Facebook ads for motivated sellers currently produce leads at roughly $40 apiece in a market like Dallas-Fort Worth, and it takes about 35 of those leads to put one property under contract. That works out to a cost per deal somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 — the same range personal injury firms pay per case.
Those benchmarks come from Cris Chico, who published the first course on Facebook advertising for real estate investors back in 2016 and now builds and installs ad accounts for investors around the country. He appeared on the Real Estate Pros Show with Mike Hambright to walk through the numbers and the mechanics behind them.
Below: what these leads actually cost, how many you need at different experience levels, the three friction points that keep junk out of your CRM, how to load an ad account after Facebook’s Andromeda update, and why splitting one budget across seven campaigns beats running one.
Key takeaways
- Budget roughly $40 per Facebook seller lead and about 35 leads per contract, putting cost per deal in the $1,500 to $3,000 range. Brand-new investors should expect 75-80 leads per contract; experienced operators running both wholesale and novation can hit one in 15-20.
- Cheap leads are forgiving. At $300-$400 per PPC lead, a few blown conversations wreck your cost per acquisition. At $40, you can survive the learning curve.
- Build friction on purpose: video creative instead of images, roughly eight qualifying questions on the form, and Facebook’s SMS phone verification. Anyone who clears all three is a real seller.
- Load 24 videos and 7 images into an ad account so Facebook’s algorithm can self-organize targeting from the video content and transcripts, including objection-handling videos that answer "is a cash sale a scam?"
- Split a $150/day budget across six or seven identical campaigns rather than running one. Kill the losers after a couple of days and relaunch replacements.
From the Investor Fuel Show
This article draws on an interview with Cris Chico on the Investor Fuel Show, hosted by Mike Hambright. Watch or listen to the full interview.
Inbound vs. Outbound Seller Leads: Why the Conversation Starts Differently
Chico frames the difference in one line: inbound makes you a welcome guest, outbound makes you an annoying pest. That is not a motivational point, it is an operational one.
On an outbound call, there is an entire objection layer to clear before any conversation about the property begins. Who are you. How did you get my number. You’re the fifth person who called me this week. Why don’t you make me an offer, you’re the one who called. Only after all of that do you get to ask about the roof.
Inbound starts past that. The opener is “you filled out a form about getting an offer on your property” and the seller already knows why the phone is ringing. Hambright, who owns a lead generation company himself, puts the typical return on inbound at two to three times outbound.
The bigger gap is scalability. Scaling cold calling means hiring more humans, pulling more lists, skip tracing more numbers, and replacing the callers who quit — and they will quit, because being told to get lost all day is a burnout job. Investors who go that route end up spending their time recruiting and retraining instead of buying houses.
Scaling paid ads means changing a number on a screen. Going from $5,000 to $10,000 a month on Facebook is not meaningfully harder than the $5,000 was. Neither channel is wrong, but only one of them scales without a hiring pipeline attached.
What These Leads Actually Cost and How Many It Takes to Close
Chico’s agency is currently running campaigns in Dallas, Fort Worth and the surrounding counties at about $40 per lead. For comparison, Hambright estimated a Google pay-per-click seller lead runs eight to ten times that — Chico put the number at $300 to $400.
On leads per contract, the middle-ground benchmark is 35. That figure moves substantially with the operator:
- Brand new investors: 75 to 80 leads before a contract
- Middle of the pack: around 35
- Experienced closers running both wholesale and novation: one contract per 15 to 20 leads
The spread is almost entirely sales skill and exit options. An operator with two ways to monetize a conversation converts roughly twice as often as one with a single strategy.
Multiply it out and cost per deal lands between $1,500 and $3,000. That is the same cost per case personal injury firms pay, in an industry that spends far more aggressively on advertising than real estate does.
The argument for cheap leads is not just the arithmetic — it is forgiveness. Botch three or four $350 PPC leads and your cost per acquisition goes through the roof. Botch three or four $40 leads and you have spent $160 learning something. If your acquisitions process is still being built, that margin for error matters more than raw lead intent.
Use 35 as your scorecard. If you are running Facebook and sitting at 60 or 70 leads per contract with volume behind it, the ad account is probably not the problem.
