You get a call or email saying, “Hey, I’m interested in selling my home on 123 Park Street” or “Can we meet up to discuss the sale of my property?”

Hurrah! You’ve got a lead. But the truth is that not all seller leads convert. Before you contact the seller, you need to identify if the lead is genuine and motivated. Is the seller looking to sell their property immediately, or are they planning to sell a year from now and just testing the waters?

Not all seller leads are created equal. Some leads convert while others fizzle out. So, how do you determine if a lead is hot, cold, or warm? The key is in asking the right questions. From doing so, you can better understand how motivated the person is to sell their home, and then you can strategize your communications to convert the lead into a happy client.

Here are the top three questions that will help you qualify real estate seller leads:

#1: Why Are You Selling Your Home?

Understanding the motivation behind the sale helps you determine two crucial factors:

  • How committed they are to the sale
  • Their time frame for the sale

For example, an answer like, “We’re relocating to Texas next month and we need to sell the house immediately,” shows a different level of commitment and urgency than an answer like, “Well, we’re kind of bored of the home and considering a change of ambience.”

Classify the first lead as a hot contact and the second one as warm. Alternatively, you can rate leads on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating the seller is looking for a quick move.

#2: When Do You Plan To Sell Your Home?

This is another critical question that’ll help you classify motivated seller leads. Strong motivators include job transfers, job loss, new children on the way, children moving out, and retirement. Leads with these reasons are likely to sell faster. This doesn’t mean you have to ignore leads with a longer timeline. You can push them to the back of the pipeline and check with them a few months down the line to see if their timeline has changed.

#3: When Can We Meet To Discuss Your Property?

Note the question here is not, “Can we meet to discuss your property?” Instead, it’s “When can we meet?” The lead’s answer to this question can help you evaluate whether they are serious about the sale. If they’re willing to meet “as early as possible”, you can classify them as a hot lead.

If they aren’t too eager to set up an appointment, it can indicate that they aren’t serious about selling their home right now. But that doesn’t mean they’re a cold lead. You can place them under the warm category and spend more time cultivating the relationship, thereby priming them to reach out to you whenever they are ready.

Categorizing your real estate leads into unmotivated or motivated home seller leads allows you to manage each lead in the pipeline properly. It doesn’t matter whether the lead is cold, warm, hot, or super-hot—you have to customize your approach to match the requirements of each lead. Categorizing and classifying leads will help you nurture each one appropriately, and you’ll close more deals in the long run if you do this.