When talking real estate leads, REO and Foreclosure has been the talk for the last few years. Now we are all talking listings and short sale leads and the like. Today, in many markets, pulling new listing leads is kinda like winning a mini lottery... you go home, cry a little, call your uncle and thank him for being such a special person in your life.There are 2 major dilemmas in getting leads for things like Short Sales and Listing Leads. To be more specific, the issue isn't actually with getting leads - most brokers and agents don't have concerns about getting new leads. The dilemmas come when you are sitting there with your budget in one hand, your goals for the next 6 months in the other, and your real estate website and online marketing plan on the screen in front of you... (or the imaginary one that you were supposed to get done last year).The REAL dilemma is that many of these trends (and hence opportunities) in real estate lead generation come with a need to focus your energy or attention on acquiring those leads. BUt, let's be honest - the market is changing all of the time! So, do you pay someone for the leads themselves, do you launch a big farming campaign, do you equip your people to hit the streets with a fast-paced message?Well, maybe. But you really need to know how this all ties together and how you accomplish your real goals of getting high-quality real estate leads, whether short sale leads, listing leads or something else; establishing real value in your brand; and tracking a true ROI on your spend.So, if you are finding yourself in this kind of dilemma, look for a few keys to make sure your marketing and real estate lead generation is on the right track:

1. Real Estate Leads Follow Real Value

I think you appreciated my wordplay there... In all seriousness, you have heard of Content Marketing, Social Media is almost considered "Old News" these days, and hopefully, you have identified with the "value-for-value" concept. What this means, is that you really are not going to be able to leverage or grow whatever marketing assets your have without really holding onto the idea of providing true value to your potential clients.So, even though we are talking about how to generate leads now in a competitive market - try basing all of the future assumptions on the idea that you need to provide value. The next concept this leads you to, is the idea that it is actually of value to have people manager aspects of your technology and marketing so you can focus on your value - if you have to fuss with a Wordpress install and your own CSS, or you find yourself making changes to pages yourself - you are doing it wrong! Focus on where you provide the most value.

2. Establish Your Marketing & Real Estate Lead-Gen on Your Own Brand

You shouldn't be feeling really comfortable, even if you have a decent number of leads, if your leads and marketing is purely built on someone or something else. Though, we are in favor of great and useful lead sources - think of what an unexpected shift in whatever you are relying on could do to your business (ie. Craigslist changes its rules for posting, A Company goes down, Trulia lets someone outbid you for that last spot!).What if you have real estate marketing and lead-gen power on your OWN website and online presence? This means search engine optimization as well as a lot of other things - social media visibility, inbound linking, brand recognition, opinion priority and more. If you don't have a website that is built well, and built to drive ongoing results as well as growing brand recognition, then you need to get it - this should be the foundation of everything else that you do with your marketing.

3. Mix Specific and Broad Value-Adds

Again, these trends can sometimes be transient in nature within the industry. This means that this year might be the year for listings and short sales, but you may be looking for real estate buyer leads big time next year. In addition, you have these referrals and other word of mouth or outside marketing leads that come into your pipeline, and they are interested in knowing you are a local real estate specialist as well as serving a broad range of needs. Don't go so far that you aren't building broad value to people looking in real estate.You can accomplish the right mix, by splitting up your blogging and social content to target specific niche topics, news and insights as well as unique angles on broad topics. Sometimes you may even demonstrate your general knowledge of real estate by highlighting news or trends for other areas you don't work, and then applying that trend to the areas in which you do work (ie. I work in Denver, but the trends in Florida housing are interesting to all buyers because...)

4. Build Your Website & SEO to Attract All Real Estate Leads

Your website and online real estate SEO can have some huge cumulative effects over time, and you can be attracting niche-specific leads and braoder buyer and seller leads at the same time. The trick is setting up your website with the right content, landing pages and SEO to target the groups well, and get the capture.One question we get a lot of is from brokers or agents moving from REO, Foreclosures and the like over to a more retail or short sale stance in the market. They would like to know how to combine websites, build their presence and get more listing leads or buyer leads without swearing off their REO business or sending a bad signal to Asset Managers.This can be done when you setup your new site the right way with SEO and calls to action on the site. One of our clients made a comment the other day about how beneficial it was to pick up a couple more luxury listings in her market even while Asset Managers were making positive comments about her new site.