As a real estate investor, you know how important leads are. In fact, they’re the lifeblood that makes sure you keep on investing and generate revenue. But where do you get your leads? Sure, you’ll get some through word of mouth or sellers you’ve worked with before, but this is hardly consistent.
Remember, by investing in real estate, you’re an entrepreneur and, like any entrepreneur you need a constant source of leads. You want motivated sellers to come to you, eager to sell and give you the stock that keeps your business growing and helps you make more money. This is the core of any real estate investing business.
Now, the single best way to generate consistent real estate investing leads is by building a lead generation website with a fully-featured website builder. These real estate investors websites attract leads through various channels, from PPC advertising, to social media, and direct mail. As a bonus, they’re affordable too, so they won’t break the bank…especially considering how an effective real estate investor website makes it easy to scale your business.
The problem is there are so many to choose from that it makes it difficult to choose. So, what is the best website builder for real estate investors? Where should you start looking and what are some of the things you should look at, not only when starting one, but also when optimizing them? Luckily, we’re here to help. We’ll show you some of the best platforms in the business and some tips to making to best use of those platforms.
Granted, you could build a real estate website on any of the available real estate investing website builders out there and use that. We certainly don’t recommend that as your real estate investing website needs some industry-specific features that these builders don’t offer. So, you’re first step is to find a real estate investing website platform that you can use.
But, before looking at the various platforms you could use, you need to know what to look for when picking a platform. In other words, what prominent features should it have to make it work for you.
You could build pages from scratch with all the features and content you want but we almost always recommend against it. Why? It’s simple. It’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time, which you could rather spend building your business and increasing your profits.
So, we always recommend that the platform you choose have templates, and lots of them. With millions of sites out there, you want your site to stand out and not look the same as other sites. As you’ll see later on, being unique helps you in your Google rankings.
To stand out further, it’s also important that the template you choose be customizable. You should be able to choose the fonts, colors, layout, and more to make your website your own.
There’s no use in people visiting your real estate investing site without a way in which you could collect their information for you to follow up on. That’s why lead forms are important and why your website should have at least one.
You could have your lead form in one place or, like we advise, include a button that visitors can click to open the contact form from any of your pages.
What’s something of value you can offer to your visitors that other real estate investor websites can’t? This can be anything from a downloadable guide to a free valuation report that your visitors get in return for their contact information.
These lead magnets are an essential feature for any real estate investor website, and they attract targeted online leads to your website.
How do you get visitors to your lead magnets? With squeeze pages. These pages narrow the sales funnel, taking your visitors into a limited portal where their only choice is to give their information and get the lead magnet you’re offering. Once you have their information, you’ll send them the guide or valuation report their after and you’ll be to take them further down your funnel with the ultimate goal of making an offer on their property.
It’s thus important that the platform allows you to create squeeze pages to take visitors to your magnets and get more leads.
Not every page on your real estate investing site needs to be a squeeze page, so you’ll also want to create landing pages. With these pages you can target specific parts of your audience. So, for instance, your site might have general information, but your landing pages will target sellers in specific cities or regions. Make sure to customize your pages to reflect the tastes and sensibilities of your local real estate market.
This makes your page rank better in search results because you use specific keywords that aren’t necessarily linked to your main page. And a better ranking means more views, more traffic and more leads.
While it’s a bit outside the scope of this article, landing pages are also critical tools if you are using PPC ads to promote your real estate business. (If you want to know more about PPC for real estate investors, check out our complete guide here).
Live chat (or “chatbots”) can be a great way to engage with visitors to you real estate investing website.
Motivated sellers are often intimidated by the prospect of a phone call with real estate investors (for some reason, real estate investors seem scarier than real estate agents to most people!)
Chatbots (as well as email and text) give them different options for engaging with you and getting an offer on their property. Chat is also easy to use, and a great way to get prospects started.
We’ve written an entire article on using chatbots on a real estate website, so check that out if you’re curious.
So, now you’ve got your leads through the lead forms, lead magnets, squeeze, and landing pages. Now, you’ll want to manage and nurture those leads. That’s why we always recommend that you use a customer relationship manager and why the platform should offer one or allow you to integrate with one.
Without it, it would be difficult to keep all your lead information organized and accessible. It also allows you to send out targeted content and offers to your leads that makes nurturing them easy.
Now that you know what features to look for, let’s look at some of the best platforms you can consider for your website builder. Although we’ll point you to some of the popular players in the market, remember that it’s always worth your while to read some real estate investor website reviews to help you make your decision.
SEO (or search engine optimization) is absolutely critical for all real estate investors. After all, ranking well in Google is one way for motivated sellers to find you.
We’ve already written an in-depth guide to SEO for real estate investors, so I won’t belabor the point here. Needless to say, having a solid foundation for your SEO is a must if you are serious about promoting your real estate business online.
