--- title: "How to Generate Solid Home Buyer and Seller Leads" url: https://burnaze.com/article/c1f675cc-c5d2-40e8-b442-bad550b6b6f7 source: "1851 Franchise" original_url: https://1851franchise.com/how-to-generate-solid-home-buyer-and-seller-leads-2708982 category: "Real estate" industry: "Business Services" segment: "Real estate" published: 2019-01-31T13:08:01.000Z modified: 2026-11-01T04:08:05.271Z image: https://newimage.1851franchise.com/cdn-cgi/image/quality=85,format=webp,width=1280,height=720/story/featureImage/54cf298927dc583c1c326cf2359c58898173.jpg --- # How to Generate Solid Home Buyer and Seller Leads **TL;DR:** Watters International Realty uses multiple channels to generate home buyer and seller leads, including traditional mediums, online portals, and social media platforms. The company's CEO, Chris Watters, emphasizes the importance of integrating lead generation systems with the CRM system to improve efficiency and speed to lead. *originally published in 1851 Franchise on 2019-01-31. [Read the original](https://1851franchise.com/how-to-generate-solid-home-buyer-and-seller-leads-2708982).* ## Story The company has multiple funnels through which it likes to gather leads, according to CEO Chris Watters. “We use some traditional mediums, such as direct mail, radio, television and digital stuff,” Watters said. “We get leads through online portals from advertising our listings. We’re also pumping out content for SEO and running Google AdWords campaigns and retargeting ads.” They even collect data on probate and divorce records, as well as data on homes that have failed to sell by other agents. On a more dynamic scale, Watters International Realty also uses Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and more. There’s also Bing and Yahoo. “We use all of these various funnels,” Watters said. When asked if there are any unreliable sources when it comes to finding leads, Watters simply noted that some funnels have higher success rates than others. “We have so much data that I can tell you what the conversion rates are per lead source and which ones are higher quality,” Watters said. “It’s really a function of how much you’re spending.” The Facebook to Google Adwords costs $25 but conversions are low, he said, usually one to two percent. He noted that one can generate leads on websites such as Trulia and Zillow and the cost per lead is $60 to $120, which is three to five percent per hundred. A “For Sale” sign, Watters said, has the highest conversion of inbound calls, with a conversion of 12 percent, while open houses are a difficult thing to have a sample size to measure. “All leads work,” he said. “It’s about the corresponding conversion rate and how you automate the conversion process to sift through a lower quality of lead sources to help your team.” Some of that automation is already in place at Watters International Realty. The company is using an AI-powered chatbot. “People can correspond with that and ask questions and engage consumers,” Watters said. “The AI chatbot corresponds with people via text message. Someone sends information to inquire on a property and they include their name, phone number, email, etc. and the AI chatbot will text them right away to sift through leads and ask questions. Google and Facebook, for example, have such low conversion rates and people give false information, so this is one way we have really been able to improve the efficiency of the sales team members.” The biggest mistake most people in real estate make, Watters said, is that they have a lot of different systems they use for generating leads and they don’t have them integrated with the CRM system the sales people are using. “They have to then have multiple login credentials to multiple portals,” Watters said. “The challenge with that is it really reduces your speed to lead. A lot of sources will tell you to respond to a lead within five minutes to increase your chance of contact.” To that end, the Watters International Realty team has integration solutions, including a very rare bidirectional integration between popular lead generation platforms and a variety of lead management systems. They have data from auxiliary, with all of the data and lead records being pushed into their CRM. “We’re using a true bi-directional integration so that data comes in real time,” Watters said. “It pushes future corresponding activity records, not just names, emails and phone numbers. For example, Market Snapshot® is a tool real estate professionals use and it sends home value updates about their specific neighborhood. It’s a third party platform that no way before had a way to integrate with an internal CRM system. Bidirectional fixes all that. It sends the lead record and an activity record. For instance, when they go back to the site it sends that action to the core CRM so the salesperson knows that this person just inquired about their neighborhood. Literally99.9 percent of brokerages and team don’t have this in place.” ## Entities - 1851 Franchise (publication) - Business Services (sector) - Facebook (company) - Google (company) - lead generation (topic) - LinkedIn (company) - Yahoo (company) - Pinterest (company) - real estate marketing (topic) - online advertising (topic) - crm integration (topic) --- Originally reported by 1851 Franchise (https://1851franchise.com/how-to-generate-solid-home-buyer-and-seller-leads-2708982). Summarized by Burnaze (https://burnaze.com/article/c1f675cc-c5d2-40e8-b442-bad550b6b6f7).