Organizing Your Real Estate Leads

Any real estate agent, whether seasoned or new to the industry, can attest that effectively organizing leads is a crucial component of your success. It is not only important to get leads but, organizing your real estate leads will push your business to the next level. Simply put, without leads, you have no business. A well-organized database is critical factor to your productivity. Your organized database will help you with lead conversion as it allows you to market your contacts in the best way. Whereas with an unorganized database, you may not know where your lead is in the process.

You will be using tools to manage your leads. Even with these tools, you need to understand how to classify them. There are several ways to organize a database and here are some tips to get you started.

Start small.

You may organize your database based on the key relationships you have in your business. Create those groups add as much contacts into one or more of those groups. You can grow from there. Note that the more categories you add or too detailed, the database becomes hard to maintain.

Use broad categories in your key relationships

A good place to begin is to think about your relationship to the lead. Categorizing them may just depend on what their needs are. It makes marketing a to them a lot easier. You can use these broad categories first:

• seller leads
• buyer leads
• past clients
• current clients
• referrals

Divide groups based on your level of contact

These categories can help you further identify your leads.

• New to your list
• You have met
• You haven’t met with

By examining your database, you may see that you have plenty of contacts that you don’t know yet. These may be people you have connected with at an open house or internet leads that you may need to reconnect with. As for brand new leads, you need to nurture these contacts to convert them.

Categorize based on their behavior and actions

For easier real estate lead management, you can add labels to your contacts in your CRM. Categorize your contact based on their intent level and engagement. Track how many of your emails were opened, if they are clicking on your website, if they are responding to your texts. Someone who has questions on how to prepare his property and has a firm timeline may be more engaged and has a higher level of intent to do business with you. Understanding your lead’s behavior will support you in the style of messaging or marketing you should use.

Other ways to categorize your leads:

• Based on source (e.g. Facebook leads, call, email, someone who may have downloaded an e-book from your website)
• Based on need or property type (e.g. single-family residential, condo, land, commercial, buying or renting)
• Based on location (e.g. neighborhood or areas where lead is interested in)
• Based on qualifications (e.g. lead has taken steps to be pre-approved for a home or just window shopping)

However you plan to organize your lead database in your CRM, it is important to remember that relationship management is vital for real estate lead management.