Real Estate Lead Generation in the Age of AI with Bryan Driscoll Part 1 #965
In this episode, Joey Romero sits down with Bryan Driscoll, founder of Motivated Leads, lead generation expert, and real estate investor, to discuss how digital marketing, artificial intelligence, and data-driven strategies are changing the way real estate investors generate motivated seller leads. Bryan shares how he went from working in digital marketing to applying those skills to real estate, eventually building a lead generation business focused on helping investors connect with motivated sellers.
The conversation explores the differences between Facebook ads, Google pay-per-click advertising, and SEO, including how each strategy works, what investors can realistically expect to spend, and why these marketing channels often work best together. Bryan also explains why investors should look beyond cost per lead and focus on the entire conversion process—from initial contact and qualified leads to appointments, contracts, and ultimately cost per deal. He shares practical advice for investors working with smaller marketing budgets and why testing, tracking KPIs, and following the data are critical when building a successful campaign.
Joey and Bryan also take a deeper look at the growing role of AI in real estate marketing. Bryan discusses how AI can support website development, content, advertising, lead follow-up, and automation while emphasizing the importance of keeping the human in command. He explains where he sees value in AI-powered text and after-hours follow-up, why he remains cautious about using AI voice as the first point of contact with valuable seller leads, and how investors can avoid getting distracted by every new AI tool that enters the market.
Bryan also shares his personal journey into real estate investing, from attending a real estate seminar shortly after high school and struggling with his first attempts to find deals to eventually connecting those early lessons with his digital marketing experience. He explains how he used income from marketing to purchase properties, why he has remained focused on a buy-and-hold strategy, and how refinancing allowed him to recover his initial capital while keeping equity in his rental portfolio.
In this episode:
How Bryan turned his digital marketing experience into a real estate lead generation business.
The differences between Facebook ads, Google PPC, and SEO for motivated seller leads.
Why cost per deal matters more than simply focusing on cost per lead.
How investors can approach lead generation with a limited marketing budget.
How AI is changing real estate marketing, SEO, and lead follow-up.
Why Bryan believes humans should remain in command when using AI tools.
Where AI text and automation can help—and why he is cautious about AI voice for seller leads.
How Bryan's early failures in real estate helped him become a better investor.
Why he chose a buy-and-hold strategy and uses his marketing income to build his rental portfolio.
Episode:
Narrator
Welcome to the Norris Group real estate podcast, a show committed to bringing you insights from thought leaders shaping the real estate industry. In each episode we'll dive into conversations with industry experts and local insiders, all aimed at helping you thrive in an ever-changing real estate market. Continuing the legacy that Bruce Norris created, sharing valuable knowledge and empowering you on your real estate journey.
Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newcomer, this is your go-to source for insider tips, market trends, and success strategies. Welcome everybody to the Norris Group real estate podcast. Our guest today is Brian Driscoll, lead generation expert, real estate investor, and founder of the Goodness Game.
Brian built a multi-million dollar lead generation company from scratch, starting as a solo freelancer on Upwork in the early 2000s. Today, his company Motivated Leads is the go-to leading marketing partner for real estate investors across the country, generating motivated seller leads through PPC, Facebook ads, and SEO. But Brian isn't just behind the screen, he's in the game himself.
He's an active investor building a rental portfolio using the BRRRR strategy, focusing on buying and improving properties in one zip code at a time. His philosophy is simple, stay focused, avoid over leveraging, and build wealth you can actually see from your back door. Outside of business, Brian believes in giving back.
He's the creator of the Goodness Game, a simple challenge that encourages people to create a ripple effect of kindness through small daily actions. Brian also enjoys putting himself in the new and uncomfortable challenges. Right now, that includes training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
He's a husband, a father of three boys, and volunteers regularly feeding the homeless through Harvest Street Mission. For Brian, success isn't just about business, it's about building a meaningful life while making a positive impact on others. Brian, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Joey. So let's get right into it. Now, you started as a solo freelancer on Upwork.
