KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Low to No Cost Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

Summary:Host Lars Hedenborg details eight low- or no-cost lead generation tactics to help real estate agents scale their businesses predictably without relying on cold calls or expensive paid leads. The episode covers strategies ranging from value-first FSBO direct mail and daily Instagram story documentations to systematic open houses, Google Business Profile optimization, vendor-sponsored giveaways, and simple database check-ins. Lars emphasizes selecting two levered systems to implement consistently over a 90-day period to reliably increase closed transactions while retaining higher profit margins.

Here's the question. Are you on track to crush your goals in 2025 or are you still lacking some lead generation systems that it will allow you to have an overabundance of opportunity this year? In today's training, I'm going to dive into eight low or no cost lead generation strategies that are working right now. The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coach thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you, the good, bad, and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real-world tactics and strategies that get

results. You just got to do the work. All right, what's up for real estate business builders? Let's get after it here. And I'll go into as much detail as I possibly can on a training like this. This is a resource that I put together every week that will help your real estate business. Here's the deal. If you ever get to the point where you find yourself consuming stuff, but you're not implementing,

we offer a 90-day implementation program for pretty much everything I teach here in terms of real estate business building with a heavy, heavy focus on. lead generation systems, lead conversion systems, and all of the sales frameworks you will need to within 90 days add two to three plus closings per month to your business. No referral fees, no paid leads, no cold calling, no door knocking, no costly referral fees at closing. So that's the short commercial for this. Eight ways. Let's get into it. And these aren't really in any particular kind of order. You cannot implement all of these at the same time. If you want to build a business that gets to a million dollars of GCI, working less than 40 hours a week.

These are the four pillars of what we call the million dollar agent method. The first pillar of the four pillars is what we call leveraged lead generation. And I'm telling you this because this is the mindset behind doing some of these things I'm going to go through. You have to think about each lead generation lever as having the ability to produce multiple transactions per month. So when we talk about a database touch blueprint or the brand, authority builder or our expire system, our FISBO system, our motivated seller system, our new construction

system, our social proof system, our yard marketing system, our home search lead systems. I think we have like 12 lead gen levers, all proven, our open house system, all proven to work. You can't implement all of them. And they're not all well suited for every type of personality and skill sets that that's out there. So my hope for you, though, is that of this list of eight, there are one or two that you can implementing your business right away. If you get stuck and you need help implementing, go to million dollar agent method.com. Watch that short video, book in a strategy session, and we'll talk about how to help you get these implemented in your business in 90 days. All right, so number one is for sale by owners. Not the typical beat them over the head with the phone or knock

down their front door until they let you in for a listing appointment. But become a resource for for sale by owners. I think it is irresponsible. Well, let me say this. If you're a real estate agent and you want to scale your business, meaning you want to make more money in a reasonable amount of time and have time freedom, it's irresponsible not to have a for sale by owner pillar in your business. Our approach is wildly different than every other approach.

I'm not a coal caller. I never had that sort of bone in my body to just like, you know, pound the phones and like just a love rejection. That's just not how I roll. But what I did do was I figured out a series of direct mail pieces that provided value. And as a for sale by owner, these are DIYers. You know, they're like, I can do it. You know, do it yourself. They're probably the same people that maybe get themselves into trouble when they're renovating parts of their home. You're going to become a resource to these folks. You're going to send them valuable information. And we have.

all of this stuff in our program, obviously. I think in the first three weeks, we send them like four or five value added pieces. And then I think it goes to like weekly after that. So you're sending them valuable information and you're following up. We call it Fisbo Fridays. You're calling all of the Fisbo's in your database. You're like, hey, Janice, you know, I'm just checking in. This is Lars, your neighborhood real estate expert. It's Fisbo Fridays where I check in with all of my for sale by owners. Just see if anything came up this week, if you had any showings, if you have any questions or, you know, all I ask in return for sending this information and keep in touch with you is that if you ever interview someone for the job of marketing your home and getting you

top dollar, I just want to be included in that group, right? So that's kind of the real low-key sort of reminder after you get off the phone with your for sale by owners. And you're basically just building a database and adding value. All right, that's number one. Number two comes from our brand authority builder. We have members in our community using our methodologies, our cadence, our structure around social media. We call it brand authority builder. It's basically expanding expanding your digital footprint that are producing multiple transactions per month. One is producing like seven or eight transactions a month from social media. One of our community members, she did 81 transactions, but 35 of them were from her business Instagram account. And essentially

