A new tenor to integrated solutions for brokerage

I was in Seattle a few weeks ago, visiting a broker, when I encountered the Trulia team in the airport heading over to Market Leader. During the entire flight home, my head spun with ideas about how these two companies would blend their talents to serve consumers and the real estate community better. We have clients who leverage these companies to their fullest, and others who don't. It has never been the providence of a consultant to champion one strategy over another. Helping others execute the strategy that is right for their business to maximize their opportunity is our charge. Pick a plan and make it work.

With that in mind, brokers are challenged with absorbing leads from multiple sources. LeadRouter does the best job, which is great if you are a REALOGY Franchisee, other brokers are left to their own devices. But LeadRouter ends at lead distribution – there is no follow up campaign capabilities. This causes all sorts of data problems related to tracking, distributing, and reporting on leads by lead source, lead quality by lead source, and lead conversion by lead source. ListHub and reDataVault have done a respectable job of helping on the reporting side, but there is more ground to cover to perfect those reports and get a full picture.

Lots of broker solutions providers have engineered lead routing and lead management tools – but you often need a programmer named MacGyver to get it to work. Leads from publishers are all unique and require unique programing to capture the email lead, scrape the information, add it to the lead management database, then try to do something with it. It's hard.

Once you do have your leads being routed, you need a solution to manage those leads. Brokers who have end-to-end CRM solutions like LoneWolf's brokerWOLF, Homes.com's Homes Connect, CoreLogic's AgentAchieve, or Real Estate Digital's rDesk have these capabilities. They are all integrated. This is also true of Market Leader's broker solution.

Brokers who do not have lead management or drip marketing can also look to Market Leader, LeadTrax or Imprev to fill the gap. These solutions all curate leads into customers for life by making it easy for brokers and agents to stay connected to providing information and service to the homebuying or selling consumer. Both Trulia and Market Leader know that lead conversion is the most valuable product they can deliver. They are among the only broker solutions providers who provide lead capture on websites they operate as part of their solution (I guess you can say that Top Producer/realtor.com® do this, too).

Sarah Daniels from Market Leader sent me a note yesterday outlining three enhanced services offered by MarketLeader that will help with lead conversion. In the background I could hear the joy of their franchise customers, as these solutions will solve a lot of their pain. Today, brands like Keller Williams and Century 21 (Market Leader customers) have the ability to push leads to agents from listing syndication, but there was no marketing engine behind that. Leads were dying there. Now that is over. Leads will be supported on the new solution, and the early data indicates that this lead nurturing is increasing income to Keller Williams agents by more than 50% (their data, not ours).

WAV Group was the first research firm to report on the tragedy that more than half of consumer inquiries are never responded to. When leads are responded to, it is typically only once. Only a small percentage of agents are nurturing a lead for the 30-60-90-120 days that it takes for conversion to happen. That means that in the absence of some support to agents to mature a lead, the results of online marketing effectiveness are significantly retarded. Nobody understands this more than Trulia and their counterparts. They know that they generate hundreds of thousands of leads that sent into oblivion. They also know that they need to fix it to make Trulia and other sites more valuable to both consumers and to brokers. Its easier to configure technology to fix the problem than it is to compel agents to respond. Lead generation happens everywhere, but lead to close solutions are rare. Market Leaders' three pronged solution will go a long way toward filling this void and enhancing the effectiveness of agent responsiveness.

• Mobile – The entire Market Leader Professional and Business Products has been extended to mobile. That means that agents can respond and manage leads on their mobile device easily. The old way involved getting an email alert then responding from a connected PC.
• Lead Processing – As I mentioned earlier, many companies need a programming MacGyver to pull leads from all of the sources of online marketing. Publishers have relegated lead distribution to sending an email. Once the broker gets the email, it needs to be scraped and sorted according to business rules, then distributed. Market Leader is automating lead processing from any source into their solution for lead management and drip marketing. 135,000 agents are going to be able to develop those leads throughout the 30-120 day lead maturation process.
• Targeted Mailing Lists – WAV Group has been studying methods for brokers to leverage their data for nearly two years now. It is a lot easier to hunt for business than it is to lure business in. Using data, we can find customer profiles suitable for real estate transactions. For example, I can pull a list of consumers who have been in their current home for more than seven years, have equity, have good credit, and who have filed for divorce. It sounds ungentle, but you can be pretty darn sure that that house is going to hit the market, and they need a great agent.

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.