Real Estate Lead Generation & Conversion

So we talk a lot about search engine optimization strategies and different tools needed in cyberspace here at the Broker Dynamix blog. Today, let’s talk about how Broker Dynamix works.

1. We create a customized browse site.

What is a browse site? It is a website that supplements your existing website. We don’t direct traffic away from your current website. Instead we increase your internet footprint by customizing your site with MLS/IDX search. This increases your outreach to visitors on major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

2. By using the MLS/IDX search, traffic to your browse site increases six to eight weeks later.

So once visitors visit the site, then what happens? Well, they can use the MLS/IDX search to look through the properties they want. They can then register or comment on properties. This generates a lead which we put through our innovative lead generation technology to ensure that this is a REAL person, interested in buying a real property.

3. What’s the catch?

We don’t have a catch. If you have a problem with the leads you’re receiving, we don’t charge you for fake leads or spam. By using our method, we make sure we’re targeting your website towards real people, not a re-hashed list of a certain number of people who aren’t interested in your services.

4. Please have a conversation with us.

We invite you to have a conversation with us. Just email us at support@brokerdynamix.com or visit our website at http://www.brokerdynamix.com

What is Stopping you from Coverting your Internet Leads?

The million dollar question is about to be answered.  By whom, you might ask?  By you, I might answer.  Let me start with asking you some questions and depending on your responses, you may have just found the perfect answer.

I often hear real estate professionals complaining that their internet leads are not converting.  I often ask the question, “What system are you using to track and manage your leads?”  Eight out of ten times I get one of the following:

1.   “When a lead comes in via e-mail, our customer service representative responds with an e-mail, acknowledging the request for more information and then ask them that if they would like an Agent to contact them, please give us a call or shoot us an e-mail.”

2.  “When an Internet Lead comes in via e-mail, unless they specify a specific property of interest, I simply respond with a “Thank you” and let us know how we can help.

3.  “When an Internet Lead comes through via e-mail requesting specific information, I assign the lead to an Agent and leave it up to them to take it to closing.”  The Agent may or may not report and maintain the tracking of this lead – but they don’t get a percentage if they don’t close.

4.  “We don’t follow up with any leads.  I figure if they have a property in mind, they will call.  We generally don’t know where the leads come from if they are phoned in, but we assume they found us in the yellow pages or just know our brand and use an Internet Search.”.  “We use an internal tracking honor system in hopes that the lead will be tracked in our system, our lead generator’s system until closing.”

Do any of these responses sound familiar to you?  Having a lead tracking system in place is the most essential step in converting your Internet Leads.

Lead generation is definitely a touchy topic in the world of real estate and believe it or not I understand. The funny thing is, I work for a lead generation company, which is not a secret if you look at my profile. After reading numerous blogs and headlines regarding real estate professionals who have been burnt by lead generation, all I can say is, I’m sorry that happened to you. When you pay for a service, you are expecting someone who will followt through on a promise. So when there is a guarantee of, “high quality leads,” you expect someone to follow  through with that service, the same way you follow through every day when you go to meet with potential home buyers, work with other agents, and try to make a customer’s experience an easy one, while proving that you’re a reliable professional.

I am not writing today to promote selling you a list of high quality leads for five easy installments of 19.95. Instead, I’d like to invite you to have a conversation with us here at Broker Dynamix. Here’s what we do in a nutshell: we work specifically with brokerages. We create a customized browse site to complement your existing website, we keep your website with your brand, your logos, and consistently marketing your brokerage. Our site comes customized with MLS/IDX search and we analyze the best keywords so that six weeks after the site launches, your site generates real traffic with real leads from actual customers who are looking at properties on YOUR site. If the lead turns out to be faulty, we’ll work with you and credit your account. So when we guarantee you quality, real-live leads, we mean it. In addition, we don’t sell to your competition. We only work with one brokerage per MLS, so you know that your leads are EXCLUSIVE.

If you’ve been burnt before by faulty lead generation systems, I understand you’d be wary of another lead generation system, especially when you might feel like lead generation should come from the hard work of a brokerage or agent hitting the pavement and marketing the right way. What we’re offering is to help you increase your Internet footprint using technology readily available to you, we are not selling you a list of prefabircated leads while you pay for dead ends.

