Is Your Brokerage Wasting Your Real Estate Leads and Face Time?

We talk a lot about how to drive more real estate leads and more visibility. One question you might be facing right now is whether you really are taking advantage of the leads and visibility that you currently have.

Let's say you are currently getting leads from Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com or another real estate portal or network. You also get leads from your sphere of influence or referral base. You may even do some pay-per-click or have some naturally-generated leads on your website. The question is, what real conversion rate are you seeing right now and where are your inefficiencies? If you are busy tracking leads in your email and on scraps of paper, the typical conversion rate runs about one-half of 1%.

The trick to taking advantage of the leads you have, as well as driving more conversion out of new leads, is all about well-placed automation and strict tracking.

There are four things you should have in place in order to achieve the highest conversion rates on current and new leads.

1. Complete Real Estate Lead-Generation Strategy

This seems like a total no-brainer in a lot of ways. There are, however, many brokerages who look at their strategies and realize they have been relying on only one or a couple lead sources, but only one channel. The reality of real estate lead generation is you need to make sure you have the right channels and that you are getting high enough quality to drive your bottom line.

In your real estate lead activity, we tend to find that working to drive higher conversion out of leads rather than a simple quantity strategy is going to benefit the brokerage in a number of ways.

For the math, think your current number of leads, x, times your current TRUE conversion rate, y, yields your closed deals. We want y to double or triple or more, and maybe x will cut down by 30% or something – this would give you more than double the closed deals from leads.

2. Organic Search Placement: War of the Long Tail

One thing you need to remember is that you should never have a strategy that only includes your leads from PPC and buying those leads. You need to know that you are also including a strategy for picking up main keywords and lots and lots of what they call "long tail" keywords — these are the property addresses and names of areas, price ranges, etc.

The fact of the matter is that there is a decent amount of evidence that your higher quality leads and higher percentage of closed deals come from those types of keywords as you go along. We'll always encourage a good mix of marketing, but combined with the right search engine optimization for your site and brand, this will drive a good mix of real estate leads for your on-going business.

The other thing that is important to you and your brand is the actual brand and marketing equity that comes along with ranking well. If you ever intend to slow down your life, get a little more vacation in, sell the business or whatever – you really need to know how to continually build brand and marketing equity in what you are doing.

3. Completely Integrated Lead Follow-Up System

Having an integrated lead management system is much more than just having a CRM. You really need to know that you, any agents in the brokerage, agents outside of the brokerage that get referrals, lenders, etc. can all access the lead pool for their leads. They need notifications, they need to be able to see their leads' activity levels, and they need text/email alerts, right?

4. Tech to Automate and Measure EVERYONE

Today, in your real estate lead generation and follow-up, we can automate some seriously helpful tasks and reporting. Some of the big items that might have seemed out of reach for your brokerage previously are: phone call and text-message tracking, multiple email drip and follow-up campaigns, task assignment and tracking, time to accept and work on leads, initial action tracking, close rate together with follow-up Time, and more.

When running a good business, we all know that a result consistently measured will always improve and it's always easier to make adjustments to a process with good automation.

One of the biggest benefits for brokerages is that the right tools, the right activities and partnering with the right team allow you to plan and achieve the results you are looking for in the market.

You are right in thinking there are some big opportunities in the market – it is a good time to make a play as a brokerage, as long as you have the right team.

To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.