The Complete Guide On How To Get Motivated Seller Leads

Lead GenerationOctober 2024

Real estate investors have generated motivated seller leads for 20 years or more. It’s not a new business model but it surprises people that it exists.

You can wholesale anything, including houses. While working at Carrot, I often found that calling yourself a real estate investor was a misnomer. Really, what you are is an expert digital marketer. A great digital marketer understands human psychology, how to make offers, and how to find a motivated audience interested in that offer. This is marketing to motivated seller leads in a nutshell.

What Are Motivated Seller Leads For Wholesalers?

A motivated seller is just what it sounds like, but there is an important distinction. Anyone selling their home (likely their largest investment) is motivated to get to the closing table. When wholesaling real estate you are looking for a different kind of motivation. Typically a motivated seller has a distressed property. That means the property…

1. The property needs $30k+ in repairs that the owner can’t afford to fix before listing
2. The property has unknown $$$ in repairs and the owner isn’t going to figure it out or fix it
3. The house is so ugly that it wouldn’t be worth showing on the MLS and a realtor won’t touch it
4. The property has damage from natural disasters like floods, fires, tornadoes, etc.
5. The property has a tough family situation like probate, divorce, relocation, etc.

All of these motivations don’t fit in the nice box for a realtor to list the house, show the house, and wait for a competitive offer. Instead, the motivated seller is looking for cash fast so they can move out and not worry about repairs and the time it takes to close.

Really what it comes down to is time and money. They want money faster than a lead willing to list the traditional way.

How To Get Motivated Seller Leads

I am going to make this as simple as possible. You have TWO choices when it comes to getting motivated seller leads.

Option #1 – you buy motivated seller leads

Option #2 – you market for motivated seller leads

Let’s break down the pros and cons of both and then give some examples.

	Option #1 – you buy them	Option #2 – you market for them
Time	Faster	Slower
Cost	Can be cheaper	Expensive until you optimize
Quality	Lower	Higher
Scalability	Lower	Higher
Consistency	Mixed	Higher

Where Can You Buy Motivated Seller Leads

Several places sell leads. Typically this is called PPL (Pay-Per-Lead). We have written about the cost of each of these methods here. Check out this post for a more in-depth breakdown. I would recommend Andy’s service at PropertyLeads.com. Andy was a Carrot member and I saw him generate 1,000+ leads per month so I know he is legit and understands how to find motivated sellers.

Typically you will pay between $50-150 for these leads and it will cost more if you want exclusive leads that others don’t have or first access to them.

Other places to buy distressed seller leads

These won’t be qualified leads meaning you will have to do some marketing to them but you can build lists from popular criteria like…

1. Facing foreclosure
2. Out-of-state owner with high equity
3. Behind on taxes
4. Water is shut-off
5. Etc.

To pull that data and buy those leads, I recommend any of the following websites

1. Batchleads
2. Propstream
3. Dataflik.com

All of these services help you “stack lists” or build a list of leads who have a high potential for being a motivated seller or owning a distressed property.

How To Market For Motivated Seller Leads

This method requires a little more time and money but generally speaking, the lead quality and consistency is better if you stick with it.

To start you need a motivated seller’s website.

This is the most important step because all of your marketing will be driving traffic to a website where a lead will convert. The website needs to have a handful of important elements to compete with other real estate investors in your market.

1. Must load fast – people won’t wait around for a crappy website to load
2. Must be mobile-friendly – most of Carrot’s lead data comes from mobile devices
3. Must have credibility – (testimonials, before/after pics, part of the BBB, part of local organizations)
4. Must have high-converting forms – (DON’T ask 8 questions to a lead – keep it simple).

From there you can figure out what type of marketing you want to do. The goal is to find motivated seller leads where they hang out (Google, Facebook, Craigslist, etc).

You create marketing content and drive them to your website to learn more and fill out a form so you can contact them. This is 100% better quality than buying the leads because it’s THEM coming to YOU vs the other way around.

Again, check out our post on is buying leads worth it to learn more about the cost and time it takes for some of these options.

To market for wholesaler-motivated leads you have 3 to 4 options

1. Google Ads – also called PPC ads.
2. SEO – content marketing and ranking in Google to be found for leads
3. Video Marketing – posting on YouTube to attract leads to contact you to help them out
4. Social Media – it’s a bit of all 3 options above (ads, content, video)

You can do multiple strategies but I would caution you on trying to do all 4 at once. Pick a channel and strategy and devote 6 months to it. If you can scale your numbers – then you can move on to a new strategy.