Every agent asks me this. Should I buy Zillow leads? And they want a yes or no. The honest answer is, it depends on what you're trying to build.

Let me give you the real breakdown, no spin.

What you're actually buying

When you buy portal leads, you're renting attention. You pay for a slice of the inquiries in a zip code, and that same buyer is usually getting handed to other agents at the same time. So you're not buying a client. You're buying a footrace. Whoever calls back fastest and follows up hardest tends to win, which is why speed to lead matters so much when you do play this game.

Most of these leads are early. Someone tapping a heart on a listing at nine at night is not the same as someone calling a name they already trust. A lot of them are months from doing anything, and some are just looking at pretty kitchens. Agents I talk to who make portal leads pay are usually the ones who already had a follow up system dialed in before they ever bought a single lead.

The cost nobody mentions

The price per lead is the number everyone argues about. That's not the real cost. The real cost is what it does to your business model.

When all your business comes from a portal, you don't own anything. You're renting your pipeline. The day you stop paying, the leads stop. Your name never got stronger. The portal's name got stronger. You did all that follow up and the buyer remembers the app, not you. That's the trap. You can work like crazy for years and still not own an audience.

Compare that to the agent who put the same effort into content and showing up in their market. That agent built something that keeps paying after the spend stops. Their name got known. People started calling them directly. No footrace. That's the whole point of becoming a Community Market Leader in your town.

When portal leads actually make sense

I'm not telling you to never buy a lead. Paid traffic has a place, and I teach agents to run ads all the time. The difference is control.

Buying portal leads can make sense when you already have a follow up system that works, you can answer fast, and you're treating it as one source feeding a bigger machine, not the whole machine. If you're brand new and you buy leads as a shortcut around building any presence at all, you usually end up paying a lot to learn you can't convert yet. Fix the conversion first. Then add traffic.

This is where your own paid ads beat rented leads. When you run your own ad, to your own video, capturing into your own database, you keep the audience forever. Same dollars, but now you own the result. I walk through how that fits with everything else in the 7 lead sources that actually work.

The leads that cost you nothing extra

Here's what gets lost in the Zillow debate. Your best leads are the ones you already earned.

Your past clients. Your sphere. The people who already trust you. Those leads don't cost a dollar per inquiry, and they close faster because the trust is already there. Most agents are so busy buying cold leads that they ignore the warm ones sitting in their phone. Go fix that first. I laid out exactly how in past client lead generation and referral systems that scale. That's free pipeline you're leaving on the table.

So, are they worth it?

If you need leads this week and you can convert, a portal can be a faucet you turn on. Just know what you're getting: a rented, shared, early stage list that disappears when you stop paying.

If you want to stop chasing for good, put your energy into being known in your market and running your own marketing, so buyers come looking for you by name. That's the agent who isn't a commodity. That's the agent who doesn't sweat the next portal price hike. I broke down how I sold homes year after year on exactly this kind of online marketing in my video on selling 100 homes a year with online marketing.

Rent a few leads if you want. Build your own pipeline no matter what. Start at the Real Estate Lead Generation pillar and build the machine you actually own.