Real Estate Leads 101: Detective, Realtor, Same Thing!

Following up with real estate leads isn't easy. Wait. Let me rephrase that. Following up with real estate leads IS easy, but it can be very time consuming. When you receive leads from online sources, such as a lead generation service or your own website, following up can be time consuming. There's not much you can do about it. However, bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of commissions each year can sure go a long way to making persistent follow up with your real estate leads WELL worth the time.

The first and most important thing to do with your real estate leads is what I like to call the detective stage. Let's be honest: how often is the information submitted by a consumer online 100% correct – a real name, phone number, email and address. The answer? Pretty rarely. Consumers will often be misleading in at least one piece of information when filling out contact forms. Often, it is the phone number, because they have no idea who is getting the information on the other end and what it will be used for.

This can be a pain for agents when it's time to follow up with your real estate leads. To avoid frustration with running into bad numbers, or fake names when doing weekly follow up calls, it's important to do a bit of detective work with your real estate leads before jumping right in to the contact stage. I've seen so many agents just trash a lead and not bother to follow up because the name of the lead was something like 'John Smith.' So the name may be wrong, so what? You still need to work it!

Read through your real estate leads carefully. Some may have given the address of a property they're interested in buying, not their current residence. The first step is determining whether the lead is a potential buyer or seller, and most contact forms the homeowner would fill out will have some kind of option to show if they are a buyer or seller.

The next step is running your real estate leads through a public directory site such as Whitepages.com or 411.com. These sites are basically a giant white pages online and will allow you to do reverse name, address and phone lookups. Search for the address first, and see if the name and phone listed in white pages for that address matches the lead name and number submitted. If they all match, great, you have an easy time of contacting them. If the number doesn't match, then you definitely want to note the phone number listed in the white pages, it may be an alternate contact number. If neither the name or number match what is listed in the white pages, then document the contact information found in the white pages along with the information from the lead's form. Then, when you start actually contacting your real estate leads, try BOTH names and number to determine who actually submitted their information as a lead.

Once you've looked up the address, go ahead and do the same with the name and the phone number and document all information you can get from white pages and include it with the original lead information. If you do this for say, 50 real estate leads, you will most likely wind up with quite a bit of alternate contact information.

Your next step should be checking the old tax records of each address in your real estate leads, another method of double checking that the person who submitted the lead is the same as the person who actually lives at the property. If they are not the same, start looking up information of the person listed on the old tax records! You should also check the MLS for each address, to make sure the home isn't already listed. You may even want to go and get directions to each property, just to have them in case you get the opportunity to drop by the home with information.

Once you have exhausted all avenues of double checking your real estate leads contact information, you are ready to move on to the most important stage of follow up: getting in contact with the lead. Thanks to your look ups, you should have tons of contact information to connect with your real estate leads – use it all. Phone numbers, emails, stopping by the property – persistent and consistent follow up is the main component to having success with your real estate leads.