REI Blackbook prides itself on supplying real estate investing websites, software, education, and community to help investors grow their businesses. With their web-based platform you can streamline all your processes, find, and analyze deals, and track every part of your business.
(Full disclosure: I am a huge fan of the REI Blackbook team and product. I’ve taught seminars for them and referred several clients to them. If you’re looking not just for a website, but need a fully featured CRM and automation platform that can do everything from RVM to driving for dollars, this is a great option).
To do this, it features:
· Lead capture real estate investor websites. By offering proven pre-built website templates, you can easily convert real estate investor website visitors into leads. Any leads captured through your site is also automatically sent to your CRM and followed up which makes lead management easier.
· Contact management. Its CRM helps you identify new leads and manage existing ones. You can stay in contact, track conversations, and follow up all from one place.
· Call tracking. The Profit Dial mobile app allows you to use unique phone numbers for your campaigns to track each contact and know exactly where your leads are coming from. From here, you’ll be able to see what’s working marketing wise and what’s not and adapt your marketing efforts.
· Automated workflows. This feature takes the hassle out of follow-up. It triggers personalized follow-up campaigns when your leads complete a form on the website, text a keyword, or click a link in an email. You can also create follow-up campaigns with automated text messages, ringless voicemails, emails, and more.
(For more on the use of automation in real estate investing, check out the interview I did with Dan Schwartz on the REI Marketing Nerds podcast!)
· Team and task management. You can manage your entire team, create notifications, and assign tasks to team members. This frees up time and allows you to focus on implementing and managing your systems.
· Property analysis. Easily analyze your properties from one place to make sure you’re only buying those that will make you the most money. The available property analysis tools make it easy for you to make the most informed investment decisions.
· Property marketing. With the property marketing engine, you simply add your photos, write a description, and with the push of a button it’s marketed on your website and the top 3rd party property sites.
· Property finder. Recruit, educate, and motivate property finders to submit deals constantly.
· Facebook ads integration. Easily capture leads from Facebook ads and send them directly to your CRM where you can trigger personalized follow up on every lead.
Best Features: REI Blackbook’s best features are the Profit Dial mobile app and the automated workflows it offers.
Pricing: Prices range from $81 / month for its Solopreneur plan to $248 / month for its Accelerator plan. These amounts are billed annually and there’s also a $997 license fee.
Carrot is one of the largest real estate investor platforms on the market today and has been featured on the Inc. 5000 list. It also has a 5-star rating on Facebook Reviews. Its platform provides all the tools to make real estate business perform better and have a higher return on investment.
(Full disclosure: we’re a Carrot partner. I have both used their products extensively, and referred my clients to them – they’re a great option if you’re looking for something quick and done for you.)
Some of its features include:
· Website templates. Carrot’s templates are built with performance and conversion in mind. Their templates make it easy to build high-performing real estate investor websites for every type of business and are optimized for both desktop and mobile devices. You’re also able to customize the templates with a drag and drop editor that makes designing your unique website a seamless experience.
· Marketing optimization. Not everyone has the experience, tools, or time to develop a solid online marketing strategy and Carrot knows this. For this reason it provides a full suite of tools to improve your marketing that incorporates an SEO tool, keyword tracking, automated blogs, social media sharing, a landing page builder, and other time-saving marketing tools. These tools allow you to build a content marketing strategy that ranks well and gets more leads.
· CRM Integrations. The platform makes it easy to manage your leads and push them to a CRM through CRM integrations with Zapier. It also provides analytics that let’s you see exactly where your leads are coming from and which sites are performing best.
· Training and Support. It has an entire team of product and real estate experts on hand to help with coaching and strategy reviews, whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro.
· Carrot Marketplace. As an add-on, it also offers services to further build your business. These include marketing and strategy outsourcing, site personalization and optimization services, and coaching partners.
Best Feature: We believe Carrot’s best features are the marketing tools and the Carrot Marketplace that gives you everything you need to ensure more success.
Pricing: Pricing ranges from $69 per month for its Core package to $199 per month for its Advanced Marketer package. When billed annually prices range from $55 per month for the Core and $159 per month for the Advanced Marketer.
Investorpro’s real estate investing websites are designed by successful real estate investors and built specifically for real estate businesses. By using the experience they gained in their own real estate investing businesses, the creators are perfectly poised to help you build long term wealth through your business.
Some of the features they offer:
· Website. Although it features website templates, unlike the earlier platforms we mentioned, here the setup and maintenance of the website is done by their inhouse team of developers. That being said, the websites offer custom domains and personalized email addresses. They also offer free “Ask the Expert” and “Earn Extra Cash” pages where you can get more leads.
· Autoresponder. The free autoresponder makes sending personalized follow-up messages to your leads easy.
