When done right, pay per lead in real estate can open doors to substantial earnings. But let’s not sugarcoat it—it’s getting tougher out there.
You’re right in the middle of a challenging market where your clients are facing an inventory shortage, increasing rates, and quick client turnover. Add that to the fact that more prominent platforms like Zillow are taking a big slice of the market.
To keep your clients around and thrive as a marketer, you must deliver top-notch real estate leads. I’m dropping these five advanced strategies to help rev up your game.
Assuming you’re not new to this and understand the basics of real estate PPL, we’re skipping the 101 and heading straight to the best actions you can take to improve your existing campaigns.
Let’s get into them!
Five Pay-Per-Lead Real Estate Strategies You Should Follow
1. Pre-qualify your leads
As I mentioned, the demand for highly qualified leads has shot up. The stakes have never been higher. Agents, brokers, and lead buyers are all looking for hot leads, those with genuine intent to engage with them and with a huge tendency to convert as clients.
However, many PPL marketers for real estate are struggling to generate high-quality leads. So what can you do?
Firstly, implement a multi-step form to gather detailed information about each lead. This helps to filter out prospects and ensure that only interested parties make it through.
You want to ask things like:
- Property type (single-family home, a condo, or a multifamily property?)
- Desired product. (purchasing a new home or considering refinancing options?)
- Timing.
- Location.
- Purpose. (personal use, investment, or a secondary home?)
The higher the quality of your leads, the better. Your clients paying for real estate leads will be willing to invest more in your services, knowing that the leads you provide have a higher potential for sales.
However, you must collect this information strategically to avoid repelling your prospects.
Big names in the industry, such as RocketMortgage, have successfully implemented multi-step forms to effectively pre-qualify leads.
Its form is interactive, so the leads would feel they’re just answering a fun yet relevant quiz.
Creating similar high-converting forms like the above is possible with GetLeadForms. Our tool allows you to set up simple to more sophisticated multi-step forms.
We even offer a usable and editable template inspired by Rocket Mortgage.
2. Boost conversions by making strong offers
Although there’s more power in quality than quantity, getting more inbound leads can impact your ability to sell more real estate leads.
The best way to gain more qualified leads is to make an irresistible offer visible, just like what Zillow does in the example below.
From the start, it directly addresses the prospects’ need or curiosity – knowing the value of their property.
The offer is clear, enticing, and relevant, which increases the likelihood of them engaging with the form and providing details.
Zillow then combined it with pre-qualifying questions (tip#1) using a multi-step form to decrease the friction.
We offer a similar yet more solid home valuation form template inside GetLeadForms.
Besides highlighting what leads can get, we made the final step more persuasive.
Note: Do you want access to the home valuation template above? Sign up for free at GetLeadForms.
The caption aligns with the lead’s initial interest and implies the report is already theirs, just waiting to be claimed. It’s a simple yet helpful technique that encourages sign-ups.
The note at the bottom also reinforces the offer’s value. It underlines the practical, tangible benefit of completing the form.
Aside from home valuation, you may offer free consultation calls or exclusive market insights reports.
3. Route and distribute your leads to buyers
Like any other competitive industry, time is vital in getting leads for real estate. It can be the difference between closing a deal or losing a prospect.
For instance, a potential home buyer fills out an online form. Without lead routing, you must manually assign this lead to an agent.
What happens if you’re not available at the moment? The lead sits idle and may eventually move on to a competitor who responds faster. Meanwhile, the buyers (real estate professionals) lose out on a potential sale, which can impact your relationship with them in the long run.
But with lead routing and distribution software like LeadProsper or LeadByte, you can save time and guarantee that leads are immediately assigned to the right agent.
Both are fantastic tools with powerful features like advanced routing options, real-time analytics, and seamless third-party integrations.
They can help you be more efficient and increase the satisfaction of your real estate clients by providing them with timely, qualified leads.
Note: Good news! GetLeadForms will soon integrate these tools into the platform. So, setting up your forms and routing your leads will become effortless. Stay tuned for that.
4. Automatically capture TCPA-compliant leads
You know what happens when you don’t adhere to TCPA regulations, right?
You risk facing hefty fines (about $500 to a hundred thousand dollars) and damaging your reputation as a pay-per-lead real estate marketer.