If you have the time, please give us a call at 847-680-8811 or visit us again at www.brokerdynamix.com. We’d love to have a conversation with you regarding our systems. Otherwise, we wish you the best of luck and hopefully you’re all enjoying the spring weather.

In the age of the Internet, I think we all get caught up by terms as new forms emerge. Ten years ago, “change agent” wasn’t an actual job description and “brands” appeared to apply to things like Pepsi Cola (or Coke depending on which one your prefer). What fascinates me about the real estate market and the real estate industry in general is the concept of people becoming a brand. In one sense, your brokerage counts as a brand, but what about agents? You go from the main brokerage website into smaller individual websites with information about the agent who may or may not also have links to personal promotion mediums such as Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, blog posts (hence Active Rain). Does this marketing classify you as a brand?  As an individual who grew up in a smaller town, I can remember vividly seeing so many signs of one particular agent around the neighborhood. We also had a local hot air balloon port so every time I see a REMAX sign, I’m reminded of a certain young family member who wandered off just to chase the balloon.  The point of these memories is that a brand surely sticks in our consciousness. We can all recite jingles, talk about Super Bowl commercials, and mention other goods as well as services. But what I would like is to what extent do you as a real estate professional look at yourself as a brand? And what do you do to differentiate yourself if you do see yourself as a brand?

Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?:  Broker Dynamix Defining a Real Estate “Lead.”

In business, a “lead” means many different things: the next source of information, the perfect sales tip, the next business prospect or transaction. What about real estate? Where does the term lead fit into the ever changing world of buyer’s markets, seller’s markets, foreclosures etc.?

A Lead is a Potential Business Prospect, Typically A Person

Definition 1 takes the idea of a lead from the traditional business approach. As a salesperson, you receive leads or tips on the next prospect, the next big “thing” (client, market, product, or service ) will bring in profit.

What Do Leads Do? Where Do They Come From?

A handful of  real estate professionals definea lead as the potential buyer, a fish in the water who will eventually net profit by buying property in an agent’s particular geographic area. Other professionals try to place leads in different categories so  specifically that a lead is only a prospect (typically a buyer) supplied by a third-party that has a for-sure interest in purchasing real estate.

By defining lead in such terms, real estate professionals run into a potential problem, you limit the definitions to extremely narrow margins.

The Problem with Defining Thinking, “Lead = Buyer”  or “Leads Come To Me”

The idea of a lead as solely a buyer tempts a person into thinking: “Ok, my leads are buyers, with cash in hand, ready to make a purchase.” If leads are buyers, then you might say the best leads are the ones who are ready to buy and will bring you, the agent, instant profit.

In addition, adopting the idea of a lead as a prospect, an agent or professional may be tempted to think, “Leads come to me, so there’s nothing more I can do.”

These Definitions Will Keep You From Being Proactive, Making You Lose Potential Business

By narrowing your “lead” search to the cash in hand buyer or the quick profit prospect, you may lose the opprotunity to build future business. It’s tempting to take more time and follow up with leads or individuals who are absolutley ready  to jump into the real estate ocean. Why waste your time and their time, right?

However, by limiting your leads (only to buyers, only to results generated by others, or  only to the informed consumer, etc.) will hurt your customer service and ultimately, hurt your business in the long run. You may find yourself spending so much time with Informed Buyer A that you lose Clueless Seller B’s business.  ISeller B may leave feeling ignored and not only will you lose business, but your reputation will suffer. Even in the Information Age, word of mouth does matter.

Besides, a third-party service can help generate or bring you leads, but as a professional you need to be proactive! Following up with leads goes beyond calling Buyer A, selling them a home, and then moving on. As an individual, you need to be proactive in building relationships and optimizing those relationships. Your long-term connection with Buyer A has the potential to bring you referrals. Viewing a seller as a lead increases your chances of potential business, your reptuation, and your customer service skills by taking time to help empower your customer. After all a little bit a patience with a potential, albiet clueless customer could pay off dividends in the future.

Bottom Line:

Broker Dynamix sees a Real Estate “Lead” as:

A Person

Interested in Real Estate (No matter how clueless!)

