- Target homeowners with high equity or who are late on payments, landlords with leases about to expire and internet buyer leads. Then leverage people for your prospecting process to ensure that enough calls are being made to generate seller leads consistently.
Seller leads are the lifeblood of any listing business, and the best way to ensure your success as a listing agent is to find reliable sources of these leads. Although this sounds simple enough, it can be a serious challenge.
Even the greenest of agents knows that FSBOs and expired listings are potential sources of seller leads, but experienced agents know that these leads often aren’t worth the effort.
If you really want to get a significant number of listing appointments, you need to work underutilized seller-lead sources. Don’t be afraid to get creative — you might stumble on one of your market’s most lucrative lead sources.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
Homeowners with high equity
Most homeowners don’t know how much their property is worth. By targeting people who bought their homes at the bottom of the market, it’ll be easy to find homeowners with high equity.
Providing free home valuations is a great way to turn cold calls with these homeowners into hot seller leads.
Landlords with soon-to-expire leases
Targeting landlords with soon-to-expire leases is another great way to generate seller leads. To do it, look for homes rented eight to nine months ago.
Get numbers for the owners of these homes and give them a call. You’d be surprised how many landlords are tired of tenant-related headaches and are open to the idea of selling.
Homeowners who are late on payments
Distressed homeowners are often extremely motivated sellers. The problem with this lead source is that getting useful information on these potential sellers can be expensive.
Still, if you manage to get a good return on these potential seller leads, it’s worth it. To purchase them, find a list broker that sells pre-NOD (pre-notice of default) leads.
Internet buyer leads
And don’t forget that many buyers also need to sell their current home. Instead of completely segregating buyer and seller leads, explore buying and selling opportunities with all of your leads.
A few extra questions during your pre-qualification process can easily turn one deal into two.
Leverage people
To generate as many seller leads as possible, prospecting needs to be a major part of your business strategy. Unfortunately, as a busy real estate agent, there are only so many calls you can make per day.
There’s one easy way to solve this problem: leverage people.
By hiring ISAs or outsourcing certain aspects of your prospecting process to a call center, you can ensure that the calls needed to generate more seller leads for your business are being made.
With a steady supply of seller leads coming in, you can focus your energy on setting and closing listing appointments.
Eventually, you might even need to consider scaling your business to handle the number of seller leads you generate!
Pat Hiban is the author of the NYT best-selling book “6 steps to 7 figures: A Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Destiny,” the founder of online real estate sales training site Rebus University, and the host of Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, an agent-to-agent real estate podcast with Hiban Digital in Baltimore, Maryland. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
