How to Lose More Money in Real Estate (II)
My last post was about apple picking and how real estate agents lose money on leads. If you read it, you would recall that in a study by The Wav Group study on “Agent Responsiveness.”, it was concluded that: 48% of buyer inquiries were NEVER responded to. Let me make sure you got that almost one-half of buyer leads are never responded to.
In this post, I want to talk about the ones that are responded to.
The lack of a good follow up.
Before moving to Zyprr, Inc. full time, I was an active Realtor in the Boston area. One of the opportunities I had at the agency I worked for was to partner with newly hired agents to get them through their first two deals. In that role, I told them and showed them the importance of follow up and how it would impact their business.
I told every one of those partners that if they wanted to be good at any one thing in Real Estate, they should be good at follow up. I would explain that without good follow up they were letting money slip through their fingers. I still believe that is true and it is one of the reasons why I partnered with Depanakar Neogi, John Trayner, and Nimish Sanghi to create ZipperAgent.
Some of you may be wondering what I mean by a lack of good follow up. You ’re saying to Yourself, “They were all responded to, so they did have the follow up required.”
To that, I would have to say not so much follow up as an attempt by a real estate agent to get a deal going quickly. Many real estate agents want to grab the low hanging fruit. To get their next commission as soon as they possibly can. Maybe to disqualify a lead so that they can move on to the next.
Why would I say that? The answers are multi-tiered but worth understanding. Let’s start with the number of call back attempts. The summary above shows that is the average number of attempts by real estate agents to contact a lead by phone is 1.5. This is consistent with the number of attempts made by sales professionals in other businesses. Unfortunately, that is not enough.
How many times should I call my leads before I give up?
InsideSales.com’s internal research with Dr. James Oldroyd, former Research Fellow at MIT, and with data analysis company InfoUSA, shows that for sales organizations who rely on lead generation to create sales, 8-12 contact attempts over a 10-14 day period is the optimal strategy to maximize the value of every lead.
Did you get that? Eight to twelve contact attempts are necessary to maximize the value of leads, and the average number of attempts by real estate agents is 3.57 if you combine e-mails and phone calls. One study I know claims, “It takes 18 or more dials to connect with a prospect over the phone and call-back rates are below 1%.”
A CRM like Zippergent can help you keep track of your leads, how often you have called them, and when you should call them again. Our CRM can help you provide good follow up to those leads or yours. If you are not using a CRM, you should consider it.
You can book an online demostration with our specialists, who will guide you to the best features of our CRM and will help you to grow your business. Click here and don’t miss the opportunity.
