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Real estate agents in Australia are getting ample leads for growth, but you now need to convert them far more quickly to make a success of your business.
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Ray White’s CEO for growth Mark McLeod says Aussie agents have always had enough leads to “light up a small country town”. However, the market has moved and today, success in real estate is about lead conversion, lead maturation and customer experience.
“I think our industry has given relatively good customer experience when they have listed the property,” he told REB from the 2016 Inman Conference in San Francisco.
“By and large, many of the great agents are pretty good at that part. The real open space is the customer experience you provide holistically to the approach of consumers in our world.”
Mr McLeod said he has attended the Inman Conference for the past five years, and much has changed in that time.
“When we first came, it was all about social, all about leads, but not many people knew or understood what that meant,” he said.
“It was just get as many leads into your funnel as you physically possibly can, and throw them up against the wall and something will stick. The problem with that is that the customer experience was really poor off the back of that for someone inquiring.”
Mr McLeod pointed to statistics gathered in the US, and presented at the conference, that show that 40 per cent of all digital leads real estate agents receive today go unanswered. This is despite the fact that 63 per cent of consumers expect a response to their query within five minutes and 93 per cent want an answer in one hour.
“Now if they don’t get that, those consumers don’t go back to that lead source again,” he said.
“And there is a discussion that has gone on now that says if you don’t use your CRM, if you don’t understand your CRM, then you are just not going to be able to manage a customer experience across a broad enough number of leads, to actually make a really successful business.”
