I thought it would be worthwhile to show agents, particularly HomeGain BuyerLink and AgentEvaluator members, some true stats of Internet leads (from one Realtor to another).

My goal in gathering this data was to discover  home buyer tendencies.  I randomly took 100 of our sales this year to come up with the following stats.

I figured it’s roughly 50% of our sales this year and would be a great sampling.

The main findings were the following:

Average Number of Days to Purchase: 180.5 days

Quickest Sale: 5 days

Longest Sale: 539 days

(Last year we had approximately 20 sales from leads that were from the year 2004.)

Number of Closed Leads with Phone Numbers: 88

Number of Closed Leads with no Phone Number: 12

(This is a tough number to quantify as many of our Agents put the phone numbers in the CRM once they have obtained it.  When I worked on this stat two years ago, we were at 25% of our sales came from leads with no phone number.  I believe we are most likely still around that level.)

Number of Confirmed email addresses: 58

(When we send out our first auto-responder, along with their passwords, we also ask them to confirm their email address.)

Number of unconfirmed email addresses: 42

(This number really surprised me.  I was expecting the confirmed email addresses to be the stronger lead, but as you can see, over 40% of our sales did not confirm their email address but yet still used us as their Realtors.  This proves to me that it’s all about follow up and working every lead like it’s potentially a sale.  42% of our sales did not choose to receive the information we sent them and we would have lost out on all those sales if we didn’t use our strong follow up and lead conversion programs.)

Anyway, I thought I would share with you some of the numbers I like to track as they all help me in deciding which leads we need to work.

I have always said that the average buying time frame is 4-6 months.  This study proves that to be very accurate.  With that knowledge, you can see how your follow up with determine your sales.

If you don’t call your leads and cultivate them, you will most likely lose those potential sales to another Agent.

Mitch will be hosting a session titled “Traffic, Leads, Conversion: BuyerLink” at HomeGain Live Nation in San Francisco on August 3rd at 2pm. Twitter it @homegainnation