Not a lot of people know what Upwork is, that was kind of our secret behind the behind the Norris Group also. We had, we, you know, we, we contracted several folks from Upwork. But when was that moment where you realized that this marketing skill could translate into a business, not for other people, but just for you? Yeah, so you know what, it was after I got my first deal.
So I've, I was always trying to get into real estate, bought courses, failed, things like that. And then I bought my first deal probably about 10 years ago, maybe off of a wholesaler. And I saw the deal, saw how the whole transaction went.
And I'm like, I think I can get these myself, because I've been doing marketing for 20 years. So I was always doing like general marketing, like insurance agencies, or HVAC, or whatever. So I put ads up in Pittsburgh, to generate people that want to sell their house.
And I was really good at it, got a lot of leads. So that's kind of where I bridged the marketing into the real estate. Sweet.
So can you break down the difference between Facebook ads, paperclip advertising, search engine optimization, for motivated leads? Yeah, sure thing. So you got Facebook ads, those are the ads are like one out every three or four posts on Facebook. So what you're doing, if you're running Facebook ads is you're bidding on an impression.
So you're telling Facebook, hey, I'll pay you 20 bucks or 30 bucks to show my ad to 1000 people. And then you want to make sure you have a good pixel and tracking things like that. So Facebook knows who to show it.
But that's kind of like a super high level Facebook ad, you're putting an image or a video out, and basically trying to interrupt people. But it's really effective, because you're because Facebook's algorithm is going to show ads to people looking for what you're offering, if you do if you do your ads, right. Then you have Google Paper Click, that's where you're going to Google and saying, hey, you know what, I want to bid on these keywords, or these phrases or whatever it is, and I'm going to pay you per click.
So Facebook was paid to show my ad, Google might show your ad, they could show your ad 1000 times and you don't pay for it because you're only paying when someone clicks. So that's what you're looking at on there. In this space, it's very, very expensive.
Like we're along the lines of like attorneys, mortgage kind of cost per click, like you can see clicks of 50 bucks, 100 bucks, sometimes even more depending on your market. So super expensive there, right? Third thing is SEO. That's also in Google, what we're trying to do is we're trying to optimize our website to rank in the free section of Google.
Now we're also bridging into like AI, because it's like the top section of Google now is their AI result, which before it was like three ads, and then your results. Now the organic results are down low, but forcing you to use Gemini. Right, yeah.
So what you're doing though, is you're trying to optimize your website. What that means is like your title tags, meta descriptions, your body content, even the names of your images, you want to kind of lay each page out so that the search engine or the AI bot can tell what that page is, what it's relevant for, and then show that page to people that are, that it's going to help, like people that are looking for that. Which one of those is winning right now? Is there one that's doing better than others or does that depend on the market that you're in? Well, it kind of depends.
They kind of work together. So say you're running Google pay-per-click and you're spending $50 a click. On average, it might take you 10, maybe 15 clicks to get a lead.
So you get one click, one lead out of 15. The other 14 people were interested, they're just not ready yet. So that's where Facebook comes into play, because if you have the Facebook pixel on your website, you can retarget those people.
You already paid to get them to your website. Now you stay in front of them, you might pick up the lead for like 20 bucks on Facebook. So they kind of work together.
If I was just gonna pick one though, it kind of comes down to budget. Google, if you have a bigger budget, Facebook if you have a lower budget and a little bit more time. And what is the realistic cost for these types of marketing? And what's the... do you keep track of the conversion rate or is that up to the investor? Yeah, so the cost, it's gonna depend on market.
But I would say the average cost per lead is going to be, say on Facebook, about $150 to $200. On Google, probably $300 to $400. Now if you're in San Diego or somewhere like super competitive, it might be more.
And if you're in a rural area, it might be less. So we do two things. We offer, we can run ads for people and that's where we would run the ads and keep track of KPIs.
And then we also offer a paper lead service where we market and just sell the lead on an a la carte basis. So to answer your first question, if we're doing the custom marketing, we're gonna know the KPIs and we're gonna be optimizing. If we're selling on the paper lead side, we do offer for people to work closely with us so we can help them at each stage.
