Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies for 2025 (Ranked Worst to Best)

After serving 5,000 families in my real estate sales career and helping over 2,000 agents grow and scale their businesses through real estate B school, I know what works and what doesn't work as far as lead generation goes. So today we're going to go into the 12 lead generation strategies for 2025 ranked from worst to best. You just gotta do the work. When I say worst to best. This is my philosophy of real estate, meaning I was all about generating marketing systems that drove inbound leads, organic lead generation. So paying for leads or cold calling, Spoiler alert, Those are my 12th and my 11th. While all of these dozen lead gen strategies worked, I'm going to go through the pros and the cons based on I don't even know. I think over a hundred billion dollars worth of real estate have been sold through our members. Probably over a million consultations have been gone on by members that have been through our program and my own journey. 10,000 plus consultations just in my real estate sales business. So this stuff definitely works. And it just comes down to if you want to run a business where you're not relying on cold calling or paid leads or begging for referrals, this is going to be your jam. So let's get into it. So number 12, like I said, all of these work, but number 12 is cold calling of any kind. So you're like Lars, cold calling works. I cold call. Cold calling does work. So I'm talking about circle prospecting. I'm talking about, you know, expireds for sale by owners are a little different. I'll get into that. Notice the defaults for rent by owners calling investors or motivated sellers. The pro is that there's an unlimited amount of homeowners that you can call. Pick a neighborhood of a thousand homes that you want to work in and you can call that neighborhood. Just cycle through every 60 days and probably get in touch with 20 to 25% of that neighborhood. In my experience, it is mind numbing and soul sucking. The first time I called and expired and this was early in my journey and the expired got really mad on me. Maybe that's a reflection of my not so thick skin. I just knew that I wanted to become a really good marketer because I wanted someone to call me and then the conversation's completely different. So that's number 12 is cold calling of any kind. Number 11 is paid leads. These could be home search leads, so buyer leads or seller leads, which are say a home eval lead. And when I mean paid leads, it's running a Facebook campaign. Or a Google pay per click campaign, even paying Zillow or Realtor. Com, those are paid leads. Now these work, we've used them in our business with a pretty good success rate. The pro is that they do work the con. Is that the way the environment is. Now I would venture to guess that minimum 10 times the number of leads are sold to real estate agents than there are even commission checks to be had. Probably even a hundred times. So the quality of most of these paid lead sources, it's not very high. And unless you really trick out your CRM and you have all the tripwires and you probably have an AI bot somewhere in there responding at all crazy hours, you really need to go crazy Beast mode on the mousetrap behind these automated sequences. It takes an average of 8 to 10 plus conversations with a total stranger that opts into a paid lead for you to be able to have a shot at presenting your services to them. So it works. But like I said, I want to have a business where business is coming to me. Number 10 are referral sites. This is where you pay 25, 30, 40 plus percent at closing to the lead provider. So Zillow Flex is an example of this. Homelight ideal agent, there are dozens. You know Dave Ramsey, he calls it his ELP program where he'll essentially provide leads to three agents. The first person to convince that lead to do business with them, they get a closing, they pay a pretty stout referral fee to Dave Ramsey. And so while it works, that's the pro that you could plug into these referral sources and it works and you could actually do pretty good unit production. But you're giving away so much of your commission check that it's ultimately not sustainable. So the con is that you cannot scale a business. Our economic model at real estate B school accounts for only 10% of your gross commission income can go toward lead generation of any kind. And we have members doing 50 transactions per year that are only spending 5% of, let's call it 500,000 GCI on all of their lead generation activities. Every agent comes into our world having failed on all of these paid home search leads or paid seller leads or these referral sites. It's just not sustainable. Those three buckets there, cold calling, paid home search leads, paid seller leads, referral sites, they work. I just wouldn't advise them. If you want to scale a business and really make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time, those lead sources will require that you work more time to generate new business or give away too much of your commission check where you'll have to do more deals, which just means more hours in the business. So the next nine that I'm going to go through, they're each good for one to two plus transactions per month in Million Dollar Agent method. If you ever come into our world and we help you implement these Legion levers, we actually only help you implement four in the 13 weeks that we work together. But each of those four are good for one to two transactions per month once they're fully operational in your business. If you want information on Million Dollar Agent method, just go to milliondollaragentmethod.com and we'll just have a conversation about your business, where you are now, where you want to be in the future, and what is holding you back. Chances are you've tried some of those first three lead generation strategies if you're not where you want to be in your real estate business. So number nine is new construction. And what do we mean by new construction? There's two angles here. Little bit of sweat equity in terms of new construction can go a long way if you're in a market where there are new construction opportunities, either smaller builders or even mid size or larger track builders. With the smaller builders you have the opportunity. Just stop by a job site and introduce yourself. Chances are if it's a smaller builder, they're going to be swinging a hammer at the home and you just show them what you do. For builders, we've got a whole process around that. And ask them if they would consider allowing you to help them sell that property. Do it on a trial basis and not even do an exclusive listing or depending on what you can do in your state. That's one angle of it I actually like. The other angle where essentially you're becoming known as a new construction