just this, this one, number two is called Document Your Days on Instagram. So number one was for sale by become a resource for FISBOS. Number two is document your days on Instagram. So So there's a lot of nonsense you can get caught up in social media and waste a lot of time doing a lot of things that aren't going to add a lot to your business. And if you find yourself scrolling, that is not social media. That's you're consuming. We do not consume social media. We use social media as a platform in our business to expand our digital footprint and

our influence and our perception of authority. So all this agent does is essentially. document the insanity of being a real estate agent. She has a system that we teach that basically you can turn one client into 13 different posts. So, you know, just documenting different parts of the transaction and different parts of your day and meeting someone at a home here or you see something in a walkthrough that's crazy or you're writing an offer on the side of the road. Essentially, just documenting your days and posting on social media via either Facebook or IG stories. There are more advanced strategies about Facebook lives and creating short form content and all of that

that we get into. But this is just something simple that everyone can do. You can simply just document your days. And you can even do posts on Instagram and Facebook. But it kind of feels a little bit better when you're doing these consistently on stories. And just let people in to your expanded database, you know, people that are friends, quote unquote, and following you on your platforms, just let them into the insanity of what it is like to be a real estate agent. That's some good stuff that we come across. And, you know, when you get through a difficult negotiation or you have a challenging seller or buyer or, you know, whatever, just document that stuff. So that's number two. Number three is our 250K open house system. Now, this is one of our community members that, I don't want to say it.

She, open houses aren't for everyone. Let me lay that groundwork. If you put me back into production, and you forced me to get productive. And me knowing that real estate is a contact sport and my goal every week is to have 125 meaningful conversations with decision-making adults about real estate, I would implement open houses. I would probably do one or two a week. So I would do 75 to 100 open houses in the next 52 weeks. And I would do these with a focus towards acquiring sellers.

And I wouldn't even need listing inventories to do this. So basically, if you have an average commission check of 10,000, there's 25 closings waiting for you if you implement an open house system the right way. So open houses aren't for everyone. I wouldn't even enjoy doing it, but I would build it as a system that I could have a junior agent come into my team and take over that system. And the entire system would be totally leveraged at that point. I would build the system, operate it, make sure it's working, optimize all the scripts. and we have all that stuff and all the checklist and whatnot. There are two transactions per month waiting for you if you do open houses the right way.

So that's number three. Number four is another tactic in our brand authority builder. One of our community members did this tactic in 90 days, which happens to be the length of our million dollar agent method program, committed to doing Facebook lives once a day. And at no tech, she is not techie. literally no editing at at all i'm talking literally going facebook live going into facebook hitting the live button and just talking to the camera or turning the camera around and say hey you know if you guys have ever want a nice local coffee shop you know i go to abc coffee or you know hey whenever i'm not

feeling well i always stop by this juice place you know this juice place hey i just had you know a really bad transaction close and i wanted to you know vent to all of you hey i just had a rough with getting my kid off to school. Can anyone relate? You know, so once a day you're committing to, again, another version of just letting people into your world. She took 30 listings, 30 listings in 90 days using that one tactic, right? So just take a pause there. If you're not utilizing video on social, you may be left out of the future of business overall. So that's number four. Number five is setting up your Google business profile the right way. We've got a community member, and I'm going to use her example here, actually in the next one as well.

She does 52 transactions. Ten transactions came from her Google business profile simply because she set it up and optimized it the right way. Her business hours were put in there, her zip codes that she worked. every time she posts on Facebook or Instagram, she puts those posts on her Google business profile as well. That's the big secret there. And then she focuses on getting Google reviews, right? Cool thing about Google is that it's Google. A lot of people focus on getting reviews on Zillow.

But for the most part, people are going to Google to search for the best real estate agent in their zip code. And if you're not using Google reviews and you haven't optimized your Google business, Profile, again, you're missing 10 deals she got. So she got 42 deals from her database of 250 people, and then 10 deals from her Google Business Profile. So that's number five. How do I want to say number six? I'm going to lay out the story where it's maybe a two-parter here.

So this same agent in our community that set it and forget it, Google Business Profile Strategy, almost one transaction per month, doing nothing except posting some of her content that she's already posting on other platforms. She has a database of 250 people. She manages this database in a Google sheet. First name, last name, email address, cell phone number, and probably like notes on last contact and like a date range for the next time to reach out.

42 transactions she did by, let's say, two strategies. So one of the strategies is that there are in her city, there are free concerts in the park kind of thing. She basically reaches out to her entire database. I think all she does is send a Gmail with a BCC and copies everyone in that Google sheet column. So again, no CRM, no tech, and says, hey, this Friday at 5 p.m, I'm going to the picnic in the park or concert in the park over at Waverly Center. Meet me at the entrance and I've got a free ice cream voucher for you. Not everyone comes, maybe 10 people out of the 250 people come, but she gets a touch with all of them. And these people now know that she's active in the community. She participates.

