What are the best ways to generate home seller leads?

Another year. Another opportunity to reinvent oneself.

If this isn't your realtor mantra, it should be.

In kicking off 2023, I’ve decided to kick the real estate hornet’s nest and answer one (not so) simple thing: What are the best ways to generate home seller leads? 

Realtors know the sting of a cold listing – or worse, a cold lead after briefly connecting. While the best real estate lead generation evolves, the high, early-funnel stakes for realtors don’t. And that’s what keeps the adaptive pressure on.

By focusing on the other half of real estate leads (the seller leads who aren’t only buying!), this blog aims to bring some heat to your real estate seller lead game.

What are the best ways to generate home seller leads: #1 Be an FSBO hawk

This isn’t a new means of finding motivated seller leads but at (usually) no cost to the agent, the results of circling FSBO sites speak for themselves. FSBO stands for for sale by owner, by the way.

So, what sites? For starters, try Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or Zillow and sister-site Trulia. For commercial property seller leads, look no further than popular LoopNet. If you’d like the groundwork laid for you, there are also FSBO lead services like REDX whose prospecting platform can batch-send daily FSBO listings your way. Not bad, but also not free.

A cache of foreseeably new contacts and clients, the short of it is FSBO sites are pages of motivated seller leads who’ve opted in representing themselves to forgo bringing on an agent to sell their property. Your job? Convince them they’re wrong.

Traditional points of persuasion in outreach are showing these brave souls you can fetch a higher price for them through a bidding war than they can in alone drumming up interest. After that, lay bare for them your ability to sell within a shorter window than they can, with properties sold by estate agents selling markedly faster.

Another one-two in pitch is lessening the stress of and outright removing any question marks around home seller paperwork, which is a high stressor for even the most motivated of FSBO home sellers, yearly surveys reveal. Moreover on saving money, that’s a myth, in fact. FSBO listings sell for almost 30% less than agent-assisted listings! Quite a bit, I know. And certainly something to remind an FSBO home seller of.

Action point: Show me an unsold home and I’ll show you a bad asking price. Your clever FSBO marketing tactic? Home pricing. Mining real estate hubs drives home one thing: It’s the talk of the home seller world. Like bad landscaping, inaccurate home pricing scares off qualified buyers – and here’s the kicker: every home seller knows it. Promote your expertise on the matter!

What are the best ways to generate home seller leads: #2 Portal chat

‍Portal chat is an attention catcher but not something every estate agent knows about. So don’t be a scaredy-cat and let’s get curious about this new tool that’s got even the best real estate lead generation abuzz. Portal chat is a brandable chatbot solution for your real estate marketplace listings. Powerfully scalable up to 1000s of properties, it has the automation advantage of a chatbot but the real-time customer service pivot of a live chat.

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The secret behind portal chat’s success in real estate is engaging motivated seller leads when their curiosity about you is highest, not later. Remember that leads by definition aren’t yet prospects because they’re unqualified; once a real estate lead is qualified, they become prospects. So what do we want? Prospects! And when do we want them? Now.

Helping you get there, portal chat comes equipped with a two-scenario advantage of having chatbot and live chat optionality.

Portal chat’s chatbot advantage is to prequalify a real estate seller lead by having a question filter for whether the lead also has a property to sell. A sensible thing to ask, of course, if someone is looking also to buy a property.

The second portal chat advantage is live chat. And that’s an agent connecting with a prospect in real time. This is made simple by the chatbot’s ability to route the lead to the agent. Serviceform, for example, does this by connecting prospects and property agents directly (an industry first!), as if the prospect is already texting the agent. On most occasions, speaking to a live person is the final push a prospect needs to convert.

Action point: Keep it casual inside Serviceform’s Portal chat when introducing yourself to your newest lead. You’ll notice the trust-earning process to be faster when you have a real-time tool like portal chat breaking the ice for you before you two connect.

What are the best ways to generate home seller leads: #3 Social media management

Social media. It’s a beast. A lot is going on across platforms and both in comments and direct messages. Also from both unmotivated and motivated seller leads alike. It can be tough to tell who’s really sell-ready and who’s just window-shopping. Not to mention the nuance of taking stock of likes and also reciprocating those likes for some goodwill and any long-game nurturing.

The real enemy of social media though? That’s the speed at which everything happens. We actually have an adjective in English for exactly this: breakneck.

You’re just way too organised for that to happen, right? Wrong. Trust me. Overlooking a motivated seller lead late Friday afternoon or losing the latest contact you meant to save before the holiday isn’t a question of if but when. Because one can’t slow down social media, helper tools to ease the social media circus exist – and you need to get one, frankly.

To speed up your researching the best real estate lead generation and what kinds of social media managers there are, I’ll advise right now to look at tools that allow for automatic, live sync with your CRM. For the best real estate lead generation in 2023, this is one of those nonnegotiables, really. And that’s because in between first getting the real estate seller lead and then following up is where a hand-off needs to happen between your marketing and sales teams.

Always get that warm seller lead you’ve captured into the CRM for sales to contact ASAP. 

Not to plug our own solutions, but Serviceform’s Social inbox was built precisely around this principle, actually. Any question from your social media channels is automatically entered into your CRM as a single contact. This step is the critical hand-off to sales for that seller lead to be followed up with. Sure, you could use another social media manager but with the Social inbox, it’s automated. So no Friday fog or holiday brain to let that lead slip from mind.

Action point: Given social media’s seismic role in modern B2B branding, look for social media solutions that prioritise both cross-team automation and compatibility (like auto-sync). Incompatibility across tools that otherwise bridge the efforts of marketing and sales teams are a famously overlooked conversion pothole. Hint: Revenue good.

What are the best ways to generate home seller leads: #4 Meeting scheduler

This tip to get more motivated seller leads is rounding out our list for a reason. Should any of the three methods above work best for you, they all lead to the same thing: scheduling a chat. And that’s a good thing…if you’re quick about it.

After you’ve won a chat with a real estate seller lead (congrats, of course), you want to ensure you’re getting them to booking in as few steps as possible. Do this by looking for tools called meeting schedulers as well as calendar or scheduling apps. As a general rule amongst the best real estate lead generation, lesser motivated seller leads are likelier to drop out before committing to a time to chat so the quicker your interactive calendar is in front of them, the better!

Action point: Digitalise your booking with schedulers that have integration with website tools like portal chat and chatbots. Unique in its ability to do exactly this, Ourly from Serviceform is a versatile real estate meeting scheduler that’s both a standalone tool and helper appearing inside listing page chat windows. See the demo!

‍Wrapping up

One of my favourite quotes from Albert Einstein has nothing to do with physics but personhood, saying that true intelligence is the ability to adapt one’s thinking. Real estate changing year on year demands something really not all that different. The best realtors are always going to be the ones surveying the latest industry trends, and asking themselves in what ways real estate seller leads are being won. Because they want to win those leads too.

Touched on in this blog are some painless ways you yourself can be that much smarter a real estate agent when it comes to knowing real estate seller leads (better: motivated seller leads). These were in addition to what exactly falls in the always-evolving category of the best real estate lead generation. Said painless ways include:

• Being an FSBO hawk to actively search for individual home sellers
• Getting portal chat to woo leads with a chatbot-live chat hybrid tool
• Ensuring your social media solution has real-time CRM sync for better sales team hand-offs
• Boosting lead-to-prospect conversion with meeting schedulers

No more excuses! Busy your 2023 starting today with more motivated seller leads.