· Backoffice Pro. With this feature you can manage and track your leads easily. Once a lead comes in, it is automatically recorded and you can access it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It also makes communications easier and tracks all communications with your leads. From here you can also manage your property listings on your site and share your listings on social media sites.
Best Features: We believe Investorpro’s best features is their website designs that are underpinned by years of real estate investing experience.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $39 per month for the Bronze plan with the top of the range Gold plan coming in at $59 per month. Irrespective of plan, there’s a setup fee of $95.
Leadpropeller believes the key to successful real estate investing is by having a motivated seller leads generation website. Being in the real estate investing business for over 10 years, they know the importance of knowing what to do and what not when it comes to setting up a real estate website.
Some of its features include:
· Website templates. Leadpropeller offers website templates that are fully customizable with their proprietary website editor. It allows you to change the text, links, images, and colors to make your website stand out from the crowd and attract more leads.
· Lead capturing. All forms on their real estate investor websites uses a two-step form system. This is a proven method to capture more leads because the short form is easy and quick to fill out. Whether or not your leads fill out the second form, you can still contact your leads with the information provided in the short form.
· Buyers list. As a real estate investor, you don’t only want to buy properties but also sell. You can easily build a buyers list of buyers and investors in your area so you can sell more and make more money.
· Autoresponders. You can link your form to email marketing services like Aweber, MailChimp, ConstantContact, GetResponse, and others to setup email campaigns that will send out a series of emails over time to motivated sellers.
· Content. Every website comes with content that is proven to convert. You’re also free to customize the content to your needs using the built-in editor or Leadpropeller will help you customize it.
· CRM. All your real estate leads are stored in the basic built-in CRM that makes managing and accessing your leads easy wherever you are and on any device.
Best Features: Leadpropeller’s best features are the Buyer’s List and the expertly crafted content that is proven to convert.
Pricing: Pricing ranges from $49 per month for the entry level Starter plan to $299 per month for the Franchisor plan that offers 15 websites.
REI Leadz simplifies the process of getting a real estate investor’s website. There’s no monthly payments and the process is as simple as placing your order and receiving your website. Keep in mind, though, that because off this you’ll have to get a domain and hosting for your site.
It offers these features:
· No monthly fees. There are no monthly fees which means that your website belongs to you and it’s not tied to any platform.
· Website templates. Its beautifully designed website templates are built to capture leads so you can close more deals. They are fully responsive on all devices and you have complete control to customize anything you want and make your website stand out.
· SEO Tool. Every website comes with a built-in SEO plugin so you can optimize your pages and outrank your competitors. You’ll also get pre-written blog content that helps your site rank higher.
· Lead storage. All leads captured with the two-step form are stored in your website back-end, so you never miss out on any leads.
· Integrations. You’re able to integrate your website with most major autoresponders and CRM providers to make follow-up and communication with your leads easier.
Best Features: We believe the best features are its simplicity, prices, and the fact that there are no monthly fees.
Pricing: Pricing is $100, which includes a website template, setup, and content.
When it comes to real estate investment software, REI/Kit brands itself as a business in a box containing everything you need for your investing business. With its tools, you’ll have a strong deal flow, more motivated seller leads, automated systems for marketing and expert analysis to make your business more profitable.
Some of REI/kit’s features include:
· Real estate investing Lead generation and follow up. You’re able to build a responsive and conversion and SEO optimized website in a matter of minutes and market your website in Google search, Facebook, and AdWords. You’re also able to target 8 types of motivated seller leads and create forwarding numbers for each of your marketing campaigns that will automatically capture callers as leads in your CRM. From the CRM, you can manage your leads and trigger email campaigns designed to generate an offer and make contact.
· Email marketing automation. A series of high converting email campaigns are already written for you, ready to use so you’ll spend less time chasing leads. When you add leads to an email sequence, they’ll receive email campaigns and you’re able to track your open and read rates.
· Text message campaigns. You can end text blasts to your leads or put your leads on a drip campaign until they reply. According to REI/Kit, 93% of optimized text messages delivered through the system is opened within 1 minute of receipt.
· Outbound cold calling. Each plan has free leads included, with 100% of the leads with confirmed numbers. You can further use a virtual number to call these leads and all conversations are recorded and can be transcribed into your CRM.
· Expert analysis. These tools allow you to do appraisals, see comparative pricing, calculate rehabilitation costs, and perform extensive due diligence. With these tools at hand, you can be sure that you make the right deal at the right time.
Best Features: The best features are the marketing tools and the extensive analysis tools available on the platform.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $64 / month for the Marketing Starter plan that’s perfect for investors just starting out and goes up to $204 / month for the Marketing Scale plan that’s ideal for higher volume investors.
Now that you know what to look out for and some of the real estate investor’s website platforms you could use, you’re off to a great start. But you must know that it doesn’t stop there. You’ll continuously have to improve and optimize your website to get the most returns.
