How to Get Warm Leads as a Real Estate Agent by Spending Little to No Money

As a real estate agent, you can be generating new leads by spending little to no money. Plus… no cold calling, we promise.

Although you can gain leads by investing your money wisely, sometimes the most vital leads come from paying with effort instead of money. Plus, you might foster even stronger leads since most of these methods are founded upon building a relationship with potential clients.

So let’s get into the details. We would love to share some great tips on how to generate leads efficiently and cost-effectively.

Use Different Social Media Platforms

Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn can all help you generate leads for free if used efficiently. There are so many ways to use social media to your advantage when it comes to real estate lead generation. Here are some of them:

Use customized branding through unique colors, fonts, layouts, and templates to brand yourself and make your social media profiles look and feel consistent and cohesive. Spend time liking, commenting, and resharing posts under specific hashtags and locations to engage with the area you serve to gain more impressions of your brand.

The hope is that someone will see your engagement, go to your profile, realize what services you offer and what your brand represents, and engage somehow. Whether it be through a DM, a follow, or a click to your website to sign up for your newsletter, you will have ease with real estate lead generation.

Join Facebook and LinkedIn groups of real estate agents, investors, homeowners, and renters to expand your network further. In these groups, you will be able to share your expertise through cold DM’s when someone posts a question on an aspect of real estate that you can help with.

Coffee on You!

This one is simple but often overlooked. Grabbing coffee with a cold lead or a past client is one powerful way you can go the extra mile. This will really show the potential client, whether they are new clients or past, that you are committed. It will generate quality leads more often than you would expect.

Reach out to cold leads and invite them to a coffee shop in the area. Focus this meetup on trying to get to know the potential client and understanding their needs. By meeting in a local area, you will get to have a more casual interaction, show off some of your expertise in the area, and make a genuine impression that you care about the client.

Bonus tip! Have business cards. Although they aren’t free, you can get several printed for a low price, and it will pay off in the end. Bring a business card (or a few) to this coffee meetup and give it to the potential client afterward.

We recommend to our clients to brand themselves every chance they get, so make sure to have a unique business card that will make you stand out from your competition when you are trying to generate leads.

Maintaining relationships with the people who you helped get their dream home can get you more leads than you might think. Generating real estate leads is hard work, but strong referrals can get you warm leads without even interacting with a client beforehand, so don’t let go of those opportunities. Personal connection is so important in this business. You’re also celebrating local businesses with this lead generation tactic as well. 

Channel Your Inner Blogger

Start a blog. This method can be free, but usually, if you want to use SEO or market your blog in any way, you will most likely have to pay some amount. This is one of our personal favorite ways to generate new leads.

Writing a blog can turn cold leads into warm leads and bring you warm leads out of nowhere. However, this one takes some commitment. If you want your blog to get you leads successfully, you’ll have to tailor it to your target audience as best you can.

We recommend real estate professionals to put themselves in the shoes of potential clients. If they’re looking to buy a home, rent a home, sell a home, or anything else related to real estate...what will they be searching online? What tips will they be looking for? What can you offer them as a real estate agent?

You take the answers to those questions and, boom, turn them into a blog. This gives you a chance to offer expertise in certain areas, reach potential clients outside of your circle, and gain leads through solid calls to action.

However! Do not just write to write. There should always be a purpose to your blogs. We recommend incorporating drip campaigns. You can advise readers to visit the rest of your website in your blogs, but you want readers to continue being warm leads for you. A simple way to maintain them as warm leads is to get them to sign up to an email list.

Through this email list, you will run your drip campaign, where you will consistently maintain contact with all the people who have ever signed up for your newsletter. Therefore, the people that found one of your blogs are now being exposed to an email from you once or twice every month instead of just visiting your site.

Offer Incentives

Offer prizes or have contests for people to exchange their email to be added to your drip campaign. This tactic can either be completely free, or you can choose to offer incentives you purchase.

You can get creative with this one. Some examples of prizes or incentives you can offer are a complimentary meeting or consultation with you, a free house estimate, a gift card with a dollar amount, a discount on your services, a combination of those, and so much more.

This goal is to gain warm leads by getting people to sign up for your newsletter with their emails. You can also find ways to get past clients or people already signed up involved, too, maybe saying they can enter if they repost about the contest on their social media.

This tactic is easy and great for expanding your circle because you can post about this among all social media platforms and increase incentives for other people to share about it, such as adding double entries for those who do share.

You can also create incentives for past clients by providing referral bonuses. You can have a system in place where if a client refers a successful client, they will get some type of money stipend or any other prize you can think of.

Write and Send Thank You Cards

Similar to the tactic of grabbing coffee with someone, writing a thank you card is another way to go above and beyond.

No matter if you are a new agent or a seasoned veteran, this will bring in incoming leads for sure and create satisfied clients. Writing a thank you card for something a client has done, whether all they did was have a conversation with you or hired you as their real estate agent, will most likely maintain them as a quality lead.

We’ve said it before, but it’s necessary to repeat. Brand yourself, brand yourself, brand yourself! Don’t just sign the thank you card with your name and logo. Add your branding. Yes, you will want to handwrite it to be more genuine and a.

This also goes for holiday cards you can send to past and existing clients to show your appreciation and care for them. At the end of the day, showing that you are just as much a human as the people you work with will only further foster your relationship with them.

Open Houses = Open Opportunities

Open houses can be one of the cheapest ways to kill two birds with one stone. Not only can you use this opportunity to sell a house, but you can also gain warm leads!

Of course, every single person that comes to an open house can’t purchase the same house, but every single person at an open house is most likely on the same mission. So just because the home you are showing isn’t perfect for every visitor, who says you should stop there and let that potential lead generation walk out on having you as their real estate agent as well?

Selling the house is essential, but also use open houses to generate leads. How? Brand yourself! Use this opportunity to get to know the potential client, understand their needs and problems, and prove to them that you can be their answer.

We recommend always bringing some sort of branding material to open houses, such as business cards, neighborhood guides, and listing guides. Be sure to include your name, how people can reach you, and super importantly: a QR code. By adding a QR code to your branding materials, you set yourself up to best to gain a warm lead generation before they even walk out of the door.

You can instruct them to scan the QR code, which will lead them to anything you want, but we recommend it leads them to enter their email for your newsletter or provide you with their contact info. Open houses are probably already your bread and butter, but these tips will help you generate real estate leads even more often.

Get Involved

Last, but not least, get involved within your community. Lead generation can also have reverberating benefits as well. Not only will you be able to have a good time attending community events, but you will be able to network as well.

Going to local events will provide you with the opportunity to speak to potential clients already in your area. At national events, you will meet people outside of your area and could potentially meet other real estate agents that can refer people to you if they don’t serve your area or specialize in the same area as you.

And for the last time, brand yourself! Yes, bring business cards to these events. Any chance you can get to foster some sort of relationship and give them away to remember you by, do it. Your real estate expertise is probably much desired in the local market.

In addition, don’t just stop there. If you attend an event, document it through photos and videos and then post them to your social media accounts and tag the location and event. This will expose people to your brand who were at the event, but you did not meet.