Some people want us to do it. Some people are like, hey, we got our systems down. We're good.
Wow. And then a lot of them think their AI assistant is gonna help them do that now too. Right.
Yeah. So we'll get into AI in a little bit. But so you talked about KPIs right now.
What is the most common attribution and key performance indicator and the mistakes that you see investors make? Sure. So the KPI everybody should be looking at is cost per deal and then work backwards. Most people with digital marketing, when they start, they're looking at cost per lead.
And that can be like if you run a Facebook lead form, which isn't even sending it to your website, you might get a lead for 20 bucks. I don't recommend doing that, but the cost per lead looks good. So if you're looking on paper, it's like, oh, we're crushing it.
Well, nobody answers the phone. So you want to look at cost per lead, but then cost per contact, like how many people did you contact? Who's a qualified lead? Then you want to look at appointments, like how many, what's your cost per appointment set? What's the cost per appointment that actually shows what's your cost per contract and cost per deal. So I recommend work backwards.
Your cost per deal is the main KPI, but if you're just starting, you're not going to have that number for probably six months. So then you might look at, okay, what's my cost per contract? Or what's my cost per appointment? If you're just starting right now, it's like, okay, what's my cost to get a qualified person on the phone? Make sense? Yep, absolutely. So if someone in our audience right now has a thousand dollars to test and start generating some, paying for some leads, where should they go and what should they realistically expect month one versus six months down the road? Right.
So if they have a thousand bucks, I would say if they're tech savvy, start with Facebook and do it yourself. If you're not tech savvy, if you're not tech savvy, a thousand bucks might not be enough because you're going to have to pay someone to do it. But so we'll, we'll talk about someone doing it themselves though, right? So what I recommend that's going to equal like, I don't know, 33 bucks a day or 35 bucks a day, roughly on Facebook.
You're going to create a couple images. You're going to want to make sure that those are a relative, like look local to you and also have more beat up houses. You don't want pretty houses.
If you're looking for real estate deals, right? You're going to want to use the word sell my house fast. We buy houses, we pay cash, those kinds of phrases. You're going to want to have your website set up, Facebook pixel on the website, run some ads to it, and then you're probably going to fail, but then look at the numbers like in the first week and see, okay, which of these ads sucked and then pause them and then look at, okay, did one of them work and build iterations off of that and use and follow the data.
You're going to want to look at like cost per click, cost per lead the whole way up. All right. Well, we just did a, I was telling you before we started, we just did Tsunami, the AI real estate subnet.
So AI is front of mind for everybody, whether they're scared of it or they love it. Right. But everybody's talking about it.
So how has AI basically changed the game in the lead generation game? Well, AI, it's mind blowing. And then everybody talks about AI. It's like, okay, what type of AI are you talking about? Is it like, are you making images? Are you making videos? Are you analyzing data? Are you building workers on like Cloudflare using Grok bot? It's like, so I think with everybody, it comes down to the use case too.
It's like, okay, number one, what do you grasp about AI? How can you integrate it in your life? And is, is it taking too much of your time or is it helping you? Cause that's another thing I see. It's like AI, you can make cool stuff, but is it making you money? Or is it just like, you're making cool stuff. That's not, you're not working.
And then especially depending on, you know, what it's for, like it could send you down, down rabbit holes and wait a second. Like that's supposed to make me do this faster and not have to give it constant feedback. And so you have to kind of tune it to, to kind of know where, what you're trying to do from the beginning.
Right. So now Google and, you know, everybody's using AI now to, in their algorithms and, and to, you know, whether it's in Facebook to control the targeting, creative and bidding, does that make an experienced marketer more valuable or does it eventually do essentially run into the same campaign? Cause you get a lot of AI slop out there is what they're calling it. Right.
It looks, it looks the same, you know, Hey, make me this, you know, one page that I could, that I could, you know, market and it all kind of looks the same. So what's your, what's your opinion on that? Yeah. And I do agree.
