Glossary
What is a qualified lead in real estate?
A qualified lead is a lead who, in a conversation with the sales team, confirmed their budget, purchase timeline, preferred area and payment method (cash, mortgage, developer financing). With this person it makes sense to book a meeting. Everyone else moves into the follow-up plan or gets closed with a stated reason.
Criteria for qualifying a lead
- Budget: how much the person is prepared to spend, and in which currency.
- Timeline: when they plan to buy. Next month and "someday" call for different work.
- Area and property type: whether this project fits them or another of the developer's projects does.
- Payment method: own funds, a bank mortgage, Infonavit or Fovissste, developer financing during pre-sales (preventa). The developer decides which ones the project accepts.
The person has to confirm all four points in a conversation, and the salesperson records them in CRM fields. Answers on an ad form give you an MQL. A lead becomes qualified after the conversation.
An example with a developer's numbers
A project gets 1,500 leads for MX$300,000. First contact happened with 450, and 135 were qualified. That's 9% of all leads and 30% of those the team spoke to. Each qualified lead costs about MX$2,222 (CPQL). Raise first contact to 60% and you get about 270 qualified leads on the same budget.
In our experience, the share of qualified leads on our projects grew from 5% to 25% once campaigns switched from optimizing for CPL to CPQL and the qualification process itself got cleaned up.
What inflates the qualified share
- The salesperson sets the status on a hunch: "nice client, clearly going to buy." Nobody asked about the budget.
- The agency counts everyone who answered the form questions as qualified.
- The criteria are written in the playbook, but the CRM has no required fields. You can't check qualification after the fact.