Real Estate Lead Generation & Conversion

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

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.

RISMEDIA, March 9, 2010—Online marketing is–in comparison to the business of selling real estate–a relatively new thing. Just 10 years ago, it was not an important part of any agent’s marketing for many reasons. Now, with a majority of North Americans having access to high-speed broadband Internet, online marketing is one of the most important parts of any agents marketing; after all, with more than 80% of all residential home sales beginning online, if you can’t make it work for you, you are missing out on 80% of the business.

What is SEO?
Please think of the Internet as a giant filing cabinet and think of each page on a website as a conventional manila file in alphabetical order. Currently, more than eleven billion pages of websites are indexed by search engines. That means that when a shopper types in what she wants to see, the search engine must find the proper file and show it as a choice in a fraction of a second. This can’t happen without proper SEO (search engine optimization), because even a computer has trouble indexing 11 billion different files; as the search engine goes to the “location” file and parses down to whatever is being searched for (homes, condos, real estate, real estate agent, etc.), wherever it is, there will be at least 500 real estate agents in the mix. SEO affects which 10 agents are shown first, and so on, with the goal of putting your site on that first page, where the prospect can choose it. You can see the problem: not only is the Internet one large filing cabinet, just getting to the right location in .3 seconds is a chancy thing—especially if your ‘file’ is misfiled. That’s the function of SEO: to put your site in the proper file where it can be found every time under what you sell—in as many different descriptions of what you sell as possible.

Non-agents are making it harder for agents to get onto that first page
These days, large corporations and portals are trying to elbow individual agents off those first pages. The biggest offenders are lead aggregators, who try to have anyone searching for a home anywhere end up at their central site so they can sell that name to their customers—sell it (in many cases) multiple times. These lead aggregators never brand to you, they brand only their own brand. They all have spent huge amounts getting their aggregator on as many different searches as they can—although they have no offices there. (Please note that proper organic search can still outperform the big entities, enabling an agent to be found on 500 or more search terms on the first pages. While that is a good thing for every agent, it is also a clear indicator that in years to come, getting found will continue to get harder and it will become–even more—the province of professionals).

The consumer, however, usually does not want to talk to a faceless corporation so in most cases, they skip those corporate sites and look for a local individual agent to work with, instead. They’ll click on those agents’ sites and if they like what greets them, maybe they’ll stick around. Of course, without SEO, those agents won’t be able to be found on that first page.

Just being on that page is not going to sell houses; more is needed today
Five years ago, if an agent could just get to that first page, success would follow. Today, it’s not enough. These days, it’s all about conversion—from random visitor into lead. Most individual websites do a poor job at converting visitors into leads partially because most websites are simply software templates designed by big software marketers. They sell the same page over and over again in the form of a website subscription and they can’t worry about optimization; standardization is their big concern and that is at odds with customization, which is needed to make the site “stickier,” i.e., to make people stay there and sign in.

Custom sites, on the other hand, have a whole separate set of issues as custom Web builders tend to be more expert in “pretty” than in “effective” and many of them will not “desecrate” their designs in order to implement things vital to success online, like lead capture. Online marketing is not about “pretty.” Forget trying to win that “most beautiful website” award. Try to convert 5% of your unique visitors to sign-ins, instead.

If you don’t have visitors you can’t convert them to sign-ins and without proper SEO, you probably won’t have enough visitors to matter. Even if you do have proper SEO you might not get enough visitors in some cases. You must have a minimum level of traffic; the better and more effective your site is, the less visitors you need and vice-versa. To the extent that your site is more effective, you can do with less traffic—when your site is effective you may find that even 100 visitors monthly produces a steady stream of good leads. Success in online marketing only begins when people register on your site—voluntarily—because they really do want more information.

SEO is getting more complicated and so is succeeding at online marketing
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft know the value of their search engines so they continually make it harder for folks to affect their placement on them. Blogs and social networking are developments to try to get more placement than the search engines algorithms would accord an ordinary site. For a while, that may help with SEO, but the engines are adjusting and will continue to do so.

