Landing Leads From Reviews
Evan Compean of The Champions Real Estate Group has enviable ratings on Yelp and Zillow, garnering five stars across more than 20 reviews on both sites. To Compean, maintaining a strong online presence is as necessary as keeping water flowing into a field of crops. Shut it off, and business dries up.
“The last thing you want when trying to acquire a new client is have them look you up and barely find anything about you,” Compean said.
A recent survey by the real estate consulting firm T3 Experts queried 852 agents about lead generation and found that 72 percent believe agent reviews are important and 70 percent feel they are either relatively easy or very easy to convert into leads. However, only a relatively small number – 35 percent – said that they had received at least one lead from an online source in the last 12 months.
The 35 percent of Realtors who do find clients through their online reviews do so at an enviable rate. The T3 study found that the top-producing 6 percent of those agents picked up at least 51 leads from review sites in the last year.
The primary review sites for real estate agents are Zillow, Trulia, realtor.com and Yelp. According to T3 Experts, almost 61 percent of all Realtors who cited online review sites as a source for leads in the last year said that clients found them through Zillow. Trulia captured leads for almost 28 percent. About 12 percent said they had leads from realtor.com and 10.7 percent from Yelp.
Tracy Montgomery of Keller-Williams has maintained a strong presence on Zillow for almost two years. She estimates that she gets about one lead per day from traffic on her profile, which features 25 reviews and a near-perfect rating.
“It’s definitely helped me get business from people who are new and trying to pick a Realtor,” she said. “They’ll see that they may click with me better than another agent and give me a call. Zillow is such a popular website, so that’s why I’m on there.”
Online reviews are also becoming increasingly more trusted. Online search optimizer BrightLocal’s 2014 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 88 percent of respondents used online reviews to gauge the quality of a local business, up from 85 percent in 2013. The number of people who read online reviews regularly also increased, jumping from 32 percent to 39 percent.