June 12 2013
Guest contributor Delta Media Group says:
At the end of the day, your real estate business boils down to leads. They might come from ads, referrals, online, your brokerage, or through a service you pay monthly for a set number of leads, or per lead. But leads are the starting point to every transaction you'll generate.
This leaves you with two fundamental ways to grow your business:
Either one will help boost your sales, but combining both is optimal.
We recently looked into the data behind leads and conversion rates to help shed some light on where your business could, or possibly should be. Let's start with a few numbers to strive for:
These are numbers we are seeing through some of the integrated real estate websites we currently build and manage. Granted, it takes a relatively large company to generate a few thousand high-quality leads in a month (your average neighborhood real estate agent or 12-agent brokerage isn't likely to see that number), but these numbers are scalable, and we want to show you how.
Leads come from the Web. There might still be some debate as to how much marketing budget to put into non-Web areas, but there's little debate any longer about how the overwhelming majority of real estate leads are generated these days.
Generating leads from the Web requires more than a nicely designed website or MLS property search functionality. It requires a robust Web platform that's built around search in order to push your visitors effortlessly to exactly what they're looking for.
If a customer can't immediately find what they're looking for, they'll go right back to their Google search and find another local real estate website, and you'll lose that lead.
Once a visitor finds the listing they're looking for on your real estate website, they need to be able to quickly and easily request any additional information they would like, and receive that in a timely manner. If it's a showing request, they should receive an email notifying them instantly that the request was received, and an email within a couple of hours from an agent confirming that the showing was scheduled, or is in the process of being scheduled.
If your visitors are interested in a specific area, they need to be able to request and receive not only email updates of listings in that market, but detailed information of real estate trends in that market. They should receive comprehensive market reports, which all provide the info necessary for them to make a well-informed decision.
A well-designed email report will prompt a consumer to take action when they find the information they're looking for, which equates to lost leads for you if you are not offering that report to prospects.
If the visitor is browsing on a mobile device, they should be redirected immediately to a mobile real estate website. They should be able to find your website through a search engine (which can't happen with an app), should be able to find listings around them regardless of where they are, and should be able to quickly submit leads a request directly from their mobile device for more information on that listing or schedule a showing.
To that visitor, your mobile website is a more convenient version of your desktop site. And it should feature functionality built to work on smartphones. Gone are the days of mobile websites that served only as watered down versions of desktop sites. Smartphones are smart, and can leverage location data to provide a much better user experience to consumers.
If your mobile website doesn't provide that user experience, your website visitor will find one that does, and you'll lose more leads.
Leads submitted to your mobile website should route the same way they would if submitted from a desktop site.
Many of the integrated real estate websites we build and manage see one-third of all visitors coming from mobile devices, and mobile shoppers are interested in making a buying decision. Desktop computer users might be more likely to browse, but a lead submitted on a mobile website from a visitor sitting in their car near that listing is a hot lead.
Those leads should route through a central lead management system that distributes them to you instantly. You should be able to log into your lead management system to see all your leads, whether from desktop or mobile, in the same database. You should be able to follow up with them just as quickly, and with the same options.
How your leads are managed greatly impacts your ability to convert them, and whether you'll receive more. Leads that aren't quickly responded to might as well have never been leads at all.
We've highlighted four crucial steps to helping you attain more real estate leads. Improving your conversion rate comes down to the quality of those leads and your ability to respond to them.
We'll touch more in our next article on the top steps to improving your conversion rate. In the meantime, learn how to generate more leads for your real estate business.
To view the original article, visit the Delta Media Group blog.