agent in your market. You are going to treat all the new construction in the market as your own inventory. You're going to include it in your social media and your video marketing. Really get to know 10 subdivisions that still have homes coming out of the ground. You're going to get to know those on site agents. You get to know all the floor plans, make it a point to stop in at least once a month and just get to know the inventory. Get to know those agents. They have buyers come through that aren't represented and they have homes to sell. So they'll hook them up with agents that they have good relationships with. Yes, there's sweat equity involved. They're probably going to be about two to three hours a week and you can organize it in a simple Google sheet. It doesn't have to be really complicated. Number eight is yard marketing. All our systems revolve around helping you get more listings. That's where maximum leverage is in your real estate business. And a yard marketing system done properly will generate two to three times more yard sign calls than just putting a single sign in the yard that has your brokerage on it. You want to set intention with your yard marketing, so have a system where buyers can get information on that home 24 7. Not even complicated technology. But we also have something called an open house system. Essentially they call a phone number and they're talking to an agent. It doesn't have to be you necessarily, if you want to hand off buyers, you've got a junior agent on your team or showing agent. But we want to put a buyer in a position where as they're driving by properties, generally they don't want to call the agent. They just want information on the home or they want to get in to see the home. So the everyday open house, they're going to call that phone number and schedule a showing before they'll call the number on the main yard sign. And we've got swipeable designs for all this stuff if you ever come into our world. So that's yard marketing. Number seven is open houses. Not for every agent. I've said it before, if I had to sell 52 homes in the next 52 weeks, starting from scratch, I would do open houses. I would do two open houses a week. And I'm an introvert and I didn't build my business on open houses. But we have members that are doing 250,000 a year, 25 transactions on open houses. And the thing that we would add to it is that we would door knock with intention. Essentially introducing yourself to the neighbors of this seller and basically inviting them to the open house. Hey, come by Saturday at 2pm you can help me pick your next neighbor. They want to see the inside of that house anyway and you're inviting them. I would also circle prospect around that open house. You're not asking them if they're thinking of selling. You're introducing yourself and saying, hey, I'm holding an Open House on 123 Main St. Saturday, 2pm Once you stop by, we can help pick your your next neighbor. At least you'll know what the house looks like if you have one of your friends that want to move into the community. So you're just making an effort to not only sell that house, which is important but you're making an effort to get to know people in that community and adding contacts to your database as a result of that. The goal is to get one to two closings for every open house that you do if marketed properly. Number six, Expired Direct response different than expired Outbound. I'm talking about something different. When I got rejected on the phone because I don't have thick skin, I don't think God created me to be a, an outbound prospector. I was like, well, clearly I have to commit to making expireds part of my business. You cannot ignore expired. You cannot ignore for sale by owners. We know they want to sell their homes. I just committed to becoming a good, good direct response marketer. Highly influenced by Dan Kennedy. In my early days of business, I created a series of postcards, letters and handwritten notes. Not overly complicated, a little bit of technology, a little bit of organization, a 25x return on investment and there's some time involved. So you may even offload some of that to a low cost local admin to help you coordinate some of the mailers. It is phenomenal. You can target neighborhoods, you can target luxury with these campaigns we did one year between FSBO's expired direct response and FSBO direct response over 700,000 GCI which is in our markets, about 70 units. Most of our members are using this Legion lever because we have an increase in expireds in most markets. Number five is for sale by owners. There's a similar direct mail which is generating inbound responses from for sale by owners. Little different content because we want to be a resource to for sale by owners. Reach out to for sale by owners to introduce ourselves. Very low key script that we use. It's not a beat them over the head with the phone until they submit and give you an appointment. We're going to be here as a resource. Did you get that thing that I mailed out to you then you're following up in a week. Did you get that thing I mailed out to you? Another system in place that has a massive return over 20x return on investment. So very low cost investment for a very massive return. The yard marketing open house is expired Direct response for sale by ownership. We want to implement all these lead gen levers in your business. You can't implement all of them at the same time because none of them will work. It's one at a time generally speaking. But you want to have a mindset that each of them could be good for one to two plus transactions on the way to 50 transactions. In a year. There's no stopping these systems once we get them up and running. When I was implementing a lead gen lever, or what I'm calling in this video, a lead generation strategy, it was doing it in a way where I knew it could be worth 50 transactions per year. When I had 10 producing agents and I was working one day a week, they were doing over 450 transactions. I only had about six lead generation levers in place and I was doing over $3 million of GCI gross commission income per year. And I was spending a lot less than 10% of that on all of our systems. Number four, is social media an extension of your database, expanding your digital footprint? You could create one short on Instagram that a thousand people can view and you can generate a couple appointments in the DMs. You're having conversations with people looking to sell their home in your market. I'm not in Dallas, but the three tips for Dallas home sellers to get maximum price in 2025, that is going to get some interest and it's going to be shared with people that know people in Dallas that might be looking to sell in 2025. Short form content. Expanding your digital footprint is something you must incorporate. This is not something that back in the day was part