Compliance is non-negotiable in real estate and mortgage, especially since many of your buyers might use automated dialers or SMS marketing to connect with leads. This makes capturing and storing proof of consent an excellent and essential practice.
If I were in your shoes, generating and selling leads to buyers who have the liberty to use them as they see fit, I’d make it mandatory to capture proof of consent with every lead to protect myself, at the very least.
However, doing that on your own won’t be feasible because of the sheer volume of leads and the complexity of tracking consent for each one.
In this context, tools like ActiveProspect’s TrustedForm become invaluable.
It allows you to automatically capture and verify consent directly from your leads, ensuring that every lead you hand over is TCPA compliant.
The document will look like this:
What’s great about this software is its accessible starting point. ActiveProspect’s TrustedForm lets you run the script on your landing pages or forms and generate a TrustedForm Certificate for each lead, which you can review and retain at no cost.
It also offers advanced, paid options, plus a managed solution if you’re supplying over 20,000 real estate leads monthly.
With GetLeadForms, you’ll have no issue using TrustedForm as it integrates well into our system. You can be confident that every lead captured through your forms is automatically compliant, with documented proof of consent.
There are other things you can do to make sure that you’re TCPA compliant. That includes adding a disclosure statement that’s easy to understand and visible near the form. You can learn more and view our checklist here.
5. Verify your leads
Lead generation fraud is another big challenge in PPL marketing besides maintaining compliance and managing costs. It directly impacts the quality of your leads and, consequently, the success of your campaigns.
Marketers involved in pay-per-lead real estate and mortgage programs often struggle with the issue of receiving low-quality or unqualified leads.
Besides wasting your effort, this situation can drain resources and frustrate you and your clients. Quality control becomes imperative to ensure you maintain the efficiency and effectiveness of your lead generation efforts.
The best solution to this is lead verification. Applying this to your process can improve lead quality. So, you only deliver the best ones to your buyers.
You can verify your leads in two ways – OTP (one-time password) phone verification, and email verification.
OTP phone verification is a proactive approach where a lead must confirm their phone number through a one-time password sent to them before they can proceed with the form submission.
This method ensures the authenticity of the phone number from the outset, saving you from chasing non-existent leads.
With GetLeadForms, you can easily enable this verification method through our LeadVerify feature. Once your client submits the form, they’ll receive a one-time four-digit PIN code.
They’ll need to type it into your lead form before submitting it. It will reflect inside your dashboard, and you’ll see a “Verified” status next to the phone number.
Do you want to see the step-by-step guide on using our OTP phone verification feature? Read this post.
On the other hand, email verification helps authenticate the validity and activity level of your lead’s email address.
There are two methods to accomplish this: real-time verification and post-submission bulk list cleaning.
Real-time verification, conducted at the point of form submission, is an effective way to immediately confirm the legitimacy of an email address, preventing fake or inactive emails from entering your database.
I love how effective this one is. So, on top of the OTP phone feature in GetLeadForms, we’re working on a real-time email verification tool to serve our users better.
However, the more common one is the bulk email list cleaning. This method involves collecting all the email addresses you gathered and assessing them through a verification tool like Neverbounce.
This process checks each email address against multiple criteria for validity and activity level. If an email is inactive or fake, the tool can remove it from your list.
Final Thoughts on Pay Per Lead in Real Estate
Here’s a quick recap of the five strategies you need to capture better and sell real estate leads:
- Pre-qualify your leads by asking the right questions and implementing multi-step forms to filter prospects.
- Create free yet compelling offers, like home valuation tools, to attract, engage, and encourage leads to sign up.
- Use lead distribution software like LeadProsper or LeadByte to deliver leads promptly to the right agent or buyer.
- Prioritize being TCPA-compliant to protect yourself and your clients from legal issues.
- Verify your leads through OTP and email verification methods to ensure the authenticity of the leads, significantly reducing time.
Applying all these methods is easier with GetLeadForms as we have the necessary tools integrated into our platform. Sign up for a free trial today.
For additional resources and to deepen your understanding, check out:
- Get inspired and learn from the best mortgage landing pages: 5 Best Mortgage Landing Pages [With Examples]
- Capture more leads and grow your real estate lead database with real estate lead magnets: See the 5 best real lead magnet ideas here.
