RealTown's RealTalk

Hello all;

Our goal is to convert 5-15%of your unique visitors to registrants, and we succeed with most of our clients. Registration is name, email address, phone number and comments.

With that goal is our secondary goal, which is to get all of our clients over 400 unique visitors each month. Our clients average slightly over that, now.

If you can do that, you are doing well. It takes work and it takes time, but since 87% of all real estate transactions start on line, it's something everyone must aim for, otherwise those sales won't ever get to you, they'll get to another agent who does work hard to succeed online..

I don't have the lead numbers handy but 75-85% of our closed transactions come from our website as reported in the RISMedia article Mike wrote.

Malcolm Waring, Realtor, e-PRO
Pocono Homes

So if someone is really getting over 2,500 leads a year from their web site
and is closing just 300 of those (assuming that 100% of their real estate
business comes from their web site), that is a 12% closing ratio of leads to
actual closings (a little more than 1 in every 10 ends up as a sale). And if
that salesperson is a "mere mortal", and not one of the real estate
industry's Super Stars, with less than 50 closed transactions per year, that
is only a 2% closing ratio out of that many inquiries or even far worse if
that agent had fewer sales.
This just doesn't add up. If these numbers are true for some, there must be
something wrong with this picture if a top producing agent can only close 2%
to 12% of all of the Internet inquiries they are getting! Or else the
inquiries are either extremely poor quality or the numbers per day being
cited here by some are very suspect. ;-)
Win

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As usual, well said Win...

But let's take a look at some other marketing tools, and compare: what
number of post cards are mailed out per number of closings coming from them?
How about newsletters, or newspaper ads? I am sure these tools are much
harder to track, since we don't maintain logs like computer servers do for
these items.

I can't put forth real numbers, but I have heard that 3% is not bad, on
"clicks" on internet sites... and that is not leads... that is just clicks
(as with Google PPC) again, I am not sure of these numbers, but for us, if
we landed a deal from 10% of the inquiries that come in, we would be doing
very well... very... some folks drop off the face of the Earth, some have
situations come up that prevent buying, like illness, lost jobs, family,
transfers, credit issues (we had a person we had worked with the clean up
their credit, and then was ready to purchase, and for some strange reason
this person decided two weeks before the closing to go buy a new car, with a
$40K loan... DTI went through the roof, and she could not buy, silly girl)
etc., and some leads we find contact us and then a year later come back
ready to start looking...

But my thought here is to try to compare conversion rates from web based
leads to those from other media, such as print, radio, television, etc.

I think we will find that with proper care, the web yields higher rates of
conversion. And that rates as described above are not unreasonable.

Have a great day!

Best regards,

Paul Silver
Focus Professionals, Inc.

Our goal is to convert 5-15%of your unique visitors to registrants, and we
succeed with most of our clients. Registration is name, email address, phone
number and comments.
With that goal is our secondary goal, which is to get all of our clients
over 400 unique visitors each month. Our clients average slightly over that,
now. -- Mike Parker

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Just for some real numbers...

One of our sites has received 3376 Unique Visitors this month so far... for
a total of 12,998 visits. 112,874 page views.

>From this traffic, we have had, so far in March, we have had 29 leads that
have responded back to our replies. These leads have a percentage of closed
deals resulting in an average of 2 closings per month so far year to date.
For example, we have 5 closings scheduled for April now that resulted
directly from these leads from that site. But that is a high number for any
month...

For February, we had fewer Unique Visits than in March so far, but January
had 12,456 Unique Visits... January is closer to our average, of about
11,000 per month.

We do all our own SEO work, and we do include linking.

How does this sound?

Have a great day!

Best regards,

Paul Silver
Focus Professionals, Inc.

Joe asked: I would like to know how my Internet leads compares with other Real Estate agents. I get about 1 to 2 legitimate leads per month from my personal website

Our website averages 18,000 - 20,000 hits and 4000 unique visitors per month. From that we average 2-3 names and numbers a day. Last year we were able to sell about 3% of those leads which lead to 42% of our business. The rest are in the pipeline.

Now I think those are great numbers considering we are in Macomb County, MI just outside Detroit. But as Drew said each area is different. Folks do not move to our area for 2nd homes, the warm weather or jobs lately. Plus we have one of the highest foreclosure and unemployment rates in the country. On top of that we have dropped back to 97-98 prices. So we may not compare to well to your area.

Hope this helps you

Cindy Knight

Realty Executives e-Group

www.EdandCindyKnight.com

>From this traffic, we have had, so far in March, we have had 29 leads that
have responded back to our replies. These leads have a percentage of closed
deals resulting in an average of 2 closings per month so far year to date.
For example, we have 5 closings scheduled for April now that resulted
directly from these leads from that site. But that is a high number for any
month...

For February, we had fewer Unique Visits than in March so far, but January
had 12,456 Unique Visits... January is closer to our average, of about
11,000 per month.

We do all our own SEO work, and we do include linking.
How does this sound?

Paul Silver

---

I realize I am commenting on my own post, but ce la vie... I am sure someone
will attack me for it...

In any event, I wanted to clarify my stats, due to a question I received via
email about this: the numbers of closed deals I indicated are what we close
3 months out from receiving the lead... I personally do not track the leads
longer than that... the agents who receive them do, and some have indicated
that they close deals from these leads as far out as a year or more, and one
just let me know that she now is closing one lead from this site where the
buyer was originally in contact with us 19 months ago, and took a hiatus for
8 months in the middle, and came back... I consider this almost as a self
referral though, due to the way the agent handled them...

So in truth, I cant say how many turn into business over the long term, but
2 to 3 close each month that are within 3 months of contact. It seems many
more than that close further out in the time line.

Also, we do not pay for any clicks, but rely entirely on organic placement
for traffic, and of course, the social media...

Just a couple of points of clarification.

Have a great day!

Best regards,

Paul Silver
Focus Professionals, Inc.