If finding seller leads is tricky, finding motivated home seller leads can seem downright impossible. At least, it can seem that way, if you aren’t leveraging a best-in-business seller lead generation tool to meet your transaction goals here and now. Seller lead generation should be an intentional part of your business strategy. We’re breaking down our top, proven tips on how to find motivated seller leads. 

Read how one Realtor generated 700 home seller leads in six months using Sierra Interactive’s PPC campaign management.

Differentiate your approach to find motivated home seller leads

All realtors know home buyer and seller leads are not created equal, so stop marketing to them as though they are one-in-the-same. Use a differentiated approach in your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, SEO efforts and database management to better target seller leads in low inventory markets. Here are some tips how:

• Adjust your expense expectations for PPC and SEO campaigns. There is lower seller lead search volume than buyer lead search volume. Meaning, you should expect your cost-per-lead to be higher.
•  Expand your targeting with PPC and SEO campaigns. Insights in location vary, as seller leads rarely use geographic information (like city names or subdivisions) when searching for information to sell a home.
• Nurture existing contacts. Each customer journey is different. Some sellers are likely already in your database.  

Knowing these facts, it makes sense to use a varied approach when trying to generate quality leads in either category.

Since home seller leads rarely search using geographic information, we recommend using geographic targeting at the county level to reach a large enough audience to support your seller lead PPC campaign. Pro tip: population within your target market can be the key to success here. Whereas buyer lead generation strategies might benefit from keyword specificity of targeted cities or neighborhoods, seller leads make more general searches like, “What is my home worth?” 

Factor in your sphere of influence as a gauge for where, and when, and how to drive your marketing services strategies. Knowing past buyers can become sellers down the line, it’s important to not neglect the leads already in your database. Instead, develop action plans to keep in regular contact and implement automations that can trigger workflows based on lead behavior (like expressing interest in a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) call-to-action you might have included as part of your nurture).

Proactively budget for nurture efforts that keep you front-of-mind (even if the buyer hasn’t yet considered another move). It can be easy to get caught up in generating new seller leads. Don’t let this pipeline of existing contacts in your database go stale.

Tailor your tactics so you’re spending resources on the right leads

Just as buyer and seller leads are different, leads and transaction-ready leads are not always one-in-the-same. Even among those who are ready to sell, timelines vary.

That’s why it is important to use tools early on in your lead generation efforts to correctly categorize potential sellers and prioritize using CRM management tools. Time preference tags, for example, are one way to quickly sort seller leads into different categories based on how soon they are needing to sell.

A real estate website can capture and tag this information for you, automatically sorting leads into different categories that can help determine urgency. For example, 1-3 months would demonstrate a much higher urgency and a transaction-ready lead than a lead interested in selling 12 months out, or even someone who isn’t willing to commit to a timeframe and opts to refrain from submitting this information on your seller site.

Other factors that could impact your prioritization efforts could include lead responsiveness and the quality of the information they’ve submitted. If they’ve supplied a phony email, you have some indication on lead quality. Similarly, if you’re having a hard time getting them on the phone or getting email responses, they may be in “just curious” mode. Once you know details like this, you can filter your leads to better prioritize your efforts.

Our recommended process looks like this: 

1. Reach out to every lead you collect regardless of timeline. We recommend doing this with a phone call — it’s important to establish a relationship immediately, and while emails, texts or automated messages can be effective in a long-game, it’s best to start a relationship with a call. 
2. Root out the leads that are in “just curious” mode, and move them into custom action plans so your services are front-of-mind as they become more transaction-ready. 
3. Once you’ve identified leads on a faster timeline, you can focus your immediate efforts on them. 

How to find motivated real estate seller leads already in your CRM

Lead prioritization isn’t limited to new seller leads. You can (and should) comb your database for seller leads on an ongoing basis. If you have the right tools in place, this doesn’t have to be a manual process.

Use your CRM to track home anniversary dates based on when buyers closed on their last home. Knowing that the average expected length of ownership for a home is 15 years, with some generations skewing even lower, you can strategically estimate when a contact might begin to become motivated to sell. When your contacts are approaching anniversaries, or have surpassed that length of time in a home, you can plan to pop by with a gift or send a note.

Additionally, integrated technology solutions like Revaluate can help you identify likely movers based on recent life changes. Major life changes that can motivate seller leads include death, marital or relationship status changes or job changes. Tools like Revaluate does the work analyzing a lead’s likelihood to move for you, factoring in a mix of government, social, search and spending insights. 

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By combing through your database, you can identify sellers who are extremely likely to convert into deals, without a heavy lift from your busy agents and brokers.

Compare your findings with your available toolkit  

We’ve shared strategies to help you find motivated seller leads. The trick to actually winning seller leads, though, comes down to the tools you’re using to run your business. A full-picture real estate software solution should deliver premium features, without premium prices.

Key attributes of best-in-class real estate software can do these things:

• User-friendly, no-code IDX website templates, with included SEO and landing pages that can be tailored to your individual buyer and seller website domains. This is critical, as your seller lead site should operate independently from your buyer site, without the hassle that might otherwise come from mapping two individual business websites.
• Deliver a sophisticated CRM that can handle lead tagging and routing, a wide variety of follow-up features, reporting and smart filtering. (Plus, built-in integrations to tools that can reevaluate your database).
• Powerful lead generation services, with PPC ads that are proven to deliver quality leads, instead of high volumes of dead-ends.
•  Cost-effectiveness. In real estate, the industry standard is charging 20% of the ad budget for service fees. Knowing seller leads typically cost five times as much as buyer leads or more , it’s important to invest in a software solution that can keep costs low and quality of leads high with no extra service fees that increase your costs.