What the Heck Is Lead Generation, Anyway?

For many investors, new and experienced alike, deciding which lead generation source is the best option can be a daunting task. There are a few ways to simplify the process and bypass unnecessary headaches.

The process begins with a clear understanding of the following:

1. Exactly what lead generation is (and is not)
2. How to efficiently use lead generation for cherry picking or pinpointing the best opportunities available, according to an investor’s preferred investing strategy
3. The different ways in which lead generation can be used within a deal—from start to finish

Educating yourself about these three concepts is necessary for streamlining your day-to-day business practices and successfully completing deals.

What Is Lead Generation?

Let’s start by getting down to what lead generation is and why you need it for your investing business. Lead generation is simply the action or process of identifying potential customers for a business’s products or services. In the business of real estate investing, customers fall into one of two main categories:

1. Properties for acquiring, by using one of several investing strategies (sellers)
2. Buyers, either individuals who will purchase or lease option properties to live in or investors you can pass properties on to via wholesaling or other investing strategies

Although it is certainly possible, investment properties won’t for the most part be found listed for sale with a real estate agent. This is because listed properties generally have less room for investors to profit.

So how, as an investor, do you find available properties if they’re not listed for sale? This is where the nuances of lead generation come into play.

Pinpointing Profitable Opportunities

Much like the gold prospectors of old, your job is to filter down and sift through situations with the potential for profit in order to hit paydirt. Back in the “old days” of real estate investing, this was a time-consuming task that involved driving around looking for unlisted vacant or distressed properties, and then heading down to the local county tax assessor’s office to glean information about each property. Property characteristics, the current owner, and their most recent tax bill address was the most information investors could expect. The next step was an old-fashioned search for phone info, sending a letter or postcard, and then hoping for a return call from the owner.

With the internet, most county assessor records became available online, but vital information for determining whether a property even had potential for profit before contacting the owner was just not available. This made “blanket (mass) marketing” a costly, time-consuming, but necessary part of everyday business practices. Once a prospective deal was in place, investors were tasked with finding a buyer for the newly acquired property.

With the advent of real estate investing software, a completely opposite situation is now the case. Investors have access to almost all the information needed to determine the potential for a deal, with a seemingly endless supply of data available right at their fingertips. Everything from property characteristics, owner contact points, mortgage info, estimated values, and area statistics can be found within the platforms of big player software companies. What sets these companies apart from one another is how this mass of data is translated into useful tools for the investor.

Let’s go back and look at what lead generation is not.

This is a key point to understand It is something past investors faced just as often as today’s investors do—and every investor in the future will. Lead generation has come a long way and will continue to make advancements as time goes on, but one thing it won’t ever be able to provide is the ability to predetermine the individual situation of a seller to guarantee that a deal will go through. There is just no way around reaching out to potential sellers and hearing a few of those dreaded “no thank you” answers before you get to the “tell me more” replies. For this reason, target marketing will always be one of the most important instruments in your toolbox.

Here’s the bright side:

Good lead generation can identify properties with the highest potential for profit, and great lead generation can pinpoint properties that match your specific search criteria—whether you’re filtering by current LTV ratio, estimated value, estimated equity, or tax value. Most will also have at least some form of lead generation for finding prospective buyers or turnover investors to pass the deal on to.

The best lead generation software takes it a step further.

REIPro—Working Through a Deal from Start to Finish

REIPro’s new intuitive lead generation is like nothing you’ve ever seen—but always wanted. Their newly redesigned LEADPro caters even more to the individual investor by offering some exciting new pinpointing features.

Users now have the option to search by strategy, using predefined filters that narrow down the best possible leads for lease option, seller finance, wholesale, rehabbing, and pre-foreclosure investing. This feature is fantastic for new investors who want to take the guesswork out of “reading the signs” for a good deal.

The Target Mapping feature allows you to filter down property criteria and then free-flow draw multiple shapes around areas across the country or within an area. These can be as detailed as a particular side of the street to creating lists for marketing only to the properties that match your preferred investing strategies.

Perhaps the most exciting feature of Target Mapping for investors who work most often within a particular city is the ability to filter by school district or subdivision. This allows investors to market only to particular areas they know to be hot spots for potential buyers.

These advanced lead generation capabilities assist investors in reducing the number of unqualified leads they market to, saving both time and money by stretching precious marketing dollars. LEADPro is also equipped with the ability to search nationwide for quality prospective buyers and turnover investors so investors can quickly move on to the next deal.

In addition, REIPro’s unmatched 10 Executable Steps workflow system and comprehensive marketing library walks users through the entire deal process from start to finish, providing excellent education along the way, to help investors stay on track with turning leads into deals and deals into dollars.

In a busy, highly competitive field, it’s vital to have a real estate investing software you can trust to provide the best tools for your business, and that’s what really sets REIPro apart from the pack. It’s the only real estate investing software inspired by, designed, and continuously improved by actual, in-the-trenches real estate investors who know what’s needed, what’s not, and how it should perform.

To read more about the REIPro story, head over to myreipro.com and learn how they’re working to streamline your path to real estate investing success every day.

Suni Goff’s passion for real estate remodeling design and talent for insightful, well-researched writing are the cornerstones of a prolific, successful career spanning 20 years in the real estate marketing and rehabbing world, as well as ghostwriting numerous professional articles, educational programs, and books for 11 best-selling authors.