Unless they’re just completely out of their mind and love to fill out forms and confirm their phone numbers through SMS verification for no reason, then they’re motivated. And as long as you have the right sales process, you’ll convert them.
— Cris Chico
Facebook Is Not Google Search: Where These Sellers Are in the Process
Google search is bottom-of-funnel. Somebody typed “sell my house fast” because they need to sell a house fast. The intent is high and so is the price, and the whole channel runs on speed to lead — most operators competing there are trying to reach the lead within a few minutes. If you are the second or third caller, you are usually out.
Facebook is an interruption platform. Nobody opened the app to sell their house. Your ad found them, which means the people who respond are warm to the idea of selling but not necessarily in crisis mode yet.
That changes what a good outcome looks like. You are catching sellers before they start searching, which means before your competitors know they exist. Chico’s point is that you are getting them ahead of the game — they are starting to have conversations, not making decisions this afternoon.
The tradeoff is follow-up. A lead who is three months from listing does not convert on the first call, and an acquisitions process built around same-day contracts will treat that person as dead. If your CRM only knows how to handle hot leads, Facebook will look like it produces junk when it is actually producing early.
Neither channel is better. They are different points in the same seller’s timeline, and they need different sales cadences behind them.
Three Friction Points That Filter Out Junk Leads
Lead quality is the number one complaint about Facebook seller ads, and Chico’s answer is deliberately counterintuitive: make the form harder to complete, not easier.
Three friction points, stacked:
- Video over images. An image can be glanced at and clicked past in a second, and the person submits without absorbing anything. A video forces the viewer to actually consume some of the message before they reach the form.
- Roughly eight qualifying questions. Not two. Eight is enough work that idle curiosity drops off.
- SMS phone verification. Facebook now offers an option requiring the person to confirm their phone number by text before the form submits. Bad numbers die here.
Chico’s logic on why this works: unless somebody is completely out of their mind and enjoys filling out forms and verifying phone numbers by SMS for no reason, a person who clears all three is motivated. Every step you remove to boost volume is a step that lets an unmotivated person through.
This is worth contrasting with what the industry often calls a lead. Hambright pointed to data vendors advertising 10,000 downloadable “leads” a month. That is not a lead. That is an address and a name. A verified human who watched a video, answered eight questions and confirmed their phone number is a categorically different asset, even at volume.
Expect fewer form fills after adding friction. That is the point. Judge the change on leads per contract, not leads per day.
How to Build the Ad Account: 24 Videos, 7 Images and Avatar Targeting
Facebook rolled out an algorithm update called Andromeda that forced Chico to rebuild his entire ad account infrastructure. The practical consequence: targeting is now driven far less by the audience settings you pick and far more by what the algorithm reads out of your creative — the video itself, the transcript, everything in the frame.
So the account gets loaded heavy. Each campaign carries 24 videos and 7 images, over 31 creatives total, and Facebook self-organizes from there.
The videos are built as avatars matched to specific seller types. A landlord video speaks to landlord pain points. A downsizing video features an older person standing in a house that looks a little dated and cluttered — the environment matches the prospect, not just the script. Male and female versions of each. Most are AI-generated, though Chico will clone an investor who wants to appear on camera himself.
Images are used sparingly. Pixar-style animated characters also perform well alongside human-looking avatars.
The subset that does the heavy lifting is objection handling. Those videos answer the questions a seller is actually stuck on: what happens if I sell my house for cash, am I going to get screwed, is this a scam.
None of these ads works alone. A prospect sees one and does not submit. They see another. Then they see the objection video, it clears the thing that was holding them back, and they fill out the form. The creative set functions as an ecosystem, which is exactly why hunting for one winning ad is the wrong exercise.
The Portfolio Approach: Split the Budget Across Six or Seven Campaigns
Say you want to spend $150 a day in Dallas. The default move is to build one campaign at $150 a day and see what happens. Chico calls that a roulette wheel — you put all your money on one number and pray.
The portfolio approach takes the same $150 and divides it across six or seven campaigns at different budget levels. The campaigns are identical. Same creative, same setup, same targeting. You are not testing messaging.
