Ferrari’s F1 pit stop, just over 2 seconds.
One way to fix agent responsiveness
To me one of the biggest challenges that faces online real estate today is the issue of agent responsiveness. How do you get agents to respond to leads, whether an email or a phone call? A recent survey done by the California Association of REALTORS shows that 45% of consumers want a response “instantly”, a total of 85% on consumers wanted a response within the hour.
I’ve helped launch a couple national real estate portals and I can say the response rates from agents is super, super low.
So here’s the idea. I call it the “Golden Ticket Powerball”:
1. Every week, you either send an email, or make a phone call to a random agent who is part of your company’s lead network. If that agent responds in 10 minutes (what I would realistically call, “instantly”) they win $1,000.
2. If the lead you send out goes unanswered then the $1,000 rolls in to next week, making the prize $2,000 for the next lucky agent. Of course you make a big deal about this to your agent clients when the prize money goes up.
You could tweak this model out. Maybe if the agent responds in an hour they get $500. Or you up the prize money. At $1,000 per week that $52,000. Imagine if you went to Trulia/Zillow/Realtor.com and said “I can raise your agent response rate from 23% to 67% for only $200,000 per year.” I think it would be money well spent.
Deep Linking Doo Doo
Solid Earth’s Spring platform provides ‘deep linking’ to brokers from public-facing MLS portals
Andrea V. Brambila from Inman News:
“Brokers who belong to multiple listing services that operate public portals powered by Solid Earth’s Spring platform can now add a “deep link” bringing consumers who find listings they represent on the portals back to listing detail pages on their own websites.”
I just think this is the worse idea ever. Why? You need to sweat the details. A good portal needs to have a coherent path; homepage, search results page, and property detail page. It needs to be consistent. If a consumer clicks on a listing and then it brings up a whole new website (different colors, different typeface, etc.) they are going to wonder, “what’s up with this?” and go somewhere else where they can get a better experience.
I understand the industry is trying to come up with ways to encourage “big brokers” (and lets be honest and just say Berkshire Hathaway, okay? -thanks) to participate in MLS public facing websites. But if that means making your existing website a shitty experience, then everyone loses.
