How To Generate Real Estate Wholesale Leads

Your wholesaling business will be dead in the water without a steady and reliable pipeline of motivated seller leads. Your pipeline is the source of your deals and profits. So, knowing how to generate real estate wholesale leads for motivated sellers should be at the top of your To-Do list.

Once you create your marketing plan, it’s time to implement your strategy to generate real estate wholesale leads and start getting sellers calling you and submitting their information on your website and marketing forms. After all, it’s not like the first seller you speak with will turn into a deal, in fact, you likely need to speak with as many as 30 to 50 sellers before you get a deal under contract.

So, let’s talk about the most effective ways to generate real estate wholesale leads to find more motivated sellers.

Wholesale real estate lead generation can be broken down into 2  general categories:

1)     Online Lead Generation
2)     Offline Lead Generation

Any successful wholesaling business will utilize both of these methods to find motivated seller leads. Although, it is fairly common to see a wholesale company depend on just one of these methods of lead generation that they have “perfected.”

What’s The Difference Between Online and Offline Lead Generation to generate real estate wholesale leads?

Offline Lead Generation: This is simply anything that doesn’t involve the internet to generate real estate wholesale leads, such as direct mail, bandit signs, driving for dollars,  referrals, networking, door hangers, etc.  Mos offline lead generation is considered outbound marketing. This is because most of the time using these methods, you are reaching out to potential sellers. The exception is Bandit Signs because people who see your sign call you, but it is still considered offline marketing because it does not involve the internet.

Online Lead Generation:   Online lead generation is simply anything that does involve the internet to generate real estate wholesale leads. Online lead generation has evolved over the years and when properly applied can be very cost-effective and provide a steady flow of incoming motivated seller leads. Examples of online lead generation to find motivated seller leads include SEO (search engine optimization), PPC(Pay Per Click – google adwords), GMB (Google My Business), Facebook Ads, Social Media Marketing, business listings such as Yellowpages, yelp or bbb, as well as Craigslist and other similar classified sites.

Implementing both online and offline marketing to generate real estate wholesale leads is the most effective method to generate real estate wholesale leads. If you buy a lead list and send direct mail, you should also consider using that same marketing list to send ringless voicemail, voice broadcast, and running targeted facebook ads to the same list. This way, a seller who may be receiving a postcard from you and another competing we buy houses company, will also get your marketing message via telephone, voicemail, and facebook. This not only puts your brand and message in front of the potential lead, but it also adds additional credibility to your company and can make a smaller brand seem like a larger company since they are receiving your ad multiple times, through multiple mediums. This can be the deciding factor between a motivated seller selling to you

So let’s talk about the best methods to generate Real Estate Wholesale leads to find Motivated Sellers that you can implement right away to start generating more leads and closing more deals. 

# 1:  Driving for Dollars

Driving for dollars is a tried and true method to generate real estate wholesale leads, and it also happens to be the cheapest. All it requires is time and knowing what to look for. Properties in disrepair are always a good indicator of a potential motivated seller lead. Keep an eye out for boarded-up doors and windows, tall grass and/or unkempt landscaping, piled-up trash, and/or other indicators of distress like rotted wood, peeling paint, and missing or worn out roofing shingles.

You’ll need to get the house number, then you can check your city or county tax records to find the homeowner’s name. Then, use a skip tracing service to locate the homeowner and give them a call and/or send them a letter.

Pro-Tip:   instead of doing this yourself to generate real estate wholesale leads, you can hire a “bird dog”.  A bird dog is someone who will do this for you by locating potential motivated seller leads and pass the leads along to you in return for a finder’s fee or portion of the assignment fee. Many successful investors have multiple bird dogs who do this for them and can be a great resource to help you generate real estate wholesale leads without you having to leave your house!

#2: Direct Mail

Direct mail is another tried and true method to generate real estate wholesale leads, although this method comes with a price tag. Using direct mail to generate real estate wholesale leads is one of the most common methods wholesalers use, and it is not uncommon to spend multiple thousands of dollars per campaign. However, if a seller receives your direct mail and calls you back, they’re considered a warm, or hot lead. Otherwise, why else would they have called you? Other than to tell you to take them off your list, of course

As the saying goes: it takes money to make money, and when it comes to direct mail to generate real estate wholesale leads, it takes an investment, to see a return. So, consider making an investment into direct mail to generate more motivated seller leads.

