Honest breakdown of what actually works for motivated seller leads in 2025

So I've been running marketing for a cash buying operation in Northwest Indiana for a while now and I keep seeing the same questions come up in this forum about lead generation so figured I'd just share what's actually working for us right now versus what we stopped doing.

What we stopped doing:

Cold calling. We ran it for about two years and the ROI just doesn't make sense when you factor in the time, the dialers, the list costs, and the conversion rate. Maybe it works great for some people but for us the quality of a motivated seller who found us through SEO or even paid ads is just fundamentally different from someone we interrupted during dinner.

Aggregator leads. Bought them for a while. Expensive, shared with multiple buyers, and the sellers have usually already talked to five other people before you even call them. Hard to build a real business on leads you don't own.

What's actually working:

City pages. We have individual landing pages for every city we buy in. Each one is optimized for that specific city — local language, neighborhood references, the whole thing. These pages produce organic leads every single week without any ad spend once they rank.

Situation pages. Pages built around specific seller situations — foreclosure, inherited property, divorce, fire damage. The leads that come from these pages are warmer than almost anything else we generate because the person already understands their situation and is actively looking for a solution.

Meta Ads with situation-specific creative. Stopped running generic "we buy houses" ads and switched to ads that speak to specific situations. "Inherited a house you don't want to manage?" performs completely differently than a generic cash buyer ad.

Google Ads sent to the right pages. We used to send all our Google Ads traffic to the homepage. CPL was terrible. Now every keyword cluster goes to a dedicated city or situation page. CPL dropped significantly.

Happy to go deeper on any of this if it's useful. What's working in your market right now?