“Ask a Question” – Trulia Does It Well

Professionalism in real estate is based upon two core service provider traits: service responsiveness and subject knowledge. Service responsiveness is a problem for real estate websites today. For some reason, an email inquiry is treated differently than a telephone call. Why?
Scores of research has consistently accounted that 1/3 to 1/2 of all real estate inquiries delivered through a broker or agent website are never answered. As a service industry, we need to find a better way.

Real Estate websites have similar architecture to eCommerce websites. Most sites are designed for lead capture and conversion to a sale. Perhaps that design was wrong.  Instead, perhaps websites that are designed to provide service to the online real estate Web visitor would be a better model.
Trulia recognizes this consumer need and satisfies it with “Ask a Question” functionality on the home page of their website. Since they have tens of thousands of agents registered to their site, consumers get answers – fast! Why don’t local brokers provide this service on their websites? Local agents should be better positioned to answer the question quickly and professionally.
For brokers to be successful in providing an online service center for consumers, they need to fully integrate website communications into their organization.

As a broker, your efficacy at answering website inquiries should be more swift than the telephone. Brokers should copy Trulia’s paradigm for crowd-sourcing consumer inquires through a private agent pool.
Rather than distribute leads as we do today, a new paradigm would be to drop consumers into a service pool. Then . . .
•    All agents are alerted and the first one to respond to the inquiry is awarded with the customer.
•    Consumers could select their preference for a public or private response.
•    The consumer rates each agent’s response.
•    The consumer may save this agent to their profile.
•    The response from the agent offers the consumer the option to view the agent profile, agent website, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Blog, listings, solds, etc.
This set-up would be better for agents and better for consumers. In other words, better for you as a broker.

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