If you're like the majority of estate agents, you spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds each month to promote your company on RightMove, Zoopla, and other real estate portals.
The majority of estate agents report response rates from these leads of 20–30%, which indicates that these leads often generate just enough value to cover their cost. If you could achieve a response rate of close to 70% instead of 20–30%, think about how much more profitable your Rightmove membership would be.
Here are three things you can do to significantly raise your response rate if you regularly receive response rates of 20–30%:
If they respond at all, estate agents typically respond to web leads within 48 hours. Surprisingly, about 40% of online leads do not receive any sort of response.
You gain from being top-of-mind when you reply to leads as soon as they contact you. The leads are thrilled that you reached out to them so quickly and are keen on locating a property. According to research, the estate agent who contacts the buyer first has the best chance of closing the deal.
According to RightMove, visitors on mobile devices account for 67% of the time spent on the website. RightMove has 45 million visits from users each month, and millions of users have downloaded each of their apps for Android and iPhone.
Data from our estate agency clients reveals a discernible increase in internet inquiries during lunchtime, in the evenings on workdays, and on weekends.
Combining these two ideas shows that, when you are not in the office, the bulk of internet leads will come from a mobile device.
The likelihood of getting a high response rate from contacting the lead by phone or email the day after they submit their inquiry is extremely low. You must contact your leads on a device they are already using and at a time when their property search is top of mind if you want to get a high response rate.
Many estate agents also make the error of replying in an impersonal manner in addition to being sluggish to react and using the incorrect media. We observed that 6% of estate agents utilise an auto-responder to respond to consumer leads but never follow up after our examination of agency responses. Another 9% of responses invite users to subscribe to their mailing lists, which lowers lead conversions and might turn off leads. Lastly, a remarkable 23% of organisations provided email responses with enormous attachments, some as large as 50MB!
Given how challenging estate agents make it for leads to even reply, it's hardly surprise that response rates for online leads are so low.
Mention the lead's name and the details of the particular property they enquired about
To demonstrate that you are advocating for them, ask them questions. The objective is to elicit the first answer, which can be achieved by asking a basic question like when they would like to view the property or by using the question as a lead pre-qualification tool.
Have a discussion. When the lead answers with inquiries of her own, acknowledge the inquiries even if you are unable to provide an instant response and inform the lead that you are working to provide them with a timely response.
Be there for them when they need you. It happens frequently that leads will reply hours, days, or even weeks after the first chat has ended. They frequently need to make a last-minute alteration or have more queries. Give them a prompt response, possibly bringing up something that was discussed earlier, and assure them that their needs are being met.
One of two categories best describes many estate agencies. If a lead doesn't answer, either the agent won't contact them again, or they'll add them to a database and send them daily emails about properties they haven't showed interest in. Neither of these strategies encourages high response rates.
One or more follow-ups are necessary before certain leads respond to an initial interaction in a small but considerable number of cases. You may increase your response rates even more by following the instructions above, employing timely and personalised messaging together with rapid, conversational responses.
The number of leads that convert to clients will increase significantly whether your agency receives 10 leads per month or 200.
Stitch has a feature within our WhatsApp solution called Lead2WhatsApp where we send a bespoke message from your agency to your email leads in WhatsApp. From looking at our data on number of responses and response times, we engage 71% of leads from property portals with an average response time of 59 seconds - Get in touch to find out more!