5 Ways Real Estate Investors “Waste” Leads

Real estate investor leads are the lifeblood of our business. Wasting leads costs you lots of money!

“We need more leads!”

This is the cry of almost every real estate investor I know. It happens when our team “runs out” of leads to work. It causes us to worry that our team will be idle and we won’t get enough deals to keep our people gainfully employed.

1. Missed and Unreturned Calls

• Have you ever had a missed call where your phone didn’t ring?
• Have you been in the middle of an appointment and couldn’t answer your phone?
• Do you know if your team is answering and returning every single call?

How many of these questions did you answer yes to? It happens to all of us, especially when our business ramps up.

If you’ve ever used CallRail, you might know that your calls may never even reach your cell phone if the caller didn’t let it ring long enough. You’ll never know about these calls unless you go into CallRail and check the call logs.

Avoid Wasting Leads By Never Missing Calls

The recommended way to avoid wasting these leads is to have a phone system that also reports to your CRM.

CallRail integrated with your Real Estate Investor CRM will allow you to see all of the calls, even if they did not ring your cell phone.

Some CRM’s for Real Estate Investors have built in phone systems to allow you to know about all calls and even listen to recordings of calls and voicemails right there inside the software.

Forefront CRM is one of these. We built Forefront to allow you to use a different local phone number for each of your marketing campaigns to that all calls and texts can be attributed to the proper campaign automatically.

Not only does this allow you to correctly and effortlessly track your marketing results, it allows you to see a log of all calls and texts that have come in AND whether they were addressed by your or someone on your team!

Forefront customers love their Inbox because it shows them all of the calls, texts, and even emails that have come in that have not been addressed yet.

2. Allowing a Seller to “Ghost” You

Sometimes sellers reach out but then go dark every time you try to get back in touch with them. It happens.

But, the big question is, “how many attempts do you make to get in touch with them before quitting?”

It becomes critical to have a way to track these calls from potential sellers until you get ahold of them, especially as you get to generating dozens or hundreds of leads per month.

The easier temptation is to just focus our efforts on generating more leads. It’s easy to assume, “Oh they didn’t want to sell their house. They must not have been motivated.”

The easier temptation is to just focus our efforts on generating more leads. It’s easy to assume, “Oh they didn’t want to sell their house. They must not have been motivated.”

Let your competition operate like that. If you put in the effort to track these calls and have systems and processes in place you’re going to get deals from them.

Guess how many of your competitors are going to still be in the running after you had to make 12 attempts over 2 months to reach a seller that ghosted everyone?

Avoid Wasting Ghosted Seller Leads

The key again here is having systems and processes. If it’s not a documented process, you’re likely not going to follow it very long.

You could have a spreadsheet where you add every phone number that called you that you were unable to get in touch with. You could add columns for the date they initially called, your last attempted date and time, and any other information that’s relevant.

Contact Not Made Page: The Easy Button

Forefront CRM’s Contact Not Made page allows you to easily move leads (as all new calls and texts automatically create a lead record) into a list.

Here you can see the number, caller id, how long you’ve been trying to make contact, when the last contact was made, how many calls, texts, emails you’ve sent.

This is all tracked automatically!

3. Not Properly Qualifying Your Leads

Constantly spending time working with highly unmotivated sellers increases your chances of missing out on the best deals.

If we don’t have a system for qualifying leads, all leads have priority.

Which really means, NO leads have priority.

We need a systematic way to classify leads based on their “deal probability”.

We need a systematic way to classify leads based on their “deal probability”.

Here are some deal qualifiers to consider how likely a lead is to become a deal:

• Is the house vacant?
• Does the seller have a good reason to sell?
• Is the asking price less than the Zestimate?
• Does the house need repairs?
• Is there urgency to close?
• Is the seller not interested in listing with an agent?

If you track the answers to these questions per lead, you have a system for ranking which leads are more likely to become a deal.

Stop wasting your time working with unmotivated sellers!

With this data, you can focus more of your efforts on the leads with good deal probability!

Track Deal Probability Effortlessly

With Forefront, you have a gauge to graphically represent deal probability based on your answers to each of the above questions.

It doesn’t get any easier than this!

4. Not Following Up Long Enough

We all know “The Fortune is in the Follow Up”.

Even armed with this knowledge, we fail to consistently follow up with motivated sellers.

Why?

After talking to hundreds of real estate investors during our bi-weekly Q&A calls for Forefront CRM, I’ve had the opportunity to ask, “Why not?”.

The consensus is:

1. Takes too much time and busy working new leads
2. Following up (especially automated follow up) comes across as sales-y and pushy

With these beliefs, it’s no wonder we don’t consistently follow up.

The Key To Successful Follow Up

In our Ultimate Guide to Follow Up for Real Estate Investors, we went into great detail about what makes for successful follow up that vastly maximizes your deals.

To summarize, follow up works when you see it as simply STAYING TOP OF MIND for sellers. You do this by keeping in touch regularly, just letting them know you are still interested. That’s it!

Of course, there’s the problem of not having enough time for proper follow up. This problem is really an issue of not having organization and processes in place.

Forefront allows you to create follow up sequences that keep in touch with sellers for months and years for you.

One of the greatest benefits to having your follow up run by Forefront’s automations, is that you can tweak your messaging over time based on how people respond to your messages.

If you notice that you get people responding to a particular message in your sequence with anger, you can go in and change that message!

Over time you will dial in your messaging.

This is impossible if you are just winging follow up!

Here’s what a sequence in Forefront looks like.

5. Not Reactivating Old Leads

There’s gold in dem there hills! More accurately, there is gold in your old leads.

Old lead reactivation is one of the tools top real estate investors and wholesalers use to prospect their own database.

This helps them do roughly 60% to 80% more deals per year.

Old lead reactivation helps real estate investors do roughly 60% to 80% more deals per year.

Danny Johnson – Forefront CRM

If you pass on leads that don’t seem motivated or make an offer and then follow up for a couple days and let the lead die, you’re missing out.

Time has a way of motivating people. This is because the only constant in the universe is CHANGE. Things change. Circumstances change.

Even property values change.

Maybe they owed too much when they first reached out to you. If the market went up and they paid more down, it could now be a doable deal.

What if the tenants they put in the house when they decided not to sell to you, ended up destroying the place and stopped paying rent?

Reactivating Old Leads Easily

Reactivating old leads has never been easier.

Forefront CRM has created a page dedicated to follow up with leads that have gone ‘stale’. This means they may have gone through all of your automated follow up sequences and now have moved to manual follow up. Basically, nothing is going to happen with them unless you reach out.

Here you can quickly and easily see the timeline of messages they’ve received, the deal probability from earlier, the numbers from your analysis, notes left by you and your team, everything!

This will allow you to quickly determine context and reach out to see if a deal is now possible.

How cool is that!

How to Avoid Wasting Leads Ever Again

Having systems and process in place to ensure all 5 of these areas are covered at all times is critical to being a successful real estate investor and wholesaler.

Having a real estate investor CRM to make these processes easy to perform by you and your team is how you ensure it actually happens.

Wasting leads costs you lots of money!

Time to stop wasting leads. Time to turn more of the leads you have already generated into deals!

Click here to check out a demo of Forefront CRM to see why so many investors love it’s ease of use.

Wholesaling houses? Forefront CRM for wholesaling real estate is perfect for you. This is because, as a wholesaler, you need higher lead volume. Manage those leads in a way to turn more of them into deals with Forefront.