So here's what I see. I see a couple of different people using AI. I see the people that are using AI for, Hey, what should I eat tonight? And then they get excited and they're like, Hey, go build me a website with no context.
And then you come up with a website that looks like everybody's else. Right. And then you have the people that have the idea.
It's like, like more on the marketer side. It's like, okay, here's exactly what I need to happen, but I don't want a developer to do it. I want to use AI so you can make a really good website that way, because it's, because you're not having, it's basically, are you going to think, or is the AI going to think? And the people that I see succeeding really well are the humans are thinking, giving the job to AI and describing it.
And then also ask an AI, Hey, what's wrong with my idea? Make it a little bit better, but then deploying it. So you don't need to pay the developer. You don't need to pay the designer, but it's in your head.
You're not having AI just come up with, Hey, go build me a website that people can fill out to sell their house. Yeah. Well, one of the terms I've started hearing is not the human in the loop.
It's the human in command. Yeah. That's where real estate investors and true entrepreneurs, that's where they really should be in that seat.
So they're, you know, they're starting to use, you know, sellers are starting to use chat, GPT and other AI tools, um, task, um, you know, what to do when they inherit a property or, Hey, what am I supposed to do? So how does, um, what happens to traditional, uh, SEO when people stop clicking through page, um, you know, the endless pages of Google results? Yeah, it's still pretty much the same. It's a little bit different, but the bots are still reading the content. Same as like Google was always just scanning the content, finding what's relevant.
The bots are now doing that. So it comes down to more using structured data, having like an LLM text file to like explain your website a little bit better. And you want to optimize it a little bit different, but I think SEO is, it's kind of just, um, pivoting.
Basically SEO is just getting people to your website for free. Either it's Google or now it's chat, GPT or cloud or whoever it is. Would you allow AI, a voice agent to be the first contact or, um, okay.
What, what's the upside and downside of that? Well, we I've tested it and it, the outcome's not very good. So today I'll say that today, which it's changing very quick. So, and I'll, I'll take a step back there too.
It depends on who we're calling or who, who the contact is. So if I need to call a million calls, maybe, I don't know, maybe it can fish through and find a couple of leads for me. If I'm spending $300 a lead, that is not the first person that I want, or the first experience for that seller to experience in my business.
That's not the bottleneck that I want to create there. Sure. So if you were building or rebuilding your acquisitions operations today, which three AI applications would you implement first? And which tasks would you refuse to delegate? I think we have kind of answered that right now.
But, um, so how, how would you start your company now, if you, if you are starting using all the tools that you have now? That's a good question. So I would use go high level for my CRM. I would probably integrate the clod with it.
And I would, so I'll even take a step back on the first touch from AI. AI text is good. AI voice, I'm finding not so much so far, but I would integrate the AI text message or automations in there.
So when somebody fills out a form, they go into go high level. We're going to send them a text asking them like, Hey, Joey just filled out a form about selling one, two, three main street. How fast do you want to sell the AI? I would have programmed in there to respond after hours.
I want a human responding back during hours after hours. I want AI. I think even go high level has it built in.
Um, I, I built one on clod, like you link the cloud flare and like do some creative worker and everything. Not super complex. I would integrate, uh, there's a website, K I E dot AI.
You heard of that one? No, we use go high level, but not the second one. Okay. So K I E it's, it's a website that has access to a lot of different AI tools that you pay on based on a token.
So what I would use that for is like nano banana pro to make my images for Facebook ads or things like that. Um, you can get VO three. So K I E just gets you access to all the tools versus paying a whole bunch of subscriptions.
You're not going to have, like, you're not always going to make that graphic. So it's just like, kind of like the a la carte, right? Right now. Um, I don't know.
Open AI like chat GPDs just this week, kind of looking kind of cool too. So maybe I would switch images back to there. Um, I would also probably find an influencer or somebody in the AI space to follow because there's no way that you're going to be able to keep up.
Like I'm in the tech industry and I can't even keep up with all the changes. It's like find someone that can kind of point you in a direction. It's like, okay, pick your direction and then follow it.
