. That's because buyers and sellers trust recommendations from professionals they already work with or those who have patronized a business.
In addition to being more credible, getting leads from referrals is more cost-effective since you spend little to nothing to be referred. It also reduces the marketing effort, as news of your product can spread naturally with word-of-mouth marketing.
The importance of referrals in the real estate business can't be overemphasized. Think Impact reports that B2B referrals lead to a 37% retention rate. Overall, referred customers are less likely to churn and are more likely to commit to long-term profitable investment deals.
You can get referrals by partnering with local businesses to recommend you to other investors or buyers. If you have a budget, you can also turn to referral tools like ReferralCandy, Referral Factory, or Refersion for referral automation. A combination of these tactics has worked for many successful real estate businesses.
6. Rank on Google for Local Real Estate Searches
Getting leads via SEO is one strategy you don't want to ignore. According to Ruler Analytics, 27% of marketers said they get the most leads from organic search.
Many high-intent buyers and sellers start their journey from search engines like Google. For instance, a potential buyer could search for "the best realtors in town" and decide to try out one of the top results based on offerings.
However, SEO requires a lot of steps to get good results. You must create quality, timely, authoritative content to rank above competing real estate businesses. Here are helpful tips for an SEO lead generation strategy:
- Optimize your Google Business Profile: According to Google, businesses with complete Google profiles are 50% more likely to get new customers. Ensure your real estate business is visible on Google through a complete and accurate business profile. This should include your location, working hours, customers' reviews and testimonials, photos, and contact information.
- Create localized content: Valuable localized content addressing specific customer pain points is more likely to attract new leads. Content like "The Best Neighborhoods in the City", "The Top Newest and Cheapest Sites in Town", etc., can resonate with your leads.
- Build backlinks from local businesses: Ask local businesses and websites to link back to you. This indirect referral can drive quality leads to your website from external sources.
- Get quality reviews: Allowing customers to drop reviews on your website or property listing page increases trust. Google prioritizes quality reviews, so you should offer excellent services to get them.
- Use schema markup to enhance visibility in search results: Schema markup that defines your offerings, agent information, listing type, and other property details allows Google to present your business better. Clearly defined business information has a higher chance of attracting quality leads.
7. Use Video Marketing to Build Trust & Stand Out
Video marketing is another effective way to showcase your properties and services and obtain quality leads. Besides, Wyzowl's 2025 Video Marketing Statistics report that 93% of marketers generate good ROI from videos.
Videos allow better inspection and establish presence. So, most buyers and sellers engage more with them than with text-based content. Examples of valuable video marketing ideas for real estate include:
- Updates about the current state of the real estate market in specific neighborhoods.
- 3D virtual reality neighborhood or property tours showcasing amenities.
- Drone overview of a property.
- Upcoming listings, property teasers, and development sneak peeks.
- Lifestyle use cases, such as swimming and other gaming activities.
- Before and after overview for newly renovated properties.
- Live question and answer sessions with past buyers and sellers.
You can create many more videos tailored to your specific audience's needs. While making marketing videos, you should also consider the platform most suitable for promotion.
For instance, Instagram is an ideal platform for promoting high-quality nighttime ambiance tours, while TikTok might be more suitable for short before-and-after overviews. YouTube is always perfect for longer educational content, like real estate market updates.
Conclusion
Data-driven lead generation is a sure way to grow your real estate business and get new conversions consistently. The strategies in this article provide a modern perspective that helps you stand out from competitors. These include insights for creating lead magnets that work, converting nurture sequences, automated web scraping for greater efficiency, and more.
That said, realtors and businesses no longer need to wait for leads. You can proactively take your business to them by getting their contact information through automated web scraping solutions like ZenRows. With such a tool, you can eliminate endless manual searches for leads and generate them at scale with more precision and little effort.