Real Estate Wholesaling: $199 to $95 Cost Per Lead

These guys are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area doing real estate wholesaling. When they came to me, they'd been working with a pay-per-lead provider for the past two years at $199 per lead.

They were okay with the lead quality. They weren't complaining. Their problem was the price. They always thought, rightfully so, that they could get a cheaper cost per lead if they ran the ads themselves.

They'd tried. They hired a guy who ran their Facebook Ads, but the lead quality was horrible. Phone numbers where people weren't picking up. And when people DID pick up, they'd say stuff like "hey I don't know where you got my number from, I never filled out any form." Which is terrible.

They had two problems: Cost per lead was high from their pay-per-lead provider ($199). When they tried running ads themselves, CPL was decent but lead quality plummeted.

Facebook has this horrible reputation that lead quality is bad. And to be completely honest, that is the case a lot of the time, but not if you know what you're doing.

With Facebook, it's tricky. They give you all the tools in the world to generate very cheap leads, but they don't give you as many controls to make sure your lead quality is proper. Or at least that's not what they USED to do. Nowadays they're changing everything.

For example, Facebook lead forms (notoriously known for being horrible lead generators) now have a one-time passcode feature that gets sent to the person's phone number via text. They have to put in the code to verify it's actually their phone number. They've also given us the option to optimize for leads that convert as opposed to just any leads.

I built them a landing page with a multi-step form, and all phone numbers went through OTP verification. So we were 100% sure it was actually the right phone number.

My ad creatives were long-form videos talking about what they do.

My landing page was more content-heavy than most landing pages. The goal here wasn't just the most leads. If it were (and I've had clients ask me for this), I would've done things differently. But these guys aren't a huge team - they make all the phone calls themselves - so they want to make sure they're not wasting time talking to people.

I had them record a video for the landing page where they educate people on the exact process, step-by-step. They were very honest and super straightforward. That's what I told them they need to do.

The reason is that wholesalers generally get a very bad reputation. The only thing you can do to make sure people trust you is to be upfront about it. Tell them "my intention is to make money from the sale of your property, but also while doing that, I'll be helping you move this deal and providing you with options."

The VSL was built around being very upfront with the wholesaling process: If you wanna list this house and sell it for top dollar, I'll help you do that. If you wanna sell it in two days, I'll help you do that. If you wanna get out of your mortgage because you can't afford it, I'll help you do that. That's why I get paid for what I do.

Our cost per lead was $95. Not the cheapest I've seen, but still 50% cheaper than their pay-per-lead provider. We were only running ads on Meta at that time - they didn't want to explore Google Ads because they didn't have the budget for it.

Lead quality improved big time. Their contract rate was 1 in 15. So every 15 leads, they'd get a property under contract. And these guys close 75% of their contracts. They're not the type that just keeps sending out contracts with no intention of closing them.

Cost per lead cut in half from $199 to $95. Lead quality actually improved compared to their pay-per-lead provider. 1 in 15 contract rate with 75% of contracts closing.

Helped them ditch expensive pay-per-lead provider. Built trust-focused messaging and VSL explaining wholesaling process upfront. Landing page with multi-step form and OTP verification. Long-form video ad creatives. Proper campaign structure and data feeding back to Meta. The biggest thing I did for these guys was help them make the right decision - not using pay-per-lead companies when you get to a certain level. I think those companies are great and beneficial for a lot of people, but when you reach a certain point, it's just better to run your own ads. It's gonna be cheaper for you.