What agent has the time and/or inclination to try to stay abreast of all these changes? That, dear readers, is why 90% of agents are unhappy with the production from their websites: it’s just too hard to keep on top of all these constantly changing factors for most people to do while trying to list and sell real estate.

SEO is but one part of a balanced approach
You could study SEO for years, only to find out that much of what you learned had been superseded by new developments and algorithms, making what you learned obsolete. You could blog until your fingers bleed and not sell one home online. You could drive yourself around the bend trying—and failing—to succeed online, just like 90% of all agents, until you just give up and admit defeat.

Here’s what you need to do:
-Maintain a good marketing platform with information available to the consumer upon request; get them to tell you what they want and give it to them;
-Make certain that people searching the Web for homes can find your site;
-Build traffic and convert visitors to your site into registrations;
-Learn the proper way to follow up these leads; the timing, the methods and the follow-up techniques.

Do that and the world of buyers will beat a path to your door. If you can’t do that all by yourself, you need to hire an entity or person to do it for you, or you will never get a shot at the 80+% of home sales that begin on the Internet.

Success online is becoming a specialty and you aren’t a specialist in online marketing
You could learn how to do this—but how long would it take and how much would it cost? The right way to evaluate the issue is to decide just what online success would be worth to you, and then decide whether it is worth your effort.

Here’s how you decide:
-How many homes did you sell last year?
-How many homes did you sell last year as a result of your online marketing?
-What was the average commission you made on each of those home sales?
-How many additional units would you need to sell to cover the costs and time necessary to learn how to do this or to hire experts to do it for you? (Hint: It’s less than ONE side in most cases).

The Internet is not going to lose market share
Buyers want to browse the Web and look at homes, but they want a real professional with them when they get down to buying one. That is the fundamental reason that real Internet leads are so valuable; 81% of the time, handled properly, that lead will stay with you all the way to purchasing a home. Life as an agent is so much more satisfying when you always have new people to call on and the Internet can provide those people for you to call on. More than 80% of all residential homes sales start online and that’s not going to decrease. Instead of trying to become a ‘master of the Internet,’ why not just stay a master of real estate sales and consider hiring professionals to do your Internet prospecting for you? Use the Web to prospect; you spend your time selling things to people.

It’s a radical idea to some people. But in reality, it’s the only way to guarantee success in online marketing. Let others worry about algorithms and changing search engine patterns; you hold them accountable to produce buyers for you. What could make more sense?

This article has been re-posted with permission by Author, Mike Parker (mparker@theblackwatercg.com).  Mike is a well known authority on the subject of online marketing services for Realtors® and other real estate professionals. If you’d like a actual demonstration right there at your desk about how you can have strong internet prospecting done for you more cheaply and more effectively than you can do it yourself, click here and an actual live demo will be done for you at no cost or obligation—right at your desk.

The Etiquette of Effective Lead Capture

It’s been written around the Web that 90+% of real estate websites and blogs are not effective at their intended purpose.  This is assuming that your goal for your site is the actual direct generation of business.  If all you want is a billboard to place your listings and show to your listing clients, then most any site will do, and you really don’t need to get into lead capture as a strategy.

However, that’s a great waste of the potential of a real estate website.  Believe it or not, you can generate listing client leads as easily as buyer leads with the right website and tools.  The trick is to entice your visitors to give you their contact information, not steal it from them with black-hat techniques.  The right content, a great IDX search page, featured listings, and special offerings is the way to go.

Though there are ways to do it, you never want a visitor to your site to automatically get an email because you somehow captured their address without their knowledge or approval.  If you are capturing the contact information of a site visitor, it should always be with their full knowledge, and it should happen because they intended to give it to you.  Usually, that will not happen with a simple “Please sign our guestbook” popup.  Why should they … what’s in it for them.

You also do not want to make them jump through too many hoops to get to useful information or search for listings.  It should be easy, and studies have shown that sites with a lot of useful information without login or requirement for contact information will get more traffic and page views.  So, that gets them there, but how do we get that valuable email address or even a phone call?  How de we get the visitor to the next level?

