Getting the Best Real Estate Leads

According to a 2008 survey of Home Buyers and Sellers, almost nine out of ten prospective homebuyers use the Internet as their initial step in their quest for that dream home. It is no wonder then that, companies offering such listing leads and lists, proliferate in cyberspace. With this large number of online list peddlers, the average real estate agent is often bombarded with emails and calls offering the best real estate leads for listings, EVER!

Most companies offering leads to real estate agents are offering people free market appraisals hoping they will be real estate sellers ready to list now. The truth is on average only about 8.4% of new leads will be ready to list now (depending on the source), and the remaining are often discarded by agents as “poor leads”. The fact of the matter is that all leads fall into one of three categories:

1.    Ready Now (about 8.4%)
2.    Ready Within 3 Years (about 81.3%)
3.    Never going to sell (about 10.3%)

The agents that are only short-term focused miss out on many of the best opportunities for listing leads and this is why those that are in real estate as a career and think long term often get much better results (up to 80% more listings) from all their leads.

Internet lead generation, while being a new concept, is not entirely unique to the real estate industry. It is currently being applied to other industries, including banking as well as the medical professions.

As the saying goes: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. It is much the same with real estate leads. Listing Lead providers will be judged by the quality of the leads that they produce. Things such as wrong phone numbers and unqualified home sellers make for a very bad impression on the quality of the companies offerings. This is the reason why a number of quality list providers have adopted proactive means in screening their lists. These include manual screenings and the use of filtering software to eliminate those homebuyers and sellers who are less likely to commit. Their goal is to provide the real estate agent with the best real estate leads listing possible.

Does this mean instant success for the agent? Of course, not. Getting a good list is just half the battle. The best estimates put only a ten-percent conversion rate on the best of them. The rest is still up to the real estate agent. Remember that the list is only a list of possibilities. There is still no substitute to the personal touch, the trust, and the relationship that the real estate agent brings to the table.