How to Secure Real Estate Leads and Manage Your Sales Funnel

Technology has changed how people buy and sell houses. The real estate arena has become even more competitive. The modern realtor must work smart and employ tech tools to increase real estate leads into their sales funnel.

According to the last data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), there are about 1.4 million active realtors in the United States. That’s quite a competition if you’re trying to stand out in the real estate business.

Even before driving around the desired neighborhood, potential home buyers now browse properties online. At this stage lies the greatest opportunity to attract interested people and convert them as real estate leads into the sales funnel of your website listings.

The idea is to let technology do the hard “fishing” work of getting real estate leads to you with automation so you can focus on real estate expertise to close the deal. Setting up a winning sales funnel is simple and cost-effective. Let us show you how.

Real Estate Outlook

The housing market moves in cycles. Buyer demand rises and falls with mortgage rates, the school calendar and, more recently, the search for homes with office space as remote work sticks around. Whatever the current forecast says, the buyers who are active right now start their search online, and that is where you can reach them first.

Does this sound like the right time to revamp your website to attract those real estate leads into your sales funnel? You betcha.

What is a Real Estate Sales Funnel and What are Real Estate Leads

Long gone is the time where realtors would publish their profile picture on a newspaper ad inviting home-buyers for an open house. Now, according to the National Association of Realtors, 92% of all buyers use the internet in the search for a home.

Therefore, establishing your online presence as a realtor is not just necessary, but almost mandatory. Even if you’re part of a brokerage firm and your contact is already part of their website, your own real estate expertise must also be promoted like a brand.

Whether you already have your own real estate website or not, it should not be a static page just to display your contact information. There are many ways to improve it in order to build a sales funnel and turn it into a real estate lead generating machine. Let’s first define these terms:

Real Estate Sales Funnel

The sales funnel, in simple terms, is the buying process that businesses can lead customers toward the purchase of a good or service.

Also called as the purchase funnel, it is a customer-focused marketing concept that maps out the journey a customer goes through when making any kind of purchase. The typical sales funnel goes through the following stages: awareness, interest, desire, and action.

Therefore, the real estate sales funnel is that concept applied to the home buying process. And since we’ve stated that online presence is paramount, the real estate sales funnel can be a series of landing pages, hopefully converting visitors into qualified leads if a contact form is filled out and submitted.

Real Estate Leads

You’ve probably guessed it already, but real estate leads are actual people interested in buying any type of property. Not just a real estate lead is an interested person, but it only counts if that person gave away hers or his contact information to you.

It is only logical that if someone viewed your property listings page, even to just peek at a dream house, that person is already more inclined to know more about it than someone who never expressed any interest in real estate acquisition.

Of course, selling a house is not like selling candy and you can’t just as easily convince people to make such investment, but any real estate lead can become a potential sale. With the contact information, you can call visitors back in order to make your sales pitch and establish a connection.

How to Set Up a Sales Funnel for Real Estate Lead Generation

A glamorous website won’t sell houses on its own. There is more to a realtor job than to just publish a website and wait for orders to come, obviously. But most likely a home sale will start online. From a Google search.

You have to treat your website like your precious real estate shop, and each property as if it were beautifully displayed on a shelf. And by shelf, we mean its own landing page with an inviting contact form.

Setting Up Your Real Estate Sales Funnel

There are many approaches to set up a sales funnel for your real estate website. You can develop a real estate newsletter, design a popup window for an event invitation, or run a marketing campaign on Facebook and Google, just to give you some examples.

However, the most guaranteed strategy for a successful Real Estate sales funnel is to set up an individual landing page for each property. Do not panic though, thinking this is something costly or time-consuming.

We strongly recommend that you take advantage of using a mass landing page generator like Multiple Pages Generator (or simply MPG). We have covered this topic in detail before, in our article on How to Nail the Local Lead Generation Game.

The idea is to boost your website with thousands of unique pages to build your real estate sales funnel. With MPG, you can create multiple pages in bulk for any kind of keyword-targeted landing pages within minutes.

For example, you can create unique landing pages by each individual property, by neighborhood, by type of property, by price range, and so on. Map out how your visitors will view your website and tackle all three first stages of a sales funnel – awareness, interest, desire – to lure them into action!

Another benefit of using a mass landing page generator, besides convenience, is improving online visibility on search engine results. If potential buyers are looking for specific homes within a zip code, your targeted landing page will be displayed on top.