Direct mail campaigns are most effective when you target the right list of homeowners, which first requires you to create a list. The best way to do this is to use a site such as www.MassiveLeadLists.com to build a custom stacked list, which allows you to choose multiple attributes to create a custom list to ensure you are targeting a list of homeowners that are more likely to sell.

Pro-Tips: Mail to the same list at least 3 times (up to 6) before you exhaust your list in order to generate real estate wholesale leads for your business.  Don’t just send one campaign then give up because you get a low response rate. It’s actually pretty common to see 1% response rate from motivated sellers when sending a direct mail campaign to generate real estate wholesale leads

Track Everything and Create Metrics!  Be sure to track:

o    # of direct mail pieces sent to a list
o   # of phone calls received per campaign
o   # of appointments set per campaign,
o   # of contracts signed per campaign
o   # of deals closed per campaign
o   and most importantly, the amount of profit per deal

This way you are able to calculate not only your response rates but also your Return On Investment (ROI). This is crucial and often overlooked, but is an integral part of your business to track if you want to continually generate real estate wholesale leads.

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#3:  Craigslist ( & Other Classifieds)

If you’re short on money, you can start finding motivated sellers (as well as buyers) on Craigslist and some other commonly used classifieds websites. Craigslist is a good example to use. Here’s what to look for:

1) For sale by owner ads: This is the obvious one, but you’ll be surprised how few people regularly scan these listings.  Once in a while, you’ll come a cross a motivated seller and get a great deal that you can flip to another investor.

2) Rental Listings: This will be more hit or miss, however from time to time you will find a landlord who hasn’t been able to rent a property and is more likely to be a motivated seller willing to take an as is cash offer. Although you may need to contact a lot of people before getting a deal, it is a strategy that has worked for many. Just be sure to look for private owners, and not property managers and leasing agents.

Searching both FSBO and Rental listings on craigslist and other classified can help you generate real estate wholesale leads

Pro- Tip:  You are able to post in various sections of Craigslist, just be sure your post is in an appropriate section, with your contact information so people know you are someone someone that buys houses for cash.  This way if sellers are looking to sell their homes, and come across your ad, they will reach out to you.

#4: Bandit Signs

At one point, bandit signs were the foundation of the wholesaling industry and was the go-to method to generate real estate wholesale leads. The idea behind a bandit sign is pretty simple – You put a sign up with your phone number along with something like “We Buy Houses For Cash” or “John Buys Houses” (not your business name). When someone sees your sign that has a property to sell they’ll call you. Pretty Simple.

SEO is Fluid. A proper SEO campaign takes 2-3 months to start seeing results, and requires continually optimizing your keywords, page content, blog posts, analysis of competitor websites, proper page title headings and sub-headings, meta tag descriptions, alt text descriptions, backlinks, internal links, external links, and a number of other techniques. to help you generate real estate wholesale leads.

Similar to Ringless Voicemail, Voice Broadcast is a go-to marketing method to generate real estate wholesale leads for a few reasons:

1. It’s Cheap(er) than Ringless Voicemail. Voice broadcasts are billed by the minute (or fractions of a minute), not by the message. Therefore, if your message is short, or less than a minute, your broadcast will be billed accordingly, and each message may only cost you fraction(s) of a penny to send. Imagine sending 10k messages, for only $50-100 or less!?
2. Its Effective. You can reach hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people per day, or even per hour. The more people you reach with your message, the more opportunities you have to generate real estate wholesale leads

Pro- Tip:  When sending a Press 1 voice broadcast campaign to generate real estate wholesale leads, do not transfer them directly to your cell phone. Instead, transfer them to a tracking number with a menu which offers a bit more information than your initial voice message, along with the option to transfer to a live person, leave a message, or once again to opt out. This extra steps weeds out a lot of the time consuming calls with people who may not actually be interested, or just pressed 1 to complain, or didn’t listen to the whole message. It also ensures that people who do this, and choose to speak with you and/or leave a message are more motivated “warm” seller leads.