Raise your hand if you have too many leads! None of you put your hand up, right? As property investors, we can never have enough leads. In fact, the number one question that my mentees ask me is, “How can I get more leads?” I hear it over and over. That’s why I’m going to spell out the top property investor lead generation strategies here and give my thoughts on the effectiveness of each one.

If you want more leads, this is the only blog post you’ll need to read.

Strategies for Generating Leads on Property Investments

There are lots of lead generation tools and strategies out there. Some are worth your time and others, not so much. Let me share the most common strategies I see new real estate investors try–and whether or not they work.

1) Integrated Online Software

You won’t be surprised to hear that there are software programs specifically designed to generate leads for property investors. You may even have used one or two yourself. While there are a lot of different platforms out there, there are three that investors tend to view as more valuable than most:

• REIPro has a database of over 120 million properties, tools to compare area comps and even the ability to submit offers. But, it doesn’t help you estimate renovation costs or calculate potential ROI.
• ProfitGrabber lets you analyze imported property lists as well as view property reports and comps on selected listings. You can also fax offers directly from the platform. The trouble is you have to buy property lists from somewhere else first.
• Real Estate Investor 360 lets you estimate potential ROI and automatically email potential leads. Rehab costs aren’t factored in, however, and often the platform provides way too many area comps to be of any use.

Unfortunately, the problem with all of these platforms is the same. They are overly complicated, time-consuming, and don’t offer genuine value for money. Ultimately, you will struggle to generate leads without serious effort on your part.

2) Lead Lists

While some investors prefer the kind of newfangled platforms mentioned above, others keep it old school. And nothing is more old-fashioned than a lead list. If you’ve only just begun real estate investing, a lead list provides contact information for dozens or even hundreds of distressed homeowners experiencing every kind of unfortunate situation imaginable–from divorce and death to financial distress. Once you purchase a list from a real estate agent or third party, you will then typically cold call, email, or visit every person on the list hoping to find a house to purchase. As you might have guessed, some lists are good while others aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. It’s a matter of trial and error until you find a good source or develop intuition from months of practice. While this was a highly effective practice in the past, the rise of the internet means that more effective investor property lead generation strategies exist.

3) Social Media Marketing

Speaking of the internet, social media sites have the potential to generate significant numbers of leads for dedicated and hardworking investors. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you better believe that there are dozens of property investors making these platforms work for them.

There are two strategies you can take. The first is to establish a strong presence on one of the major platforms and use your profile to get involved in the local area discussions. This can be achieved by joining local Facebook groups or interacting with local accounts on Twitter. The idea is to get your name out there so much that when someone needs to sell a house fast, they think of you first. The second strategy is to use a platform like Twitter as a search tool and look for keywords or hashtags that might suggest someone wants to sell their home fast. “Inherited home,” “termite damage” or “sell fast” are good starting places.

If you’re going to try your hand at social media, you’ll need to know a thing or two about every platform first. You’ll also need a lot of time on your hands. It can take months to build up a strong presence on a platform and hours to search for something relevant. But spare time, unfortunately, is something that not a lot of investors have.

4) Online Marketing

Social media is just one way you can use the Internet to generate leads. There are many other ways to market your business online such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads and social media ads. I’ll quickly run through each:

• SEO is the process of making your website appear higher in search engines like Google for key searches. For instance, you might want to appear high on the first page when someone types in “sell my home fast in Chicago”. The higher up you are, the more likely someone is to visit your website. SEO can be a very effective lead generation strategy, but it takes time. Research has shown that it can take anywhere from two to six months to rank on the first page.
• PPC ads are a much more effective solution if you want results fast. You will have noticed that Google serves advertisements at the top of every page. And, you can pay to have your website listed there. This is a great way to get instant exposure if someone is looking to sell a home in your area. But it is competitive and it can get expensive fast. That’s because you pay everytime someone clicks on your ad, regardless of whether that lead turns into a conversion.
• Social media ads on platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow advertisers a hyper-targeted approach to advertising. On Facebook, for instance, you can choose to advertise to users in a specific demographic, age range, location, and job. Your ad will show up on their News Feed or Twitter feeds with payment working on either a per-click or per-impression basis. You can set a budget for ad spend but, like PPC ads, this can get expensive too.

But here’s the real kicker, online marketing isn’t easy. Professionals dedicate their lives to understanding these strategies and even they don’t get it right 100% of the time. If you’re going to use online marketing, you really need to hire a consultant or an agency and this can cost thousands of dollars a month.

5) A ‘Done-for-you’ Multi-million Dollar National Marketing Campaign

What if you didn’t have to hardly lift a finger to generate leads with the nationally-recognized and trademarked “We Buy Ugly Houses®” marketing campaigns? What if all you had to do was follow up with each lead when it came through? Sounds like a fantasy, right? I thought the same until I became an independently owned and operated HomeVestors® franchisee.

You’ve probably already seen signs for the “We Buy Ugly Houses®” campaigns that include commercials, billboards, radio ads and direct mail. The result is that HomeVestors® franchisees are who homeowners contact when looking to sell their home fast. This means I can focus on converting leads into customers and growing my business to new heights.

Find out more about the best investor property lead generation strategy by talking to HomeVestors® today.

Each franchise office is independently owned and operated.