A Buyer or Seller

Who Comes to You On Their Own OR Through Another Connection

A VIP who You Must Empower, Whether they are ready to do Business Now or In the Future

There has been a lot of buzz lately in the real estate community about adding QR codes to marketing materials. QR codes (short for quick response) are two-dimensional images that can be read by smart phones, using technology that is similar to that of store checkout bar code scanners. When a prospect with a camera equipped smartphone loaded with a QR reader points and clicks at the code, they are served up a mobile site with your listing and contact info.

The best answer to the question of whether you need to add QR codes to real estate marking materials may be that: 1) adding QR codes to yard signs has probably gained enough momentum that it should be strongly considered; and 2) the use of QR codes has not become mainstream enough to justify the cost of reprinting existing print materials and business cards.

The rational for the mixed advice is that QR codes only reach a small segment of the population. Among mobile phone users, only about a quarter have smart phones. And even among the smart phones users, only a fraction of them take advantage of the smart phone applications required to read QR codes. However despite the small size of the population that accesses QR codes, they tend to an extremely desirable audience of upscale, trendy home buyers. Further adding QR codes to yard signs will position you as being innovative and forward thinking. Adding QR codes to yard signs is probably a worthwhile investment because they are such a potent marketing device and are typically viewed by prospects without immediate access to a desktop computer. There is also a bit of “keeping up with the Jones” aspect of utilizing QR codes. Coldwell Banker in particular has been expanding the use of QR codes. For reference, Peter Toner has compiled a list of some potential uses for QR codes in real estate marketing.

On the other hand, given the limited percent of the population that is actually utilizing QR codes, adding them to all your marketing materials seems a bit faddish. While a QR code can be quickly accessed by a smart phone, a printed URL serves the same function, simply requiring many more taps on the mobile phone keypad to input the URL. Thus, it seems a bit premature to attempt a cost justification for discarding and reprinting all your marketing materials in order to replace them with new ones featuring QR codes.

Anyone that has even the slightest involvement with real estate lead generation has some interaction with search engines. The search engine landscape in the US has changed dramatically with Yahoo search indexing now being powered by MSN. Yahoo’s pay per click program is also in the process of transitioning to being powered by MSN. While a case can be made that Ask is a third player, their share 2.14% of US searches (as reported by Hitwise) makes them so minor that they can be easily dismissed. Although there are other services, such as Wolfram Alpha, that fill useful niches, when it comes to mainstream text based search, Google and MSN powered search dominate the US market with a 97% share.

It seems stunning that Yahoo has given up trying to compete with Google’s search indexing and pay per click programs when one considers the search providers and technology Yahoo has acquired over the years. The following is a list of some of Yahoo’s search related acquisitions and estimated acquisition price. And this list would be larger if it included acquisitions made by companies that Yahoo acquired. Overture was on an acquisition binge in 2003 prior to being purchased by Yahoo. Overture’s acquisitions included Alta Vista and FAST (All The Web).

Yahoo’s Search Related Acquisitions

Year      Company                  Value
1997      Net Controls      $       1,400,000
2002      Inktomi              $   235,000,000
2003      Overture            $1,630,000,000
2006      Search Fox                  N/A

Combining Yahoo’s spending on acquiring search related technology companies and spending on in-house development, it seems likely that they spent over $2 billion on search technology. While Yahoo asserts that they are still a seach company, if indexing the Web has become such a gargantuan task that even with $2 billion in spending, Yahoo chooses to no longer continue to attempt to keep pace with Google, it seems questionable if any company other than Microsoft has the resources to do so in the US. Even Ask’s well funded parent company, IAC/Interactive Corp, with $3.7 billion in assets, is reluctant go toe to toe with Google.

From a lead generation standpoint, the reduction in search engines that matter from three down to two probably simplifies seach engine optimization and search engine marketing. Obviously, it is easier to focus on just two search engines. For smaller programs conserving resources by only targetting Google, it may now make sense to expand the effort to include MSN since it will also power Yahoo’s organic search and pay per click.

