I ran across a good discussion on Agent Genius. It started with a post by Matt Stigliano, “Are you barking up the wrong tree”.
I was asked why an agent should participate in a site that presents more than one agent to the consumer – the assumption being that agents will have to “fight” each other to get the attention of the consumer.
A great question – I think that when you are thinking about paying for leads from online providers you should consider a few things:
Size matters – You have to be found online. Some sites produce content that brings them a large audience (Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com etc). Others spend heavily to maintain lots of websites, advertising, SEO so consumers will find them online. They make investments to attract consumer attention and sell that audience to agents. Some sites promise consumers a bidding war among agents so that the consumer will pay the least for an agent’s services – that attracts a certain kind of consumer (and agent).
Competition – If you subscribe to a lead generation site that sells you an “exclusive territory” you will be the only agent in your area that gets the lead from them. A few of those consumers might trust that you are as good as anyone and not look any further. Or they might go to other places to find agents to compare. Just because you were the only agent referred from that site does not mean that you will not “fight” other agents for the business. It just means the consumer will have to go to more than one place to compare agents. As consumers rely more on online sources to find agents there will be more competition, not less. In all but a few cases you will have to compete for business regardless of the source of the lead and if you are not up to it you will not be as successful as you could be. Get good at selling your strengths – it is not a “one size fits all” world anymore.
Differentiation of Service and Skills – Matt hit the nail on the head when you said “I want the clients to be attracted to me and they can decide if they want to work with me or not”. If a site just has a list of agents with no differentiation then it is a free for all. We encourage agents to specialize in specific areas (we use community keywords that can be a town, neighborhood, subdivision, condo building – etc.), we encourage agents to post articles about those areas (market info, schools – the kind of content agents put on their newsletter/blog) so consumers can research areas that are not familiar to them and to illustrate the agent’s knowledge of the area. We also encourage agents to specialize in a market segment(s) – first time buyers, seniors, waterfront, condos etc. Another positive differentiator is client satisfaction – we have your clients login to rate your services. A positive referral directly from another consumer is helpful to an undecided consumer and is gold for the agent. Because many agents are together on one site it does not mean that they cannot differentiate their services – it allows them to specialize and attract clients that need what they have. Look at the most successful agents you know – don’t many of them specialize in some way?
Qualification – Agents qualify clients to make sure they are serious and clients qualify us to make sure we can do what they need us to do, that we are trustworthy, and that we can work well together. The more a client knows about what you do very well before he or she contacts you increases the odds of a good match. They will come to you with a warm feeling about your abilities, so they are qualified to some degree.
Value to Consumers – If a group of agents can provide the information that consumers really want and need to choose an agent wisely they will come to the site – we will pull them with the valuable information they want (for free) rather than spending money to try to get their attention. As an industry we spend many millions of dollars on advertising and promotion that doesn’t really help the consumer and may not help agents either.
Cost/Value to you – Any initiative requires some time and effort – don’t forget about money required. Some online lead sellers ask for a significant part of your commission if you do a transaction with a client they sent to you, others sell “by the lead”. Their value is that they have spent the money to advertise, write consumer interesting content, and/or have a great number of listings to view. If we simply provide the information consumers want to research and select agents well we will have a great consumer following. The cost to run the site will be only a few dollars a month per agent. You will get to keep many more of your commission dollars.
This is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. You may see things differently and that is OK – this is just my attempt to help agents build their practice by bringing consumers some value rather than continuing to spend more money than many of us can afford to try to get their attention.
Best,
Don
