Many years in the real estate investing industry and thousands of dollars spent on finding leads have taught me one simple fact: Most of the best lead generation strategies for house flippers live online. As great as some in-person advertising techniques like flyers and billboards are, they often suffer from extraordinarily low rates of return (if nobody ever sees your billboard, they’ll never want to sell their house to you). Of course, internet marketing can suffer from that same problem, but it’s a bit easier to align your strategy with incoming data than it is with physical advertisements.

In my view, if you’re willing to invest some time and money to work with a few of the online tools available, most real estate investors can find a plentiful trove of attractive properties to buy. But it isn’t always easy to develop digital marketing campaigns that consistently deliver leads to you. The trick is to follow an online lead generation process that delivers those leads at an acceptable cost, which is much more difficult than merely attaining them in the first place.

3 Shortcut Strategies For Real Estate Online Lead Generation

In this section, we’ll take a look at three of the most common real estate online lead generation strategies so that you’ll know what their strengths and weaknesses are.

1. User-Targeted Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is the bread-and-butter technique that most real estate investors try to use to acquire more leads. Popular websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit are rife with activity, and no matter where your business is operating, you should be able to find people who are at least open to the idea of selling their houses by marketing on those sites. If you do market on social media, you’ll get the best results by finding highly differentiated communities focused around narrow and geographical themes.

The issue with using targeted social media advertising for real estate online lead generation is that it takes a great deal of time to get people to notice your material, especially if you’re not willing to pay for privileged access. And while it’s possible to use this method on your own, you’ll get far better results if you hire someone skilled at social media marketing as there’s often a lot of tailored content creation and demographic targeting required.

Pros:

• Wide reach
• Doesn’t need to be expensive
• Easy to get started with

Cons:

• Doing it well can be expensive
• It can be hard to find the right platforms for your target market and demographic

2. Keyword-Targeted Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is another popular approach to real estate online lead generation. As the name implies, you buy the rights to slots on a search engine’s results, and when people click on your advertisement, you pay the search engine company. If you pick the right keyword, you’ll get leads from people who are right up your alley. If you pick a keyword that’s suboptimal, you’ll end up paying a significant amount of money for low-quality leads that are unlikely to be useful for your business.

Furthermore, the most effective keywords tend to be bid up to a high cost by other people looking for the same type of traffic. That means there’s a significant tradeoff between lead quality and how much you’ll pay. And costs aren’t fixed either; many platforms recalculate them every month based on a keyword’s traffic.

Pros:

• Can deliver high-quality leads en masse
• Easy to implement without any help

Cons:

• The most effective keywords tend to be expensive
• Costs are variable
• Spending is at high risk of being wasted

3. Working With A Digital Marketing Firm

Perhaps the lowest-friction approach to real estate online lead generation is hiring a digital marketing firm to handle all of your marketing initiatives. Marketing agencies range widely in cost and efficacy, but in general, the more willing you are to offload your business’ public-facing appearance, the more you’ll pay and the better your results will be in terms of lead volume and quality. Most house flipping businesses don’t ever grow to a size where they can justify hiring a marketing firm to generate leads for them as lead quality tends to be somewhat low on average.

But for those who do reach a size where they can benefit from hiring an agency, the costs may take a huge bite out of their profit margin each month. And there’s no guarantee that the leads an agency yields will be high-quality if the investor doesn’t spend time communicating exactly what they’re looking for. So, agencies are an expensive option that aren’t a great fit for most real estate investing businesses, but they’re a powerful shortcut after you scale past a certain size.

Pros:

• Requires minimal effort
• Great for mid-sized businesses and up
• Can yield a large amount of good leads

Cons:

• Expensive regardless of efficacy
• Not all marketing agencies are created equal

Getting Leads Is Easier With the Right Partner

Rather than trying to implement the above strategies for real estate online lead generation, many investors—including myself—have found it incredibly beneficial to work with a larger company that handles lead hunting for them. Becoming an independently owned and operated franchise owner with HomeVestors® means you can leverage its nationwide “We Buy Ugly Houses®” marketing campaign and lead generation platform to find available homes both on and off the market. By franchising with HomeVestors®, your business can avoid wasting time and money calibrating your digital marketing campaigns, and you’ll also get a higher volume of purchase-ready leads for homes delivered directly to you.

HomeVestors® franchise owners also have the ability to purchase the properties they get leads for thanks to the company’s hard money financing portal. Plus, you’ll learn how to use proprietary home valuation software while you’re being trained by some of the best real estate investors in the industry. Without teaming up with HomeVestors®, I would’ve gotten lost in the weeds with digital marketing and spent more time scrounging for leads than buying homes to flip. Instead, my company was able to grow quickly thanks to the steady supply of leads from HomeVestors®.

If you’re looking to take your real estate online lead generation strategy to the next level, request information about becoming a HomeVestors® franchise owner today.

Each franchise office is independently owned and operated.