The question of best practice in real estate towards seller leads has, until very recently, only been answered in anecdotes or personal stories. But new data now puts some quantifiable analysis behind the practices of top performers.
It reveals that top-performing agents crush their opposition for three seemingly simple reasons.
- They attempt to contact every single one of their leads
- They make that contact really quickly
- They are legends when it comes to appraisals.
The analysis was conducted by OpenAgent of 2,049 agents over a 12-month period, examining their success with leads sent through us as a lead referral partner.
Agents were broken into 10 separate percentiles to segment the market from top to bottom, ranked according to the number of listings.
What was most interesting in the analysis was that these agents did not necessarily receive the most leads, but we could see from their behaviour to the leads that we gave them what made them successful because their conversion rates were so much higher.
The data shows the top 10 per cent of performers attempt to contact 100 per cent of their leads, while the bottom 10 per cent sought to contact just 80 per cent.
The data also shows top-performing agents respond to leads within 98 minutes, compared to more than four hours for the bottom 10 per cent.
While contact was not always made, top performers had a much higher connection rate, reaching 75.4 per cent of the leads they were given.
This leads to them conducting nearly five times as many appraisal appointments from where they convert 63.7 per cent into listings.
Bottom performing agents sought to contact just 80 per cent of their leads, from where they would connect with just 42.7 per cent and turn just 8.3 per cent into appraisals. From here though, the worst performers failed to convert any to listings.
But most agents are not terrible. Most agents are average, so let’s look at average performance.
The data here shows the difference between top performers and typical performers in real estate is just a small percentage of additional effort occurring at the beginning of the process and a commitment to seeing things through.
Average agents attempted to reach 96.7 per cent of their leads.
If you asked most agents if a 96.7 per cent score was good, they’d tell you it was excellent.
But that 3.3 per cent is really key, because from that slight drop off in attempt, their numbers start to go backwards.
Average agents take 146 minutes (2.4 hours) to reach out, and this has an effect, with them succeeding in contacting 69.9 per cent of their leads, possibly because a better performer got to them first.
And from here, they win appraisal appointments with 20.4 per cent of their leads and list just 10 per cent.
In this way, the research shows that the devil really is in the detail of agent behaviour.
Getting in touch with everyone who is a potential lead, and making that connection quickly really does have a huge payoff.
The Behaviours of Top Performing Agents report is available for free download. Click here.