of my business, but we have members. I've got a member that did 31 transactions from business Instagram. She went through exactly step by step how she did it. Another member took 30 listings in 90 days. So simply doing Facebook lives, nothing special, no special equipment, no experience on video before she committed to this strategy. Got another member that runs a small team, does a couple hundred transactions, but half her business is from social media and she taught us exactly what she did to be able to do that. Another member does a whole bunch of transactions from giveaways, basically getting a lender to sponsor a giveaway and just blowing that thing up on social media and involving the business owner and making a big deal of it. And they do six of those a year and it just generates so much opportunity to basically have conversations with more people that might be looking to buy or sell, or they know someone looking to buy or sell and they just appreciate the fact that you are in the community and doing these giveaways and they see you everywhere. Number three is social proof, specifically using your Google business profile to generate business. We had a member share a strategy around this. She does 10 deals a year, passively, no spend with Google, just from optimizing her Google business profile. She doesn't even have more than 25 reviews on Google, we encourage our members and we have a system to get as many reviews as possible. I started our Google review process when this concept of social proof hit me to get away from the Zillow reviews and go all in on Google reviews. But it doesn't take a ton of Google reviews, just optimizing your business profile and uploading content and pictures on there. There's a way to structure your business profile that will generate a deal per month without you doing anything. So that is optimizing the Google business profile and then securing the reviews. Number two, and this is going to blow your mind. It's client care. So client care, the way you treat your buyer clients, the way you treat your seller clients, that is a lead generation lever. When you sit down and you bring a new buyer into your world as a client or new seller into your world as a client, we have a process in place whereby you are going to make a promise to them. I promise that we're going to do this, this, this, this and this. And when I do, all I ask is for you to refer business to us. If you don't refer business to us, I will assume that we have dropped the ball and I didn't deliver on the promises I'm making to you now and I'm to have a conversation about it because I do want to get better. Can you promise me when I crush it for you, Mr. And Mrs. Home Seller, that you will be a raving fan lunatic of my services? Great. Go ahead and sign here. This just documents that I am making these big promises to you. I will deliver on the promises and then we can help your friends, family, or get rid of some neighbors that you don't want around anymore. Okay, let's do it. And then we just follow up on that promise. So client care is a legion lever. When you make a big promise in the beginning, you better believe you need to execute on that promise and deliver an experience to them that trumps any service experience that they've ever had in any restaurant, in any hotel they went to, in any car dealer. You want to be that real estate agent that isn't a traditional real estate agent that kind of just trips through every part of the transaction. You build out the systems, the checklists, the touch points, the things that you mail out, the brownies you send, the gifts that you send along the way. There's certain things that you can send where you want every closing to turn into minimum one additional closing. So client care's a lead Gen lever is phenomenal. And the number one hopefully you could guess it. The number one lead generation strategy I believe for 20, 25 and forever and always is your database touch system. So this, these are people that know like and trust you. And taking them through a series of value added touches as we call them, minimum 5% but the target is 10% of your database. These are people that actually know like and trust you. It's not your bigger database of random leads. It's like I have 250 people that know like and trust me. Minimum 10% if you do this right, will send you business or will do business with you. In a 12 month period. We just had a community member share did 42 transactions this year from 250 people in her inner circle database without spending really any money at all. And she just has a series of touches. She works about two hours a day nurturing the database and as a result generates about 350,000 GCI from 250 people in her database. So we have a process, it's the first thing that we work on when we get together on million dollar agent method. Agents come in, they're like, oh, I already know how to do this. How much GCI did you actually generate in the last 12 months from your database? Unless it is over seven figures, you are not done yet. We build a database, we feed it, we communicate with it. A very intentional process. Not a lot of money that we spend. And this is not calling people up and begging for business. It is just adding so much value that the natural byproduct of that is that business is going to come your way again. Inbound and organic. Everything we focus on is inbound, inorganic. Does the cold calling work? Do the paid home search leads work? Do the referral? They work. It's just not profitable, it's not scalable. In my opinion. It's a little bit soul sucking. And there just are way easier ways to build a business. It's like the blood and guts approach to real estate versus the elegance and ease approach to real estate, which I like to live in. The elegance and ease approach to real estate. Because if you build your business with lead generation strategies that can run on autopilot, parts of the business don't have to rely on you. If you have to be the one cold calling every day and you get so good at cold calling, there's little chance you could ever backfill yourself out of that position. It would take years and tens of thousands of conversations for someone to get good on the phone like you for you to ever get out of doing that. And, and there are guys 30 years in the business still cold calling and it still works and they're miserable. We want to help you put systems in place. We call these lead generation levers. It's the heavy lift of the million dollar agent method. If you want to have a conversation around it, it's million dollar agent method dot com. As you contemplate your business plan for the coming year, make sure you know exactly what your lead generation strategies look like. Go out there and crush it. If we can be part of the journey, we'd be honored. Go to milliondollaragentmeth and we'll see you on the next video.