What you are testing is which slice of the audience Facebook decides to show you. Target Dallas and the platform reports an audience of 8 million people. Your ad will not reach 8 million people — it will reach maybe a thousand, and Facebook picks which thousand. Chico’s analogy is fishing a large pond: multiple campaigns means casting several lines into different spots instead of one line in one place.
Then you manage it ruthlessly. Launch five, two come back as turds, three produce. Pause the losers after a couple of days, launch replacements. In a high-spend account he will have seven to ten campaigns running simultaneously, which is what produces day-to-day lead consistency rather than a channel that floods one week and goes silent the next.
The mistake this fixes is treating a bad campaign as a bad channel. Duplicate campaigns land in different pockets of the same market, and a couple of them will always underperform. That is the model working, not failing.
Brand, Retargeting and Whether to Hire an Agency
Chico calls it the anonymity problem. A seller sees your ad, fills out a form, you call and say you’ll follow up tomorrow — and they have no idea who you are. Another investor calls and they may think that person is you. Nothing you spent built any familiarity.
The fix is a consistent face across every creative in the account. Either the owner on camera, or an AI avatar and cloned voice if the owner is 18 and sellers will wonder how a kid fresh out of high school is buying their house. When the follow-up call comes, there is a reference point: “I’m with Mike Buys Houses, the ads you’ve been seeing.”
Retargeting compounds it. Build an audience of people who engaged with your page, and their feed starts filling with your ads. Since no two people see the same Facebook, that seller concludes you must be buying every house in town — and that impression is doing work when your acquisitions rep calls.
On DIY versus agency, Chico’s position is shaped by a specific failure mode: a client who knew their agency was underperforming but had no way to prove it, because they did not understand the platform well enough to judge. His service is an install — build the infrastructure in the client’s own ad account, hand it over, teach them to run it in about an hour a week.
The framing he uses: an agency is a limousine, and some people are happy riding in one. But you should know enough to tell whether the driver is any good.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a motivated seller lead from Facebook ads cost?
Around $40 per lead in a large metro. Cris Chico’s agency is currently averaging roughly $35 to $40 across campaigns in Dallas, Fort Worth and the surrounding counties.
For comparison, a Google pay-per-click seller lead in the same kind of market runs $300 to $400 — Mike Hambright estimated PPC at eight to ten times the Facebook cost. Your own number will vary with market size, competition and how much friction you build into the form.
How many Facebook seller leads does it take to get one contract?
About 35 on average, but the range is wide and it tracks experience more than anything else. Brand-new investors in Chico’s client base are taking 75 to 80 leads to land a contract.
Experienced operators who are strong at sales and can run both wholesale and novation exits convert one in every 15 to 20 leads. At 35 leads per contract and $40 per lead, cost per deal lands between $1,500 and $3,000.
Are Facebook seller leads lower quality than Google PPC leads?
They are earlier, not necessarily worse. Google search leads are bottom-of-funnel — the person typed “sell my house fast” — while Facebook is an interruption platform that surfaces sellers who are warm to the idea but not yet in crisis mode.
That means you reach them before your competitors do, but you need a longer follow-up process to convert them. Quality also depends on your filters: video creative, roughly eight qualifying questions and SMS phone verification remove most of the tire-kickers before they ever hit your CRM.
How should I split my Facebook ad budget across campaigns?
Divide it across six or seven identical campaigns at varying daily budgets rather than concentrating it in one. A single $150-a-day campaign is a bet on one slice of the audience; six campaigns at smaller budgets reach different pockets inside the same market.
Pause the underperformers after a couple of days and launch replacements. In higher-spend accounts, running seven to ten campaigns at once is what keeps lead flow consistent week to week.
Should I run Facebook ads in-house or hire an agency?
Either can work, but you need enough platform knowledge to evaluate the results regardless. Chico has had clients arrive knowing their previous agency was underperforming while having no way to demonstrate it, because they could not tell competent management from incompetent management.
His middle path is an install model — the infrastructure gets built inside the investor’s own ad account, then handed over to run in roughly an hour a week. From there you can keep it in-house or hire out, but you can actually vet whoever you hire.
The bottom line
Before you change anything about your creative, calculate your current leads per contract and compare it to 35. That single number tells you whether the problem is upstream in the ad account or downstream in how your team handles a seller who is three months out rather than three days out.