The real estate sales funnel will be more effective if each step is clear and pleasant. Consider including photos of the property, map with full address, and maybe a tour video. However, don’t hold information as a ransom to be divulged only if a call or a house showing is scheduled.

Keep in mind that people will be looking at many websites while house hunting and if you hold key information back, they’ll simply move on to the next realtor. On the other hand, visitors will gladly continue spiraling down your real estate sales funnel if trust and expertise are promptly perceived.

Setting Up Your Real Estate Lead Generation

Maybe you’re just beginning your career as a realtor with only one or a few listings. Or a realtor for very exclusive luxury homes or some other real estate niche. Or even a homeowner selling your property yourself. Then maybe multiple landing pages won’t be as necessary.

But even if you decide to take another approach for your sales funnel other than multiple landing pages, you will most definitely need a landing form. A proper, responsive online form is truly how you get real estate leads.

Whether for your homepage or for each landing page, a contact form must be part of it. Your own contact information should be clearly displayed, but do not passively wait for a call or an email. Besides, if it can be quite cumbersome to keep track of tons of submitted forms, imagine for loose calls and emails.

Your goal is to secure real estate leads from your sales funnel AND efficiently manage them. How will you achieve that? With an online form builder like FormBuilder!

Real Estate Lead-Generating Forms Guide with FormBuilder

If you’re not familiar yet with online form builders, then you’ll be surprised how easy and quick it is to create and embed forms into your website or landing pages. No need to hire a professional or learn to code yourself.

A form builder like FormBuilder will simplify all design and publishing process while offering great automation solutions so you can keep track of every real estate lead. Go ahead and create a free FormBuilder account to try it out. No credit card needed.

Here’s a quick guide on some of FormBuilder's powerful features that will surely enhance your sales funnel and increase your real estate leads:

Drag-and-Drop Editor

Build custom property forms from scratch, from a template, with the AI form generator, or by importing an existing PDF. Edit any element like field, size, spacing, position, and color just as you like it.

Free Real Estate form templates

There are tons of template options by type, theme, or industry, including, of course, a real estate seller form if you just want to get going even faster. After selecting the Real Estate Seller Form, you can tweak it to make it your own.

Responsive Forms

Seamlessly interact with potential home buyers with responsive forms that automatically adapt to desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones. FormBuilder allows you to preview your form on how it will look and perform on these devices before publishing it.

Custom thank-you page

Nurture real estate leads and establish a further connection with a custom thank-you page to let visitors know that their inquiry was well received. Take it up a notch and you can even redirect visitors to another page, like a home financing calculator website, after they’ve submitted the form.

Auto-Notifications options

Easily create automatic email notifications to yourself, to someone from your brokerage firm, or even to a property's current owner, to let them know real estate leads are being received. Beat competition to the punch by responding the moment a lead lands in your inbox. You can also send the lead an automatic confirmation email with your own subject and message, so they know their request was received while you prepare a proper reply.

Form analytics

Keep track of how many people view, start and finish your form, so you can see where prospects drop off and fix the step that loses them. And once a lead has submitted, remember that sometimes prospects just need a little follow-up call to smooth out doubts and fears of making such a big decision as homeownership.

Logic Rules

Refine your sales funnel by setting up Logic Rules questions to improve your form even further. You can set up conditions for the next steps based on neighborhood options, price range, property type, etc., and qualify your real estate leads from the start.

Integrations

Connect your form to integrations like Google Sheets, webhooks, Zapier, and your CRM. You can seamlessly send real estate leads data to another platform of your choice in order to follow up negotiations and commission cuts, for instance.

Built-in spam protection

Protect your sales funnel from bots and spam attacks with FormBuilder's built-in spam protection, making sure you’re only getting submissions from real home-buying prospects.

Security

Real estate business involves large sums of money so you want to build a trustworthy channel for your prospects, with end-to-end SSL encryption throughout your sales funnel and secure storage for collected data of your real estate leads.

Now that we’ve shown you the importance of building a sales funnel to secure more real estate leads and how easy it is to manage it with automation solutions by FormBuilder, it’s showtime!

It is up to you how will you leverage real estate leads received from your website and make the most it. Technology is here to do the heavy lifting so you can wow your prospects with your real estate expertise.

May you rejoice tracking up your real estate leads down into your sales funnel until finally convert them into home buyers!