Brokers Find Gem of Seller Lead Generation and Conversion

For many years, WAV Group has studied the effectiveness of broker websites. This research has included understanding where broker website traffic comes from, the effectiveness of listing syndication, the strategies of search engine optimization and marketing, lead conversion by lead source, and broker website rankings in their competitive market.

Through this research and discovery process, we impart many best practices that brokers and their vendors can use to develop strategies and roadmaps for ongoing success. For the most part, the strategies have been around active listings for most brokers, but a few firms have long known that off market data can develop a trove of opportunity for firms.

We began to notice the impact of off market data by studying online share of voice using comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen. There are pretty significant differences between these companies in terms of methodology. For the most part, only Hitwise was able to detect regional broker websites. Nielsen and comScore do a very good job of covering the national audience, but they miss local websites that do not have enough traffic to be scored nationally. One thing that we recognized is that ZipRealty, Redfin, and sometimes Movoto performed very well against the national portals and with few exceptions; they were the top broker websites in the top demographic market areas (largest cities) of America.

What do portals and brokerages like ZipRealty and Redfin do differently that allows them to be online marketing champions?

Traffic to broker websites comes from a few discrete sources like typing in the URL, organic search results, paid search results, social media, listing syndication, etc. Generally, the more data you have on your website, the more landing pages you have for consumers to find information, and the more traffic you get.

In the case of the portals and brokers like ZipRealty and Redfin, they combine public records data with active listing data. There are somewhere between 150 million and 166 million properties in America. Those websites display them all. Being an active listing only changes the status and some of the content on the pages of these national sites. The strategy works, and these sites dominate search.

In 2015, Philadelphia area technology firm Buyside introduced a product that allows brokers to display off market data on their website. If you want to see how the application works, you can look up a property on FoxandRoach.com. We have written about their deployment of the technology before.

Although the service was new at the time, Fox and Roach reported 51,000 visitors to the off market page with a lead conversion rate of 7% (over 3000 seller leads).

Compounding the benefit of seller leads, Buyside is also a powerful app for converting seller leads. They have a reverse prospecting feature that allows the agent to get the count of the number of registered buyers that the broker is representing, and define the number of buyers that are looking in the area of the listing and around the same price. That is another game changer. In my opinion, sellers are more likely to list with a brokerage that says they have some number of active buyers for their home than with an agent that talks about how they will launch a marketing campaign to attract buyers. A bird in the bush!

Buyside is a featured vendor in the RE Technology 2016-17 Guide for Broker Lead generation. Check out the Guide for more information about this company and other technology firms that can enhance lead generation and conversion.