If you don’t follow up on your leads, don’t complain you are not converting leads.

Those who know me know that my only goal in life these days (ok, I have some non work related) is to have the highest conversion rate amongst Real Estate brokerages in the country.   The better we become with our lead conversion (leads to sales) the more excited I get and the more detailed I get in teaching my Agents how to get the most out of their leads.  It’s always a challenge.

Right now my biggest challenge is getting the right Agents who have the work ethic to become successful.

I’ll give you an example.  I have a new Agent, I think this is her 8th week with me so far.  She has her second closing tomorrow and she wrote 3 contracts this past month.  That gives her basically 5 transactions by the time she finishes her first three months with me (she has 120 leads in her system).  Pretty amazing.

I have another Agent, who started with me 5 months ago.  He has closed 3 sales, has 4 contracts on the short sale board and wrote 4 more contracts in October.  Both these Agents have just started their Real Estate career.  They are brand new Agents!

Now let’s look at my 5 bottom Agents.  Continue reading this post

It’s been a pretty busy time here at Tropical Realty in Melbourne Florida since we got back from the HomeGain Nation Conference. Business is going great and my Realtors® are busy as always.  Our system of creating all our leads for our agents is a true win in every aspect of my business.

However, there is a down side to this and if you don’t protect yourself while you build your team, it could cost you thousands of dollars!

So what am I talking about?

I’m talking about having a written agreement between you and your agents to ensure that you, the team leader or brokerage, own the leads.

This past week we dealt with a real estate Agent who left our office to take a full time job as an assistant for a broker. She did everything correctly by coming to me and letting me know she was leaving because she couldn’t afford to be a Realtor anymore.  She was one of our less successful Realtors who had a lot of potential, but never really put the effort needed into becoming successful.  I did like her and feel bad for her though so I kept her leads flowing (big mistake).

So lesson one is to never let your emotions guide your business.

It’s very important that you take all emotion out of any negotiation and run your business as a business.  Be strong and cut leads off from Agents if they don’t produce.  End of story. Continue reading this post

In many cases, the perception of an online consumer is that they are not real. The result is that they are not treated as a true prospect and, clearly, deals will not close due to this situation.

This perception is understandable since an online consumer is represented on a computer screen as a series of characters in an email address or in their name. The person is not standing in front of you. They have no pulse and you cannot look them in the eye.

Their preferred method of communication is email which, by its nature, maintains a certain level of anonymity. Due to this desire to remain anonymous, the online consumer controls the frequency, or even possibility, of contact.

This same desire prompts an online consumer to register false contact information on a real estate agent’s web site whether or not entering contact information is even necessary for the consumer to gather the information they want.

Clearly, this is a huge source of frustration and, in some cases, expense for an agent.

But, on the other hand…

Continue reading this post

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.)

Continue reading this post

At 8:58 pm last night, I received a call from a Kitchen remodeling company who wanted to follow up on the estimate they had provided me; in June of 2005! It took this company (I’ll save them the embarrassment of being named) 4 years to execute a basic follow up which has to set some type of record. There had been no contacts, no drips, no anything and then a call out of the blue. Even though four years is quite the exception than the rule, it did get me thinking about responding to Real Estate leads.

For four years, HomeGain has told its agents that to win business, you need to get back to your leads quickly. We would preach that response to buyer that registers on a website should happen within the first day or not all. If a phone call can’t be made; a personalized follow up email is just as good as long as the effort is made. More times than not, a customer would interject and dictate that the reality of lead response depends on the individual and not overall best practice. Some agents only take calls during particular hours; others are often busy with showings while many more claim they are just too busy to make the calls until their schedule allows. 

Was our advice about quick response wrong? Should reality replace best practice as the key to acquiring and converting online buyers and sellers into leads? I was beginning to think so until I stumbled upon a fascinating survey conducted by Dr. James Oldroyd at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and later MIT.

Dr. Oldroyd surveyed over 500 companies across all aspects business to see how they generated and converted leads on their websites.  The organizations from different industries, country of origin, yearly revenue and size all reported the same theme; not responding as quick as you can to online leads severely diminishes your opportunity to convert and close the leads. In fact, if you wait long enough to call you’re actually causing more harm than good the longer you wait!

Let’s look at some of the findings:

Continue reading this post

Posted on behalf of Peter McCullough, Real Estate Training Specialist at HomeGain.

“A sales lead is the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in purchasing a product or service, and represents the second stage of a sales process. For a sales lead to qualify as a sales prospect, or equivalently to move a lead from the process step sales lead to the process sales prospect, qualification must be performed and evaluated. Typically this involves identifying by direct interrogation the lead’s product applicability, availability of funding, and time frame for purchase. If a sales lead eventually makes a purchase, this is called conversion and a closed sale. The ratio of sales leads that convert is often referred to as the conversion rate, a way to measure the effectiveness of a sales process, sales team, or sales person.”

OK. This is straight from Wikipedia.com. It is a straightforward description of a lead and it is relevant to the real estate community. However, I feel an analogy would help further reinforce what a lead is.

Everyone is familiar with the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. As well as real estate agents, Sherlock required leads to solve his cases and close them. A lead pointed him in a specific (or vague) direction. It was not necessarily the solution to the case, but it gave him something to pursue.

Real estate related leads are the same. They are not a closed deal; they point agents in a direction and give them something to pursue. In Sherlock’s situation, he could not afford to sit on the information contained in a lead; time was of the essence. Such is the case for real estate leads.

Continue reading this post