That’s why we’ll give you some tips to optimize your website and get more traffic and leads online.
Often the best way to see what works and what doesn’t is to look at your competitors’ websites. Here you’ll get some ideas for your website to stand out from the crowd and improve your conversion rate.
If you want to look at some real estate investor website examples, just type your search query for your area into Google and you’ll soon see who your competitors are. Look at their themes, their content, whether they list properties on their website and their unique selling propoition to see where you can improve or adapt.
When you do the search we mentioned above, you’ll notice that most sites are doing the same thing. Sure, the wording on the sites will differ, but the overall look and feel of the sites will be remarkably similar.
To stand out from the crowd you’ll want to optimize your content in order to rank higher in search results. You see, Google will rank unique high-quality content higher than lower quality content that is similar to what’s already out there. So, you’ll need to craft high-quality and unique content for all your pages to up the possibility that you’ll rank higher. But how do you do this?
The key is to add value. This means providing better information than your real estate investor competitors rather than selling. So, you’ll have to give advice, solve a problem, or help visitors make a decision. You’ll have to create a resource that people can come back to if they need any information. In this way, you’ll increase your ranking and get more leads.
Apart from creating unique content, you’ll also have to optimize your SEO strategy. Start off by having every piece of content focus on a keyword then craft your content and headers around that keyword. Doing this lets Google know what your content is about and it will rank you higher. Keep in mind, though, that your content should still sound natural, despite using these keywords. If it doesn’t, people will find other content which, in turn, increases your bounce rate and lowers your ranking.
Another thing you could do to make your content more effective is to add a few images. Images help your site feel real, and by using alt tags and name that include your keywords, Google will know what these images are and point people to your site when they need this information.
Backlinks are links on other 3rd party sites that point to your site. These links not only increase your chances of more leads, but also proves you as an authority in the field. Thus, the more sites that link to your content, the higher your ranking will be. But how do you build backlinks to your site? Let’s look.
The first way is simple, it’s just to ask. Look at some sites or blogs with relevant information and comment on their posts. Then start reaching out to the site owners and build relationships with them. Soon, you’ll be able to ask them to link to your content. As a bonus, sometimes they’ll link to your content on their own without you asking.
Another valuable tool to build backlinks is to guest post on other sites or blogs. Here you offer other sites high-quality content for their sites. Since you’re giving them high-quality content for their site, you are rewarded with a few links back to relevant content on your site.
Now that you’ve done the hard work of actually getting eyes on your site, you’ll want to optimize it for getting leads as well. It’s no use if they visit your site but don’t leave their information, right?
In the first place, make it easy for your real estate investor site’s visitors to give you their information. You don’t want them jumping through hoops just to give you their name and email address. That’s where two-step forms are really effective. At first you ask for the basics like name and email and once they’ve entered that they’ll be asked to give more information. Even if they don’t, you’ll still have their name and email to contact them.
Also, use calls to action on your site to get your visitors’ information. Make them clear and let your visitors know exactly what’s in it for them. They play a big role in people signing up for your newsletter, giving their information, or take advantage of a lead magnet you offer, so not using them will make your conversion rate suffer.
As time passes and your site is online for longer, you’ll start driving traffic and gather more data that you can work with. You’ll, for instance, see how many visitors visit your site, how long they spend there, how many leave without converting, and which pages get the most traffic.
But this traffic data doesn’t mean much if you don’t act on it. By using the analytics from your real estate website tool, you can make changes, adapt, and improve your website to make sure you get the leads you deserve.
When looking at your page views and which get the highest traffic, you can, for instance, move your lead forms and calls to action to those pages. It’s simple math, when you place these on the pages that get the most traffic, you’ll get more leads. Likewise, if most visitors visit your site on mobile devices, it’ll serve you well to make sure that your site is perfectly optimized for mobile browsing.
Apart from seeing where you can improve, this data also enables you to test different things on your site. With A/B testing you can build different version of the same page or form and see which performs best. Similarly, you can change the wording or colors on calls to action or try different lead magnets to see which performs best. With this knowledge, you’ll know which to use to make your site most effective.
(Don’t feel like doing all this testing yourself? We offer managed PPC services for real estate investors – hint, hint. 🙂
There you have it, now you’re well on your way to using the single most effective lead generation tool for real estate investors. You know what to look out for, which platforms to look at, and what tools to use to optimize your website to get the most traffic and leads. That’s an incredibly solid foundation for building any real estate business.
Keep in mind, though, that you shouldn’t try to memorize everything or follow everything we said to a tee. Remember, here we gave you guide to get started on your journey and you’ll soon figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. In the process, let us know what helped you most or what other tools you use in your real estate investment business.
So, what are you waiting for? A world of real estate investing leads is out there waiting for you to grab them. Build your own lead generation funnel using the real estate investor website builder of your choice, and start building your real estate business online today.
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