• A very visible email link on EVERY page.

• Your phone number on every page.

• If you use one, have one of the services “Call Me” buttons on every page that connects them from their phone to you.

• Special reports delivered via email.  BUT!  Every template website in the world has “How to make your kitchen show better.”  You need to do better than that, with useful locally-focused reports like “Negotiations in the YourTown real estate market,” etc.

• Statistics, statistics, statistics.  Buyers want to know what the market is doing.  Sellers want to compare their home to what has sold recently.  Everybody loves statistics if they’re close to buying or selling real estate.  You can offer useful general market stats for free, but offer in-depth stats and commentary as special reports by email.  They’ll give you their email address to get them.

• If your IDX limits the information fields, offer a widget or other way to sign up for more detailed listing reports, more like the ones you see when you log in as a Realtor.  They send you the MLS numbers, and you send them back detailed listing reports.

• You might offer the in-depth statistics as a weekly or monthly email newsletter, rather than a special report.  You just go into the MLS and generate a report of recent sold averages and that becomes the special newsletter with some commentary by you on your perceptions of what they mean.

Note the theme here.  The Internet, and real estate even more so, is becoming very transparent, with great amounts of information freely available.  If you try to force signup to get what they can get freely elsewhere, they’ll end up elsewhere.  Actually, this goes hand-in-hand with positioning yourself as the local area real estate expert.  You do that by providing this special information and extended reports and statistics.

I mentioned buyers and sellers.  Too many real estate professionals think that a website or blog is primarily to attract buyers, and they may not even like dealing with them.  The fact is that a really good website will attract listing clients as well.  If your command of market knowledge, and your reporting of statistics, shows potential sellers that you’re on top of the market, they’ll want you to list their home.

It’s really not complicated to generate leads from a web presence.  You provide information that visitors want, use marketing and SEO to get them there, then offer valuable extras to show you are the expert and to get that contact information.

This article has been reprinted with permission by it’s Author: Peyman Aleagha, Founder and President of RealtySoft.com.

The question of how much should a real estate broker or agent pay for Internet leads is a frequent topic of conversation.

The answer is “it depends”. The quality of  leads vary dramatically from lead generation firm to lead generation firm. In addition to the charge from the lead generation firm, there are the costs incurred and time involved in working the leads. For a low quality lead that is being resold to numerous real estate professionals and that has a liklihood of closing of under 0.5% (1 out ot 200), one dollar may be too much tp pay. On the other hand, a fresh lead that is requesting a showing of a specific property on a specified day may be worth over $100. 

Ben Roberts, TheExitPro, has researched the cost of leads from a sampling of the top lead generation firms. With his permission, his research is being republished here. We are  publishing an except from Ben’s article on the prices of some of our competitors in the lead generation space in part because we are very confident that the quality and the pricing of the leads Broker Dynamix  provides to our clients compares favorably to the lead generation service  of these competitors:

Realty Generator (market leader) – $15-$30

Is generally on a small brokerage basis and pricing starts with $1500 a month ‘maintenance” plus whatever PPC advertising you’re going to do through them. I will say, their system does work but it takes several months to see leads coming through the funnel turn in into closed business. A 12 month contract is required for a minimum of $18,000 without advertising. You’re paying some major bucks in the meantime so make sure you have cash in reserve. You can also drive the price per lead down if you can drive your own traffic to the site via organic search.

GetMyHomesValue.com -$225-$400 (per month) Average is 4-7 quality clients a month

GMHV is a service that calls it’s lead generation efforts referrals… that’s fine I guess since that’s what they are. They give their clients exclusive access to a zip code or designated area for a monthly fee. The contract is month-to-month. They claim 4-7 quality leads per month but some agents get as many as 60 quality leads.