She's just inviting them to meet her and get a free ice cream. And she doesn't even have to hang out with them at the event, which is even more cool. And I say that as an introvert. If you're an extrovert, and that's your thing. The challenge with hosting big events is that they're super, super expensive. So she gets credit for a touch with their whole database. So she gets the touch. And she's probably buying like 10, maybe 20. ice creams, let's say. So the whole event costs her $100. And she could probably have a lender standing next to her handing out their business card, and they probably cover the whole event. No money, right? The second part of her strategy is that

that same list of 250, once a week with someone on that list, she either has a coffee or a lunch. So in the course of the year, she's having 50, probably with two weeks vacation, 50 cups of coffee or coffee meetings and 50 lunches. So not even meeting with the whole database, but she's contacting and nurturing and loving on and adding value to that database consistently. So that's number six. Let's call that the low-tech database system to produce three plus transactions per month. Number seven is a weekly market update. Again, in line with really some of these, I think it's irresponsible as a real estate agent

to not do a weekly market update. I'd probably do this at your desk, maybe pre-recorded. It's not easy to show your screen and that sort of thing. So I'd probably do it on Loom. Basically have a few tabs open. We use Keeping Current Matters as an awesome resource. You don't have to overcomplicate this in. Some MLS stats, maybe an article that came up about housing that you want to explain your opinion on

or maybe a slide or two from the monthly market updates from Keeping Current Matters. Just three to five, maybe seven minutes. These would also go on your YouTube channel. I do think every real estate agent needs a YouTube channel. And you're basically establishing authority and establishing yourself as the expert go-to real estate agent, right? So weekly market update. No tech.

That's number seven. Number eight, another spinoff of our brand. Is this not? Yeah, I guess it's our brand authority builder. Expanding your digital footprint is giveaways. So vendor-sponsored giveaways. So a good idea for one of these could be like Adirondack chairs coming out if you're into like a cooler autumn season in your market, a couple like a fire pit giveaway, two Adirondack chairs and a fire pit giveaway. Maybe $600 to $800 that you'll spend on that.

Get a vendor to they have a different bucket of money that they can pull from to do events and sponsorships. So it doesn't go into like the paid leads. Some lenders can still pay for leads. in a RESPA compliant way. This is a different bucket of money. We've got a member does a lot of transactions. He's kind of like the digital mayor in his market. And giveaways are probably,

he does about 400 transactions per year. Giveaways are probably, I think he said 75 to 100 transactions per year, and he does six per year. And a whole process, a checklist and a very cool way to do it. You're putting all this stuff in your emails. You do voicemail drops to the database, and it's also all over social media. And you can integrate.

with the community and like help out different causes in the community. Like you could really do some fun stuff around this. So those are eight ways to generate. I mean, really low cost, but mostly no cost. Open houses, a little bit of sign money. Facebook lives, nothing. Your Google business profile, nothing. Even hosting community events, zero cost.

Weekly market updates, nothing. Giveaways, sponsored by vendors, nothing. The direct mail to FISBOs is probably the only thing that costs any kind of money. and the signage, like I said, for open houses. But even FISBOS, we've got an awesome direct response system for expired as well. Those are like a 15 to 20x return on investment. So even if you did spend a little bit of money, you are earning a wild, wild return. So until next time, my friends, make sure, like if you go through this and you're like,

man, that's a lot of crap, I don't know how I could possibly implement all that in my business. Go to a million dollar agent method.com. It's a straight up consultation about your business, where you're at now, where you're want to be in the future, what's holding you back? And we're going to go through all the frameworks, all the systems, you know, and even if you never become a private client of ours, it is definitely a valuable call. And just like anything you would invest in in your business, if you were to choose to invest in our implementation program, a million dollar agent method, the returns are through the roof. You will never have to pay for leads again. You'll never call call. You never pay a referral

Fiat closing. We have agents come into our world that they're like selling 20, 25 homes a year. but 20 of those homes are a referral fee at closing to like a homelight or ideal agent or one of those companies do the math on that. $10,000 commission check where you're paying out $3,000 twice a month. It's $6,000 a month. You paid $72,000 for those closings, right? We're like a very, very small fraction of that to implement systems where you can generate two to three additional closings outside of what you're already doing like clockwork,

no paid leads, no cold calling, none of that. So much love, much respect. We'll see you on the next training. Be good.