Use Your Assets: Bring Real Estate Leads Back To Life

Real estate brokers who have been in the business a while now know there is an average 18-year cycle to the real estate market observed over the last 200 years. For them, the fluctuations in the housing market from a hot seller's market to a cool buyer's market are expected. They know how to capture the real estate transactions that still occur due to job changes, economic ebbs and flows, changes in family structure, expanding families, and the passing of a loved one.

It may be easier to sell homes in a low-inventory market, but it's not easier to win listings in it. It's not in the peaks or the valleys where agents have the most opportunity. It's on the way up and on the way down when there are the most transactions. Seasoned brokers make investments to maximize their agents' performance during all economic conditions.

So how, when we are just coming out of the slow winter season and into a pandemic, do brokers support their agents as the income a brokerage relies on to sustain services is severely diminished? They use their existing assets.

One asset nearly all agents and brokerages have is unqualified leads. Unqualified leads are old leads, cold leads, online leads, sphere of influence (SOI) and open house leads, to name a few common sources.

Let's start with cold and old leads, also known as "dead" leads. These are generally left totally unnurtured. Qualifying a dead lead takes time and patience. It's the proverbial finding a needle in a haystack. Real estate agents have been trained for years to know that conversion rates significantly drop after five minutes and that 75% of buyers interview only one real estate agent.

How do you extract value from "dead leads"? One answer is automation. By automating your cold lead conversion process, you can easily scale to the large numbers required to actually get a meaningful ROI from dead leads.

An automated lead conversion process can simultaneously qualify thousands of leads at a time with a rather small lift upfront. Setting up an effective system that successfully engages leads may take some experience, and not all systems are created equally. A simple lead nurture email campaign can be set up in dozens of different systems. Take that to the next step and add high-quality calls to action.

Intelligent platforms that infer intent allow automated targeted follow-up that can easily increase conversion rates. Push even further by adding a single inside sales agent (ISA), and brokerages can nurture the leads that rise to the top even more effectively and actually hit that five-minute mark on outreach. Now you've scaled your "dead" lead conversion process, making it possible for one person to qualify tens of thousands of leads.

You can further enhance your "dead" lead ROI by using it to retain agents and recruit more high performers. An agent receiving qualified leads is likely to stay or join a brokerage and make more commissions for themselves and the brokerage.

That kind of meaningful ROI builds trust with agents and gives them the confidence to run their prospect lists, including certain members of the sphere of influence, and online leads, through the program. These fresher leads can further increase the entire program's efficacy. In addition, it gives brokerages a measurable ROI and agent performance metrics. This informs brokerages on where their investment dollars perform best so they know which agents and lead generation tools — like pay-per-click, social, search engine optimization for organic leads and purchased real estate portal leads — deserve greater investment.

Investing in a lead qualifying program is an incredibly valuable way to grow a brokerage by helping agents be more efficient and effective, and in turn, produce more. It can also help retain and recruit top producers and can multiply the total number of transactions possible per agent in a year — all in a very scalable model and in a short period of time.