Do you respond to all of your leads? According to a survey by Mike DelPrete, nearly half of buyer leads go unresponded... DelPrete managed a team of undercover “secret home shoppers” to test the responsiveness of brokerages to online inquiries on home listings. His team conducted 100 such tests and found significant lapses in how brokerages handled contact with potential buyers. The average time for a response to online contact was 8 hours and 17 minutes, but the median time was 39 minutes (that seems pretty good). However, he found that 47% of inquiries didn’t even receive a response, as brokerages left on the table many opportunities to cultivate a new lead. https://lnkd.in/grXd5-5r
Clayton Collins, thanks for sharing this; Randell Gillespie, should we be shocked by the results of this? While I agree that during times of contraction, every opportunity would be gold, I can't help but think that the art of making a phone call and calling leads isn't in every realtor or mortgage consultant's arsenal. I think I am more shocked that every Broker wouldn't have a system in place to track and drive these types of inquiries to Agents who have a proven track record of making things happen over the phone. Thoughts?
We did a similar study back in 2017, involving 50 top brokerages nationwide, and found similar results. After 8 years of working closely with brokerages, these are some factors that contribute to this problem: 1- Priority: Online/website/internet leads still aren’t a top priority for brokerages and agents, which is unfortunate but true. 2- Lead routing: Many brokerages route every single website inquiry to agents. Agents have learned not to respond to "Is this still available?" questions, at least not with any urgency. 3- Website technology is outdated. We still rely on basic name + phone number forms for communication with consumers. 4- Complex setup: Most tech tools that tried to solve this problem all share that common weak point. They work well, but agents need to learn how to set them up, a factor contributing to low adoption rates. Part of the solution lies in “do-it-for-you” tech that handle initial lead engagement, ensuring timely responses while freeing up agents to focus on higher-value tasks.
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I just wrote a Linkedin Newsletter on this. Lead fulfillment from a brokerage website has a tremendous drop rate and if you are a brokerage generating about 100 - 300 leads off of your website per month, you are probably losing about $2-$3 million in GCI. Unheard of in other industries.
Clayton Collins — An example that the answer sometimes is not More, but simply Better. Worse yet, if you forecast just the 5 year value of each individual inquiry by that client and everyone in their orbit, the cost of no response is 5x. Ouch.
Clayton Collins age-old, perplexing miss--so many technologies and CRM's but none of them can solve the basics.
Shocked by this article. And another great way agressive LO’s can help their referral partners with managing and supporting communications.
CEO @ Real Estate Connection | Real Estate Broker | Certified Real Estate Appraiser
4moThat's the big secret in the lead aggregator space. The real estate companies and mortgage companies are generally terrible at fulfillment. One of the big reasons why Zillow and the other Lead aggregators get into lending and real estate business is consistency with engagement and basic fulfillment.