How To Get Leads in Real Estate for Free – Phonexa Canada

Oleksandr Rohovnin

Content Marketer

14 minute read

This article is part of our comprehensive guide on real estate lead generation. Check it out for profound insights into how real estate agents, brokers, and companies can acquire paid and free real estate leads.

The ever-growing real estate market in the United States is fertile ground for lead generation, but what if you’re on a budget, unwilling to buy leads for real estate or splurge on paid ads? Are there any safe ways to get real estate leads for free?

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to generate real estate leads at no cost, especially if you aren’t under time pressure. Growing organic traffic channels may take a while, but once you’re there, you’ll have an inexhaustible source of free real estate leads.

Source: GIPHY

Read on to learn how to generate real estate leads for free.

Free Real Estate Lead Generation Explained

As you might already have learned from my solar lead generation guide, there are only three principal ways to acquire leads: generate them using organic traffic channels – your website, blog, social media, referral program, etc. – paid advertising, or buy from lead generators.

And it’s even simpler with free real estate leads for agents, as you can only use earned media in this case. Truth be told, though, these clients will only be free nominally because you will have to spend resources on building your online presence all the same.

Free real estate leads aren’t perfect all around: their quality varies, you need plenty of time to come online, and you can’t ensure your efforts will pay off. However, even one successful blog or viral social media post can multiply your revenues by any factor, driving free real estate lead weeks in bulk months and years forward.

Source: GIPHY

Six Strategies To Get Free Real Estate Leads for Realtors

In free real estate lead generation, anything can be your starting point. For example, if you’re knowledgeable about the local real estate market, you can try engaging on local forums, business networks, and community groups. If you’re a real estate investment expert, you can try generating real estate investor leads on LinkedIn, real estate investment platforms, and so on.

Here are some significant groups of free real estate leads:

It goes without saying that there are way more types of free leads for real estate agents than in the table. Likewise, you can create a custom target group by segmenting your free real estate leads by location, demographics, or previous interactions.

But one question might still be weighing on your mind: how do I get to know my customers?

I’d recommend using lead management software for its speed and accuracy. AI-powered software can identify complex interaction patterns and issue marketable insights into your campaigns.

Here’s how lead management software can unlock free real estate leads for you:

And here’s a similar piece of software for but for inbound phone calls:

Before Everything Else, Create a Unique Selling Proposition

With over 1.5 million real estate agents fighting for customers in the United States, you need something special to set yourself apart: a unique selling proposition (USP) that translates your main competitive advantages and spurs clients to action.

Here’s an example of how to get free real estate leads with a USP:

Now that you have a solid ground to market your services, it’s time to move your failproof free real estate lead sources:

• SEO & blogging
• Social media
• Referral marketing
• Real estate directories
• Email marketing
• Offline marketing

Let’s review all these free client powerhouses in detail, starting from SEO & blogging.

How To Get Free Real Estate Leads with SEO and Blogging

Every marketer knows compelling content only matters if it ranks well in Google, with the only tried-and-true approach to creating such content being SEO optimization. Long story short, SEO is all about choosing the optimal keywords and placing them strategically across your media.

Here’s how to get leads in real estate for free using SEO step-by-step:

And now to examples.

Here’s an insanely competitive keyword for generating free real estate leads online:

The sad part is that ranking high for “real estate” is out of the question for small real estate companies – it’s just too tough a nut to crack. For this keyword, even hitting the top 100 will be a success, albeit with a very low chance of drawing any leads. Not too often do you scroll to the 10th page in SERPs, huh?

Here’s a more realistic yet still difficult keyword:

This one gives you more focus – “cheap real estate” – while cutting the competition by over 50 times. Important: Ahrefs uses a logarithmic scale for the keyword difficulty, which makes “98” almost a hundred times tougher than “40,” not just two times like the linear logic would suggest.

And here’s a realistic one:

“Cheap real estate New York” isn’t a walk in the park either, but it’s good enough to try if you’re a small or medium-sized real estate contractor. Real estate is ultra-competitive, so you might not even find low-difficulty keywords with high volume, especially commercial ones.

How To Get Free Leads for Real Estate Using Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms are extremely powerful for free real estate leads, but building a strong social media presence takes time and effort. It works similarly to blogging: you target your ideal buyer with compelling content, trying to engage them first and then drive them to conversion.

Here’s more about lead generation for real estate agents on social media:

Overall, you should choose a social media platform based on where your ideal free real estate lead dwells, your content creation abilities, and how well your social media strategy fits the bigger picture. For example, YouTube can become your major content hub, Twitter can communicate updates and reflect on industry news, and Pinterest can showcase smaller real estate projects and give DIY advice.

