The 6 Best Lead Generation Companies that ACTUALLY WORK.

Christian Hadley
7 min readJun 7, 2021

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Lead generation software helps real estate agents find clients and close deals. Using lead generation companies, agents are able to find both buyers and sellers that live in certain areas, have certain interests, or are looking for certain types of properties.

In addition to the number, type, and quality of leads produced, our choices were based on features offered, pricing, and reviews from real estate professionals and other customers. Here are the best real estate lead generation companies to help you grow your business.

1-Zip Titan

I like ZipTitan. To put it simply, they handle Google Ads using over 200 landing pages to capture the leads they send you. They DO NOT give you access to their ads as they have a marketing team devoted to getting you the best results. They do give you access to the information they gathered on their landing pages, which they send with the lead. Their website advertises that their leads are exclusive and this is embedded into the core of their system, up to the point where you can share a zip code with other agents, but never share leads, this is their cornerstone and what sets them apart from other services. They state that they use an algorithm to run various ads and select those with the best performance to attract traffic to their landing pages. My gut says that it’s not really their own proprietary algorithm, but really them just using the insight of Google’s own algorithms. Either way, they get leads.

I’ve advertised on Google for years, and I’ve become quite proficient at it. Their ads have a better conversion rate than my ads, and trust me, I’m good at it. They are a Seller focused service, so if you want to deal with sellers only, it might be a good place to start.

Their service has no fixed cost. You select which zip code you want to claim, and set how much you want to spend on a monthly basis, starting at $200.

Here are the benefits:

1-You don’t have to learn Google Ads.

2-You don’t have to learn how to create landing pages.

3-It is month to month, so you do not need to sign a contract.

It is up to you to weigh whether you want to pay their team or someone to run ads for you. Fortunately for me, I learned Google Ads and can advertise in any zip I want . Sorry. Not sorry.

You can sign up on their site directly: www.ziptitan.com

Use promo code : TITANS10 to get a 10% discount on each zip code you claim when paying $300 or more.

2-Bold Leads

Bold Leads was founded in Chandler, Arizona, and is a family-run business. It works with over 2,500 Realtors across the U.S. and Canada. The company offers a vast array of features for producing buyer and seller leads. It also offers comprehensive customer support and training, so you can get to know the system and get up and running quickly. Bold Leads provides leads, and it even limits the number of agents in a specific territory. It places ad campaigns on platforms such as Google and Facebook and then draws customers who click on the ads to customized real estate websites where they provide their contact information, which then gets sent to the agent in that area. You can contact and organize your new leads from the built-in CRM.

Bold Leads features include:

-Buyer and seller leads

-Text concierge and email templates

-Lead engagement indicator tools

Bold Lead’s cost is $399 per month to create and manage ads and use the CRM. The company recommends an additional $250 per month minimum to be spent on purchasing leads. Generally, reviews indicate that customers are satisfied with the company and like its lead system. However, some customers said it’s difficult to cancel and found some buyer and seller leads to be poor quality.

Check their website at : www.boldleads.com

3. Zillow

Since it became an ibuyer it has been receiving some critics from the real estate community not only because of this but other reasons as well like placing it’s own listings of Zillow owned properties at higher placement than listings fed by Real Estate Agents and buying a Mortgage Company, Regardless of how you feel, Zillow gets a ton of traffic and as a result, a ton of leads.

Zillow utilizes a concierge-ish system whereby it connects the consumer directly to the agent who subscribes for their leads. This is huge because half the battle with online leads is getting a hold of the consumer, and being connected immediately is a major advantage. This however, doesn’t stop Zillow from providing the lead to other agents even though they may not cop to this. So even if you are connected directly to the interested party, don’t assume that the lead is only yours. Never. Make. This. Mistake.

Included in your package is Zillow’s own CRM. It does pretty much what any other CRM does: sends out emails, and home value updates. If you don’t know my position on this, I will state it now: never build a business on someone else’s platform. It’s one thing to buy leads from Zillow, but it’s another to upload your whole database into their CRM and use that exclusively. If Zillow one day decides to ditch the CRM you’ll be in a world of trouble.

Go to: www.zillow.com to start your journey with them.

4. Realtor

Realtor.com is one of the most visited real estate websites in the United States, and sells advertising and leads to agents willing to pay for it through their lead program called “Connections Plus”. They also have referral/pay-at-closing models with select brokerages via their acquisition of OpCity.

Realtor.com is significantly behind Zillow in search traffic, especially when considering Zillow also owns Trulia.But they are still a top 3 online destination for home buyers. That is a lot of people and search volume.Because their zips are also not all exclusive, there are opportunities for a quick draw agent to get in and scale up quickly.If you aren’t an exclusive real estate agent, your buyer leads get sent to multiple agents at a time. May the best man or woman win!

That can get tough. Plus would-be-customers are often irritated because they’ve had several agents call them.Being an exclusive agent for a zip code is nice, but tough and expensive. Most zip codes are bought, so you’ll have to wait for the good ones. Be sure to wait for the good ones! Settling on a zip code you don’t want to be working in or with the wrong prices for your business will not be worth it.

Sign up for Realtor at: www.realtor.com

5. SmartZip

SmartZip is a real estate lead generation service that uses predictive analytics and big data to supposedly identify homeowners most likely to sell. SmartZip is a tech company, but its techniques are old-fashioned, often using direct mail in addition to digital marketing to target these homeowners. They call this program SmartTargeting.

Here is where I do see the value in their process, in addition to telling you who they think will sell based on their algorithm, they also mail out postcards branded on your behalf to the geographic areas you select. These postcards have unique identification codes on them that prompt the prospect to go to a computer and enter that code for information on their house value. Once they do this, you are immediately alerted and now have an idea of who’s got selling on the brain.

Exclusivity is not super important to me personally, but it is to some brokers on some issues. SmartZips’ SmartTargeting program was originally exclusive, but a few years ago moved to a non-exclusive model. SmartZip does come with a one year contract and because they send mails it can get a little expensive.

Check them out here: www.smartzip.com

6-Offrs

Offrs is a lead generation company that focuses ONLY on sellers. They too claim that they have online triggers that can predict who is going to sell or not, and they have existing relationships with online portals that provide instant home valuations, ala Zillow. When I pressed them for details on who these online providers were, they conveniently told me that they NDAs and couldn’t divulge who the relationship was with. My instinct tells me that they buy seller leads from Zillow too and then resell them to you. I was quoted a fee of $300.00 for an entire territory in a zip code and that I could expect about 25–30 SHARED seller leads per month.

They too have a CRM as do all the rest. Bottom line, these are shared seller leads. The name of the game is getting a hold of the seller. In many cases all you will have is an address. It will then be up to you to do what you have to do to get a hold of the client. Use everything at your disposal: snail mail, e-mail, white pages, social media, and good old fashioned door knocking.

Last but not least, become an Offrs agent: offrs.com

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Christian Hadley

Published Marketing Exec. Career Coach featured in Fast Co, Business Insider, Inc. I build brands & tell stories. Writing for today’s knowledge economy.