I Don’t Want to Talk to Someone Until I Do, and Then I Want to Talk Now: The Importance of Lead Response

Guest Contributor
Published: 11/07/2011
Posted by: RE Technology

This article comes to us from the Ifbyphone blog.

This week Ifbyphone is heading to Anaheim, CA for the 2011 Annual REALTORS® Conference and Expo. I’m looking forward to it. Real estate is one of our top industries and “Annual” as its commonly referred to is always a fun and memorable event (this year I get to meet Tony Danza).

Getting ready for the conference reminded me of another real estate event I attended last year and an interesting presentation given by Errol Samuelson, President of Realtor.com. He described how many of the phone leads generated by Realtor.com go to an agent’s voice mail and the majority of those callers do not leave a message. In general responsiveness is a problem in real estate.

At the time I was part of NAR’s Second Century Ventures and decided to research the problem further. So I looked at a few property listings on REALTOR.com, Trulia and Zillow and made some calls to agents. Six of eight went to voice mail. That’s 75 percent! Admittedly my sample size was small, but the point remains.