HouseValues.com (market leader) – $30-$50

HV (I had HV in 2006 so I know this one intimately) provides similar lead generation as GMHV but they don’t ‘vet’ their leads the way GMHV does. Leads are sold in blocks with a guaranteed minimum ($99 gets you 3 minimum, etc). You can get HV in a 6 or 12 month contract. Let me know before you sign up (if you do) and I can make a $250 referral off you… which I will promptly send to you in the form of a cashier’s check. There’s sticking it to the system

Lead to Realty – $49.95 ($39.95 for EXIT Agents)

At least LtoR spells it out. $40 bucks. That’s what they charge EXIT agents for a lead. Converted or not. You can return leads based on your ability to contact, the lead working with another agent, or they aren’t buying or selling. That’s not bad. They have 18 different ‘landing pages’ that target specific buyer and seller targets like Luxury Buyers, Foreclosures, Tax-Credit, etc.

The following article is a reprint of a post by BethAnn Long. We liked it so much that we judged it to be well worthy of being reposted. Published with permission:

My business is split about 60/40 between:

• Category A: People I know and their referrals (60%) these are warm sources and
• Category B: Internet leads and online sources, and what I call cold sources (FSBO, Open House)(40%)

With Category A, I have one way of doing business and keeping in touch.
• Mailings
• Phone calls
• Lunches
• Socializing
I have found after dozens of closings from online buyers that ” Courting” Internet leads is an art- not a science. It takes some intuition to capture their attention and stand out above the other Realtors you know darn well they are in touch with at some level. Here are some things that I find works in my courtships that have led to engagement and ultimately to “consummate” the relationship with a transaction!:
• Assume they are cheating on you
• Think of these leads as a BLIND DATE, sometimes it works, other times…NOT!
• They are asking for an ” open” relationship- you need a commitment
• Be patient, but not stupid
• Don’t assume they are bad leads too soon
• Offer something of value, such as a relocation packet or to send them listings via e-mail
• Don’t be pushy, but know your boundaries
• Know when to move on
• Politely ask for a complimentary telephone consult and ask them about THEM before giving them the agency speech
• Try to find a common denominator such as sports, kids…
• If a phone number is given, do call right away. Be engaging, thank them for visiting your site and get them on some kind of follow up routine. Hand written notes are a favorite
• ASK ASK ASK for contact info
• Get them on an automated drip e-mail
• You win a few- you lose a few
• All is not fair in love and Internet leads or listing regimen so they keep seeing YOUR NAME!
• They have a fear of commitment for good reason usually
• I DO NOT show homes to anyone unless they work with me exclusively, but it takes TIME and persistence to develop Internet leads
• They may be looking as far out as 18 months before buying. Have a long term plan to stay in touch.
• Be professional at all times
• Internet leads are people too!
• Don’t rely solely on Internet leads- get out among the people and shake a lot of hands!
• Never, ever jeopardize your safety
• Patience, Persistence, Professionalism are required
• Like courting is real life, it requires a lot of “hand holding” before you get to first base!
I have made several wonderful transactions from Internet leads. And yes- I have had a few go south on me. I am learning as I go to treat each one as potentially valid until I learn otherwise. I am careful with my time on these, and so far- so good!

BethAnn Long
Spokane Realtor, Tomlinson South Inc.
www.BethAnnHomes.com

It required a couple of years to pass for me to get over my anger at Yahoo for totally scrambling up a 40,000 keyword account during the Panama update. But over the past year or so, Yahoo has gradually become my preferred source for PPC advertising. Now I am sorry to learn that Yahoo Search Marketing is going to be swallowed up by MSN Adcenter. Yahoo has become my preferred PPC advertising vehicle for three reasons:

1) Although it only delivers a fraction of the traffic of Google PPC, for many categories the cost per click is significantly lower and the ROI is higher;
2) The 40 character title limit allows for better copywriting opportunities than the restrictive 25 character limits of Google and Bing;
3) Yahoo tends to serve ads based on longer tail keyword terms than Google and Bing.

The consolidation won’t occur until late in the 2010 at the earliest, so I guess I can continue to appreciate the unique features of Yahoo Search Marketing for a few more months.  Call Broker Dynamix at 1-847-680-8811 or visit our Real Estate PPC and Search Engine Marketing webpage if you would like to learn more about taking advantage of the unique features of Yahoo Search Marketing during the next few months prior to the consolidation with MSN (Bing)