Let’s be honest. Out of 100 real estate leads, only a handful of those will ultimately end up yielding revenue.
There are only so many hours in a day, and you really should be prioritizing the most promising leads. This way, you and your team will save time, increase conversion rates, and find the best leads before your competitors do.
Below is the definitive guide to real estate lead qualification. We’ll cover what lead qualification is, essential lead qualification tips, and provide a free checklist for your real estate company to use.
What is Lead Qualification?
Simply put, lead qualification is the systematic process in which you gather information on your leads to see how willing they are to convert. To gather information, data from sign-ups, forms, quizzes, and so on, can be used.
Leads that you find are willing and financially able to convert would then be labeled qualified leads.
Depending on how you choose to qualify your leads, you’ll need to ask questions relevant to your qualification system. Being such, you’ll want to establish specific goals and buyer personas before creating your qualification system.
Why is it important to make the distinction between qualified and regular leads?
Qualified leads are more likely to yield conversions, meaning that it is in your best interest to dedicate more time to them. Lead qualification allows you to create a lead hierarchy, which will organize which leads to pursue first and weed out leads that are not a good fit.
4 Tips for Real Estate Lead Qualification
To get the most out of your real estate lead qualification process, we’ve compiled four essential tips that aim to make lead qualification smoother and more efficient for your business.
1. Use an Automated Lead Qualification System
Ineffective strategies are hard to pull off and unnecessarily consume time and energy. Automated lead qualification can make your lead qualification system more effective. Provided that you ask the right questions and have touch-points established, automation can qualify and categorize leads without you needing to lift a finger.
Automation promotes shorter response times too. Shorter response times can reduce bounce-rates, better nurture leads, and keep your name “hot” to clients.
2. Create an Ideal Customer Profile
If a business doesn’t understand the characteristics of their best customers — it’s going to be hard to attract more of them. It is imperative to take time to create an ideal customer profile, and should be as specific as possible.
Your lead qualification is only as good as the data and accuracy of your system. An ideal customer profile gives you a clear picture on what exactly makes a lead qualified. Without creating an ideal customer profile, your “qualified” leads may very well be unqualified.
3. Have a Lead Scoring System
Assessing your leads through a scoring system allows for a quantitative approach that is unbiased and often automated. In lead scoring, simple interactions like sharing a blog, clicking an email, and/or viewing a page will be assigned numerical values. Once a lead exceeds a designated threshold, you’ll be alerted that the lead is ready to move onto the next step in the sales funnel.
Notifications can be automatically sent to your sales team or even the now-qualified lead.
4. Be Persistent and Don't Disqualify Leads Too Early
We’ve talked about focusing on qualified leads to save time, but that doesn’t mean you need to disqualify leads and never look at them again. Save information on leads that don’t pass through your lead qualification system the first time. On future campaigns, you may choose to re-engage with these leads and see better results.
Being persistent, but not “spammy,” will help leads remember you in a positive way. If they need real estate services in the future, you’ll be at the top of their lists.
BANT - The Lead Qualification Checklist
The Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timing (BANT) lead qualification process is simple but fundamental to streamlining how you go about qualifying leads. This section will cover the components of BANT and the vital checklist of questions to ask your leads.
Budget
- Has a budget been set aside for this product?
- Do you have a dedicated budget for new investments?
- How do you typically get approved budgets?
- How much is your current problem causing you?
These questions boil down to the single most important question: Can the lead afford the property? If a lead’s budget does not align with the property’s pricing and they aren’t willing to be flexible/meet your minimum — you’re most likely better off not chasing them. They are probably a dead-end.
Authority
- When was the last time the lead bought/sold property?
- Is there anyone else who should be here to make choices?
- What does the decision-making process look like?
Who is your lead exactly? Are they the primary decision maker in the household, or will they need to consult others for decisions? Ideally, you want your main point of contact to be the primary decision-maker. This decreases back-and-forth relaying redundancies, saving both parties time and energy.
Put another way, if your lead doesn’t have enough authority on the other hand, it’s best to encourage them to bring the primary decision-maker into the conversation. On the other hand, if your lead does have the authority to make decisions, you may still want to ask if they need to consult others beforehand as courtesy. This can help you avoid last minute cancelations, or offer withdrawals.
Needs
- What’s holding your buyers/sellers back?
- Is it location, budget, some other issue?
- How are you tackling these issues?
- Can you provide additional properties for the consideration?
- Can you partner/work with lenders to get better mortgage rates on behalf of your clients?
- What roadblocks, if any, do you anticipate in the future?
- i.e. Potential withdrawing of their offer, looking for another agent, requesting lower commissions, etc...
Once you understand your lead’s pain points, and the solutions they’ve tried/are seeking you’ll have a better idea as to where your offerings stack up. This is where communication will be most vital because if you don’t understand the lead’s needs, or if you don’t think your listings/offerings will solve their problem, you might be wasting time pursuing the lead.
Timing
- Is the need for property sales/purchases timely? Put another way, how urgent is your lead to make a sale and/or purchase?
- New jobs/job loss, imminent foreclosure, and other factors can cause a lead to want to sell/buy quickly
- Is the market hot/cold right now?
- For example, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic property prices began to escalate dramatically. However, in 2022, these prices could level out or even drop just as drastically as they escalated.
- Are you considering other factors that could impact your lead’s time frame?
- i.e. Grade school start dates, timely events such as SuperBowl/Olympics/Political Conventions, holidays, etc...
The above questions will help you determine their time frame for buying/selling property. If their timeline to make a decision will take more than a year, it may be best to pause your pursuit and focus on other leads. You might be able to create a sense of urgency based on timely factors, but this is not always going to work in your favor.
Benefiting From Automated Lead Follow Ups
Hopefully, the ideas in this post help you to better qualify your leads to increase the amount conversions, and therefore revenue, in your company. Want help making your lead qualification process easier?
The answer is automation, and the best tool for automating your lead qualification and follow up processes is Agent Legend. Our program streamlines and simplifies the process while helping your real estate company to maintain its brand voice, personalization, and authenticity.
If you’re ready to save time and money while keeping your lead list organized, and well nurtured, we’re ready to assist. Click here to get started for free.
