What Is the Best Source for Leads in Real Estate?

Last month, we released a white paper on generating new real estate business. We interviewed nearly 400 real estate professionals to find out what works and what doesn't in attracting, converting and closing more real estate business.

This week, we'll take a look at lead generation. Specifically, where the best real estate leads come from. We measured the quality of lead based on what percentage closed. We asked respondents to think through their closed business from 2016 and indicate the source of that business. For this section of our survey, we were less interested in where they spent their marketing budget, and more interested in what produced the best results. We asked them, of the following choices, what percentage of closes came from each source:

• Network / Social Sphere / Referrals
• Digital Leads / Website / Online Lead Generation
• Open House
• Walk-In Traffic
• Purchased Leads
• Other

Overall, respondents said 34 percent of 2016 business came from their network, more than walk-in traffic and open houses combined. Here are the results from the group at large:

Where did new real estate business come from in 2016?

We then segmented our respondents in three categories: real estate agents, brokers/owners, and marketers to see if there was a difference among these three stakeholders. Agents seemed to close more business from their network than any other group, saying more than half of total 2016 business came from their social sphere or referrals. The majority of business for real estate agents came from two sources: network and digital lead generation. Other sources, including purchased leads, did not seem as effective in generating revenue for agents.