Real estate teams should track internet buyer leads like a business metric: cost per lead runs $5-10, but only 2% convert to a closing. Yard signs convert 2-3 times better. One standardized platform beats chasing multiple vendors.
Foreign. So let's get into buyer lead generation. And I mentioned it in the introduction, this module is surprisingly, the power of the information we're going to go through is in the simplicity of it. I mentioned chasing squirrels, and this is the biggest area that squirrel chasing is going on. Thinking that there's a magic pill to generating a buyer lead, converting a buyer lead, the buyer lead generation, conversion and management process comes down to very fundamental business principles. And managing this side of your business as a pillar of your business as a system that needs to ultimately run by itself. And so let's kind of lay the groundwork here. So there's two sources of buyer leads, at least that I know of in my business. One is Internet buyers. So that's people that may be searching, you know, through social media. They may come upon your website, pay per click. They may, you know, Craigslist is now back online, those sorts of buyers. So you're putting a link out there somewhere and people are ending up on a website and they become a lead. And then yard marketing and the relative quality of those leads. I mean, I think yard marketing converts, you know, two to three times at a better rate than Internet buyers. But they're both a pipeline sort of approach. Buyer leads are very easy to come by in general, but the process of turning those leads into appointments and ultimately, you know, commission checks and closings is where the real magic comes in. Buyer lead generation, it is absolutely a numbers game. So, you know, it's again, managing your pipeline. You have to know your conversion rates and your lead acquisition costs, and we'll go through that. It's become pretty confusing in a crowded space. When I first got into Internet buyer leads, it was early in my career I got a Boomtown site. And this was. I was Boomtown, their number nine customer. And it was the year I only sold, I guess it was the year I sold 45 homes, my first full year in real estate. And it was the only real. There was realty generator at the time in Boomtown. So it's real crowded space now. The whole point here is that now with all the choices that I see out there is that agents are bringing on multiple platforms and they're changing platforms thinking that there is a magic pill and one platform is better than the other. They have different features, but at the end of it, there's a buyer lead that was generated that needs to be serviced. We'll kind of get into that as well. So let's talk about Internet buyers. I started my career using online classified ads. I used craigslist and I sent those leads to less branded landing pages. So I didn't even have a boomtown site. And so that's the essence of what these sites do now. I believe in as low branded sites as you can possibly get. The whole point is that you have to have something sort of exciting enough for a buyer to give you their information and give you a viable lead. And most of the lead gen platforms out there, the boomtown Commissions Inc. Real geeks conversion, there's probably another five or six out there and there are three that are in development now from team leaders that are trying to invent a better system as well. But one of these systems, getting one of these on board and working it as a pipeline is critical in my opinion, to being able to scale your team and having what agents think the magic is about real estate. So being able to enlist buyer agents to join your team. Cost per lead. You know, we run anywhere from. Ours are more in the six, you know, five, six to eight to $10 per lead depending on the platform. I haven't met many agents that are above, you know, mid-20s or so in some of the higher price point markets that are more competitive. But it comes down to from there. Our conversion rates aren't. I don't know that they're any worse than some of the bigger teams. I mean we struggle from different issues relative to some of the smaller teams out there. Our conversion rates aren't real good. We generate so many leads, it's even tough to slow down the number of leads because of the number of listings that we have. But if we include bad numbers and bogus leads, we're converting about 2%, probably even a little bit less than 2% to, to closing. We're scaling down our lead generation because we just don't need the leads at this point because we have about 75 listings in the yard. Sign calls is where we really want to focus. But about $10 per lead, that'll put us at about $500 per closing for marketing.