Here’s an example of how to get free real estate leads on Instagram:

The more visually attractive the property, the more you can get from exposing it on Instagram. At the same time, Instagram might not work well with less visually appealing low-budget real estate and the secondary real estate market.

Here’s an example of how to get free real estate leads on TikTok:

@erikconover Part 2 | $54,600,000 Billionaires Row NYC Penthouse full tour, who’s moving in? #newyork #nyc #luxuryrealestate #newyorkcity #realestate #billionaire #architecture ♬ original sound – Erik Van Conover

From small to the biggest offers, every piece of real estate is now on TikTok, so you shouldn’t waste your chance to generate some free real estate leads there. Now, I do understand you’re highly unlikely to sell $50-million-worth apartments, but imagine advertising a beauty like this:

@sara_underwood Reply to @brynnemarieeee Let’s go inside! Cabin by @jacobwitzling and me #cabin #realestate #architecture #tinyhouse #diy ♬ original sound – Sara Underwood

How To Generate Real Estate Leads for Free with Referral Marketing

Once you gain footing in the game, you might want to start a referral campaign. Good thing you already know who your customers are and how to encourage them to attract new leads.

Here’s how to get free leads in real estate through a referral program:

Here’s an example of a referral program to get real estate leads:

Referral marketing is a great way to acquire motivated real estate leads, with some initial trust inspired by their referrer. Likewise, referral marketing is extremely cost-effective for generating free real estate leads without continuous efforts.

How To Get Leads in Real Estate for Free Using Real Estate Directories

There are quite a few platforms where you can expose your brand to get real estate leads for free. Moreover, researching the audience of every such platform might help you cover every target group of leads you’re interested in.

Here are some popular directories to generate leads for real estate at no cost:

Most real estate directories, aggregators, and listings work the same way, so you don’t have to do the same work twice. Once you’ve created a brand portfolio for the first time, you can duplicate it on similar platforms with small adjustments.

How To Get Leads in Real Estate for Free With Email Marketing

With emails being the most trusted communication method for over 90% of customers across all age groups, email marketing is extremely efficient in generating real estate leads for free, especially when you’ve already built a list of buyers. Batch-and-blast emails are no longer a thing – likely to harm you in the long run – so make sure to avoid them at all costs.

Here’s how to generate real estate leads with email campaigns:

Email marketing is extremely competitive – 333 billion emails are sent and received daily worldwide – so winning subscribers’ attention might not be easy. The three toughest challenges with commercial emails are personalization, automation, and performance analysis.

These email marketing priorities might give you a hint on what to focus on:

Source: Statista

How To Get Leads in Real Estate for Free With Offline Marketing

Real estate isn’t abstract – it’s not software or services – so offline marketing is necessary to establish yourself as a serious brand. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; the same good old marketing methods apply, from direct mail to local partnerships to local TV ads.

Get More Free Real Estate Leads With Phonexa

Closing free real estate leads is a big deal, but it’s equally important to analyze them thoroughly as they move down your sales funnel and after they’ve converted or bounced.

Phonexa does both, helping you convert more real estate leads and learn them better as they interact with you across touchpoints. Be they internal clients or clients transferred to an external advertiser, Phonexa’s eight-in-one marketing software suite will help you maximize your performance with every paid and free real estate lead.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

Here are the lead acquisition tools you will get at one price (online price calculator):

Build your plan now, or book a demo to see the platform in more depth.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I get free real estate leads?

The best way to get real estate leads for free is to use your most popular earned media channels while gradually developing the less popular ones. For example, if you need B2B free real estate leads, you might want to focus on SEO-optimized blogging and LinkedIn content.

How much do free real estate leads pay at closing?

It’s hard to estimate the check, but you can proceed from the fact that the average sale price of a new home in the United States is around $500,000 and is constantly growing. The only outliers are the years succeeding a dramatic increase in real estate prices.

Is buying real estate leads worth it?

Buying leads for real estate has numerous advantages: it’s instant, you can choose what leads you want to buy, and you don’t need to conduct marketing campaigns. At the end of the day, though, it’s about whether you pay for real estate leads less than they bring you so you can make profits.

How can I get exclusive real estate leads for free?

You cannot get exclusive real estate leads for free because there’s no way to know whether free real estate leads – clients coming from your blog, search engines, referral program, etc. – are exclusive or not. However, you can buy exclusive real estate leads from lead agencies, networks, and marketplaces that have the tools to evaluate the exclusivity of the leads they sell.