How to Find Commercial Loan Leads

Commercial real estate lenders looking to grow their firms need a solid lead generation strategy to compete in the commercial real estate industry. We’re not here to try to teach you how to secure borrowers — that’s your area of expertise! Rather, we want to show you how a CRE database paired with a targeted marketing technique can get you the leads you need. 

Traditional lead generation methods include:

• Networking

• Paid advertisement

• Lists of property and asset owners

• Exhibiting at a conference or industry expo

There’s nothing wrong with keeping up these strategies if they’re working! A mixed bag of lead generation strategies keeps your marketing strategy diversified so that you’re not relying entirely on one strategy. But, using Biscred, you’ll have the best way to access potential borrowers within CRE property operators, businesses, investors and more. 

Biscred is the best database specifically built for the real estate industry. If you want to learn more about how our platform can work for your business, schedule a demo to see how Biscred can generate commercial loan leads. 

This recent CRE case study with BridgeInvest shows how they doubled their loan originations from $300 million to $600 million using Biscred.

The Best Alternative to Commercial Lender Lead Lists

Our pitch for Biscred’s smart datasets is simple: We provide up-to-date information on more than 500,000 companies and over 3.8+ million CRE professionals (which are updated weekly). 

Step 1: Filter by audience industry

Only you know your ideal customer, but as an example, let’s start filtering our search to property operators, investors, and property managers, which already results in 46,499 companies and 624,411 CRE professionals in those industries across the United States (see how we categorize industries here). 

Step 2: Filter by location

We’ll filter our search to just some states in the Midwest like Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota. This gets us 3,494 companies, including 744 in Wisconsin, 2,091 in Illinois, and 746 in Minnesota. 

(Hey, wait: That adds up to more than 3,494! That’s because some companies do business in multiple states.)

Step 3: Narrow Search To Asset Class 

That’s still thousands of potential contacts, so let's narrow our search even further by getting into the specifics of what asset classes your lender usually deals with. For example, let's narrow our search to office and get 1,294 companies in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota (learn more about how Biscred organizes asset classes).

Step 4: Even more specific searches

Still getting too many results or leads that may not be relevant to your lending firm? Narrow your search even further with more parameters like:

• Cities (Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, etc.). 

• Keywords for borrower types (coworking spaces, hybrid office spaces, managed office spaces, etc.).

• Size of company by contacts (or employees) and the types of properties owned/managed

The smarter your prospect targeting, the more likely you are to find property owners, managers, and investors relevant to your lending firm’s interests. No matter your specialty or expertise, Biscred will help connect your CRE lender with the leads you need to be successful. 

Commercial Lender Lead Generation vs. Smart Prospecting

Smart prospecting targets the specific segments of your audience that are most likely to convert to leads. There are a few reasons why it’s generally more effective than using a traditional lead list: 

1. Useful leads: Lead lists tend to have high volume, which makes them difficult to segment and filter. This often manual process ends up costing time and money, as you sort through the lead list and select the leads that may actually be worth pursuing. 

2. Quality control: A lead list may not be actively updated or may contain outdated data. Your company may waste time pursuing a lead that contains outdated information. 

3. Limited data: Purchased lead lists may not have any information about how the leads qualified to be on their list or how they collected the data, which can lead to inaccuracies or misinterpreted data. 

4. Missed audience segments: A lead list collector may require that businesses opt-in to be on the lead list, which tends to miss opportunities from firms that opt-out or ignore the lead list service.   

   
   

Biscred’s platform is a data-driven lead prospecting tool that makes lead generation for CRE lenders far more efficient. We collect our CRE data through a combination of machine learning and analysts validation using publicly available sources.  

If you want to learn about how to improve your outreach and effectively use modern datasets, see our in-depth guide for finding better CRE leads. 

Ready to Get Started?

Biscred fits into your CRE lender lead generation by giving you better data and the type of niche business information that your firm needs to grow. 

Ready to start? Contact us to schedule a demo!

Boost your CRE loan leads in 3 steps:

1. Identify your ideal target market: Organize all the qualities that are important to you, such as location, property type, asset class, CRE sector, borrower size, and more. Also, consider the qualities that make a lead a bad fit for your lending or financial services! Some property types and value of assets may not be within the scope of your firm. 

2. Inbound lead generation channels: An essential part of lead generation is making it viable for potential leads to find you! You can learn more about the difference between inbound and outbound leads here. Some common methods are to leverage social media, optimize your website for search engines (SEO), and create useful, informative content that targets the terms that CRE property owners, managers, and investors may be searching for. 

3. Outbound lead nurturing: On the other hand, your firm also needs to make an effort to reach out to leads with personalized messaging that speaks to their interests and problems that your firm can solve. Outbound lead nurturing includes direct calling, email campaigns, and more personalized messaging. With outbound lead generation, you want to show how your firm is an expert in its field and can be trusted for commercial lending. 

Get the Biscred eBook series on commercial real estate growth, marketing, conversion management and more.