Who do you credit when that phone call generates a lead?
A constant question raised by real estate salespeople around the country whenever Peter or I talk to them is – how many leads should I expect to get from my listing on realestate.co.nz?
Occasionally we also get the statement that the web does not deliver as many leads (emails) as telephone calls (from newspaper adverts).
Well you may be surprised to learn that a large number of those phone calls could very well be coming from the website contact details. Data from the #1 real estate website in the UK is very revealing…
The web reveals information and facts that before would never be known. The fact is in the past 3 months realestate.co.nz has sent out over 39,000 emails from interested buyers to agents and in the past 12 months over 336,000 referral leads (including web links and emails). Could any newspaper or magazine tell you that?
In reality though the performance of the web may well be vastly under-represented. I came across the annual report of the #1 real estate website in the UK – Rightmove. This website is very comparable to realestate.co.nz with a subscriber base of over 90% of the UK industry. What interested me was the fact that over 2 years ago they started tracking telephone enquiries from web listings.
Over this period it turns out that for every email lead sent to an agent from the website there were two phone calls made.
This data is accurate as the website actually offers every agent a unique local call number through which interested buyers contact the agent, so this is not analysis of sample research – but actual calls made.
The data also provides some perspective of the ratio of emails that agents receive in the UK as compared to here in NZ. With over 5 million emails sent to agents in the UK from the rightmove.co.uk website this represents a response rate of 22 emails per 1,000 browsers sessions on the website. Our comparable figures for NZ are 171,000 emails sent from realestate.co.nz representing a response rate of 28 emails per 1,000 browsers sessions. As ever it is quality over quantity.
So when next you get a call about one of your listings don’t assume that the lead came from the newspaper – it is far more likely that the web listing drove that enquirer to call you.
June 11 2008 06:58 am | Web facts
Julie McDonald on 12 Jun 2008 at 8:38 pm #
Hello, Im a real estate agent on holiday in UK and have been reading my mail on realesate.co.nz which has brough me to your site in UK.rightmove.co.uk whihc is relavant to us here as my partner has his house on the market currently and we are just keeping on top of movment within the industry thank you. Thanks for the information as it makes very interesting reading))
Alistair Helm on 12 Jun 2008 at 9:01 pm #
Julie
Thanks for making contact – it might be good if you could share some observations on the UK market – on a comparable basis with your experience of NZ.
On Target » What response rate should I get from my web listing? on 15 Dec 2009 at 6:52 pm #
[...] not to judge website effectiveness purely by the number of emails as cited in the blog post “Who do you credit when that phone call generates a lead?” the facts from the UK website of Rightmove show that for every 20 emails a website sends an [...]