Like if you build an AI bot on cloud and something else cool comes out next week, be cool with your bot and focus on something else for the time being. And it's like, if it's not broken, don't fix it. Cause there's a lot of shiny object stuff.
Yeah. There's a lot of those guys on Tik TOK and a lot of social media where they'll give you like the, the secret like prompts and you know, and they'll go on, Oh, here's the 10 prompts that you're going to need. If you're, if you're going to build a, you know, your next website or whatever.
But yeah, I've seen those guys. Let's, let's get into your, um, in personal investing. You know, um, how did, uh, you talked about when you got your first deal, but what, were you always like interested in like, Hey, I want to get into real estate.
Like why did you go into real estate and not something else? Yeah. So I was interested. I was interested since like back in the nineties, like right after I got out of high school, I went to one of Ron LeGrand seminars.
It was here in Pittsburgh. One of their circuits where they go to all the hotels and they got me in the back of the room for like 1800 bucks, which was a ton of money at the time. Um, but I bought the course.
It was on CDs. It was like a, it was a binder with paper and like CD discs had the contracts and everything. So I followed the book, went out, put ads in the newspapers, said we buy houses with a phone number, got a bunch of calls and didn't know what to do with them.
Like, I'm like, okay, Hey, you can get it. You can get all these deals using none of your own money. I'm trying to talk to these sellers.
I'm 18 years old. So I, so I failed. It didn't work.
Right. But what I learned there was, I was able to take that knowledge and take it into the future. And then I started buying properties again and I bought my first deal off of a wholesaler, but I understood the whole fundamentals of real estate investing and getting the deals and owner financing.
If I chose, I didn't go the owner financing route, but I understood it, understood the burr method. So I was able to like connect the dots of the failures in the past in the future. And that's how I got into it.
And I was just kind of doing it as a side hustle just for fun. So what, what kind of fed into the other, like what was the, what was the lead generation? Like, like where, where your, where your heart was or did, did the lead generation kind of come from like, Hey, how can I be a better real estate investor? Like, so which one was it? Like did the lead generation just make you a better real estate investor or Hey, you know, you, you built a better company because it's, it's what you needed. Yeah.
So the real estate, the digital marketing came first. So I was always doing digital marketing. Then I got into real estate and what I was doing was I was taking my money from digital marketing.
So I had a nine to five job. So I was working nine to five in insurance, digital marketing in the mornings and afternoon, like after work. And so I, and I didn't live off that income.
So I built up that nest egg. And then my, my idea was I'm going to take this money and deploy it into real estate. So that's kind of what I did.
I started saving up and I bought my first property and I brought a cash and it's like, okay, this makes sense. Cause I can buy a property. Then I can get my money back out of it and do it again.
So how do you do now? Like, cause you know, the, our, our, our founder Bruce Norris was always a, he's always a flipper, just 6,500 deals in 40 year career. And the one regret that he has is like, I should've hung on to more of them. You know? So what, how's your balance in your portfolio? Are you, are you flipping? Did you ever flip? You know, were you always a buy and hold guy? Like what's, what's your portfolio look like? Yeah, it's always buy and hold.
Just because I wasn't, I didn't need to make the money from the real estate. So most guys in this space, you got a wholesale or flip and then you keep one out of four or something. You've got to live.
I didn't have that because I had income coming in. So I bought junkers, fixed them like I would for a flip. And then I just refinanced my initial cash back out.
I left the equity in the property though, pulled my initial cash back out. And I'm looking at it like it's like pushing money into the future. That's going to do it for part one of our interview with Brian Driscoll of Motivated Leads.
And for more information on Motivated Leads, go to motivatedleads.com. See you next week. For more information on hard money loans, trusteed investing and upcoming events with the Norris Group, check out thenorrisgroup.com. For more information on passive investing through the DBL Capital Real Estate Investment Fund, please visit dblcapital.com. The Norris Group originates in services loans in California and Florida under the California DRE license 01219911, Florida mortgage lender license 1577, and NMLS license 1623669. For more information on hard money lending, go to thenorrisgroup.com and click the hard money.
