Glossary
What is a lead in real estate?
A lead in real estate sales is a person who left their contact details with a developer or agency. The trigger varies: interest in a specific project, a request for property options, a downloaded brochure or price list, a call from a listing portal, a WhatsApp message. Until the first conversation you don't know whether they have a budget or a timeline, so a lead isn't a buyer yet. It's only the entry point to the funnel.
How many leads it takes to make one sale
In our running example, a project gets 1,500 leads a month for MX$300,000. Of those, 135 become qualified, 40 make it to a meeting and 5 buy. That's one sale per 300 leads. So the lead count on a report tells you little on its own: 1,500 leads with 30% first contact and 1,500 leads with 60% first contact bring in different revenue on the same budget.
What happens to a lead after the inquiry
Someone shopping for a condo usually sends inquiries to several developers at once. According to Harvard Business Review (2011, 1.25 million leads), companies that reached a lead within the first hour were nearly 7 times more likely to qualify it than those that reached out later. A lead loses value within hours, and paying for new leads while the old ones wait for a call gets expensive.
Common lead-tracking mistakes
- One person sends a WhatsApp message and fills out a form, and the CRM shows two leads. CPL looks lower than it really is.
- Leads from portals, the website and phone calls live in different places, and half of them never reach the CRM.
- A salesperson deletes "unqualified" leads without giving a reason. Later nobody can tell whether the lead was bad or just never got a conversation.
- The agency report counts leads and qualified leads as one number.