Congratulations to Realtor® Andrew Duncan of Keller Williams Realty in Tampa, Florida for being the next $50 winner of the HomeGain Agent Appreciation contest!

A HomeGain member since 2006, Andrew is an AgentEvaluator® Gold Club member, an AgentView member as well as a HomeGain Blogger. “That’s fantastic!” commented Andrew on hearing the news.

The correct answer to “How Many Max Gorillas Are There?” is: 10!

As the Agent Appreciation celebration comes to a close, we are also pleased to announce the Grand Prize winner of $100 — Laurie Hill of Desert Gem Real Estate in Surprise, Arizona.

Laurie has been a HomeGain member since 1999. She is an AgentEvaluator Platinum Club member and a BuyerLink™ real estate agent. “Yeah, that’s great,” said Laurie. “I’ll gladly accept the honor and the $100!”

Thank you to all weekly surprise participants for making it a great Agent Appreciation month. See you next year!

I’m not sure if it’s the real estate downturn, but my phone has been blowing up with online advertising vendors lately.  I monitor my advertising revenue very closely, so I ask a lot of questions when talking with their salespeople.

Salespeople like to throw around big numbers to entice you to buy, so it’s important to ask for the proper metrics when analyzing different potential advertising sources.

Here’s a breakdown of what you should measure, and what to ask:

1) ROI (Return on Investment) is the bottom line number that you need to use after you have given an advertising source long enough to perform.

ROI is simply how much you’ve earned on an advertising source divided by how much you’ve spent.  So, if you’ve earned one $6000 commission from Website A, and spent $2000 advertising there, your ROI is 3:1.  You’ve earned $3 for every $1 you spent.  Most advertising sources won’t track their customers’ ROI because there are so many “real world” variables that can create different results for different buyers - predominantly how well each customer can convert.

2) Conversion Rate is the number of leads you get per click.

If you have different types of leads (contact requests, registrations, property info requests) then it’s best to track the bottom line conversion rate, and then crunch it down to conversion rate for each lead type.  So, if you get 100 visitors in one month from a traffic source, and you get 5 registrations, 2 contact requests, and 3 property info requests, then your conversion rates are as follows:

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Nothing beats attending HomeGain “Live” Nation in person, but the videos are second best!

This video features Mitch Ribak of The eHomes Realty Network in Florida, Linda Davis of RE/MAX Realty Group in Connecticut, and Dave Marron of First and Elm Realty in California.

These three Realtors® became successful by mastering techniques of leveraging the Internet to get people to their websites, turning visitors into clients, and building profitable real estate businesses as a result.

Watch the HomeGain Nation session video: “Traffic, Leads, Conversion: BuyerLink”

Keep checking back as we will be adding more videos over the next couple of weeks.

Up next: “Home Staging Session” with Lise Desormeaux of RMR.

Also see more HomeGain Nation videos on the HomeGain YouTube channel and on the HomeGain Nation Blog.

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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.)

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On Monday, in anticipation of the HomeGain Live Nation Real Estate Forum on August 3rd in San Francisco, HomeGain will recognize several agent and broker members in a press release for their success with the HomeGain’s BuyerLink™ per-per-visit marketing program.

The press release will recognize Mitch Ribak of The eHomes Realty Network and Tropical Realty of Suntree in Florida, Debra Gravelle with RE/MAX Home Team Realty in Washington, Rosemary Mancuso of Keller Williams in Massachusetts, and Ron Petzel of Realty Executives in Florida.

Mr. Ribak is on track to sell 350 homes in 2009 with the help of the BuyerLink marketing program. “BuyerLink has helped me increase my business revenues year after year – it brings in over $110,000 per month,” said Mitch Ribak. “We get double the click-to-lead conversion rate using HomeGain versus Yahoo! and Google. We expect to earn over one million dollars in commissions coming from BuyerLink this year.”

Debra Gravelle stated, “I just calculated that I am now over $50,000 in commission from BuyerLink! That’s amazing considering a $600 a month budget.”

“Since September of 2008 I have spent $5,400 and have made back $72,355 in income just from BuyerLink,” said Rosemary Mancuso. Plus, I have 24 home sales pending. HomeGain’s leads are very high quality and I rely on the traffic they send me.” 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:

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