A single property website focuses on showcasing a single property or a single listing. There is some debate over whether single property websites are an effective marketing tactic or just a gimmick to impress current and prospective clients. A single property website certainly offers vanity appeal to a home seller that has a website dedicated exclusively to their property. However, beyond just being a vanity offering that impresses clients, there are marketing benefits to creating single property websites. Having a short URL, such as www.propertyaddress.com, is very straight forward and memorable when used in marketing marterials and e-mails. Due to the limited number of characters, a single property domain does not use up much space and avoids having annoying line breaks that occur with long URLs.  Single property website domain names are particularly effective when utilized on yard signs. They fit on the signs and are memorable even to prospects quickly passing by in their cars.

Another benefit of a single property website to a home seller is that a prospective buyer directed to a website focused on their property is not going to be distracted by opportunities to browse other homes. There is no “shiny object”  search box on the site pulling the prospect’s attention away from the seller’s property. This applies in particular when a prospect enters the address of the home directly into a search engine. It is much better for the home seller to deliver the prospect directly to information about the seller’s property rather than to a webpage where the viewer may have to scroll through lots of properties before they find the right one, with lots of opportunities to become distracted by competing homes.

Although the following are single property subdomain websites, they serve as good examples of what a single property website looks like.  

22429 Brookside Court, Lake Barrington IL 60010

http://22429brooksideway.agents123.com

3550N Pine Grove Avenue, Chicago IL 60657

http://3550northpinegroveavenue.agents123.com

For reference, the above are subdomains because they are webpages on the agents123.com website. A full fledged single property website would only have “www.propertyaddress.com” in the URL without adding any other domain name inbetween the property address and dotcom (agents123.com in the above example), but the above  offer good examples of  the content of a single property website.

If you are interested in more information about single property websites, or would like to discuss having us create single property websites for your clients, contact us at sales@brokerdynamix.com or call  (847) 680-8811.

There has been some buzz lately suggesting that online real estate leads must be responded to within 5 minutes. However, research that I conducted on thousands of online real estate leads suggested that the time frame is a bit longer than just 5 minutes, if not all that much longer. While it certainly is not a bad thing to respond to an online lead within five minutes, the results that I reviewed indicated that the value of the lead did not begin to significantly degrade until after about the 15 minute mark. So while a quick response is required to maximize the conversion rate on online real estate leads, you don’t need to panic if you are on the phone and can’t get to them within 5 minutes. Further, the review of conversion rates of online leads indicated that as long as a connection with the lead was made during the same day that the lead was submitted, then the conversion rate remained fairly high. The huge drop off occurred if the lead was not connected with on the day they submitted their contact information. Conversion rate from lead to sale dropped off by 40-50 percent if not contacted on the same day.

A surprising result of the study was that the conversion rate of leads contacted more than 15 minutes but within an hour after submission, was only about five percent below the rate on leads contacted within one to four hours. Thus, the one hour mark was not very meaningful in terms of contacting leads. The two key deadlines seemed to be 15 minutes and same day.

As a caveat, the above referenced study was conducted based upon reviewing real estate leads that were exclusive to a single real estate broker. It may not be the least bit applicable to leads that are sold to multiple sources. 

It seems likely that the idea that online real estate leads must be responded to within five minutes is based upon research by Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT on lead response management. However this study is focused upon leads in general and is skewed based on lead generation companies that sell their leads simultaneously to multiple sources.

Regardless of whether the deadline for responding to online real estate leads is 5 minutes or 15 minutes, a key factor in producing a good lead to sale conversion rates is to respond quickly.

Internet leads are different. They tend to be self directed, better informed, and don’t need to be chauffeured to as many viewings. On the other hand, they can be challenging to close because often they are simply in the information gathering process and months away from conducting a transaction. Also, despite the fact that they will take longer to close, they demand greater responsiveness. Failure to respond to a fresh Internet lead within 15 minutes diminishes the likelihood of closing the lead. Further, you are typically likely to have much more perceived credibility with a traditional lead. With an Internet lead, you are usually starting from scratch in terms of gaining their trust and even getting them to take your phone calls.

An informative article on courting Internet leads, “Meeting Consumers Earlier in the Process Means You Need to Adjust Your Approach” by Jim Zirbes was recently published by Arizona Realtor Magazine. The article includes a sample phone conversation script using a traditional lead approach and an Internet lead appropriate approach.