LeadRouter revisited

While I am pretty impressed with my post output for the month of January I noticed that all of them were what I call "academic" sort of posts...they used another situation to try to make a comparison or teach something. While I am sure my professors (or our Education Director) would be proud of that, this time I want to be more concrete.

Specifically I want to talk about lead distribution and LeadRouter. If you have never been trained to use LeadRouter, stop reading this and take the online class from Coldwell Banker University. If you are trained, however, let me do a little recap on how the process works.

First of all, LeadRouter is NOT a lead generator. It does not find people shopping for homes on the internet and force them to tell us their name and email address so we can go get them and bring them into our office. Sorry. Rather, LeadRouter is a TOOL for distributing the names and email addresses of people who are interested in our homes for sale to an agent quickly. Research shows that consumers are likely to work with the FIRST agent who gets back to them - even if that agent may not be the best one for the job. LeadRouter helps us be first by delivering the lead info to our cell phones.

Now, if you were with us in January 2009 you may recall my office tour to discuss lead distribution strategy. In those meetings (remember I played this cool video about the future beforehand?)
then you recall that I said that our new lead strategy was that leads would be delivered to the listing agent first, and the lead would be delivered Referral Fee Free. Well, that policy is still in force a year later...and we still use LeadRouter to make it happen most of the time.

BUT BUT BUT...there's more to the story

Just because you are the listing agent doesn't mean I am going to let you kill leads. No siree. If you mark a lead dead (or bogus) I reserve the right to hand it to someone else to check out. According to research done throughout our brand network, more than 80% of leads are killed within the first 48 hours after we receive them! That is amazing...and sad. The average internet consumer searches for up to a year for a house, yet because they didn't email us back within 48 hours with their best date to write a contract we mark them dead. Yikes.

Anyway...if that happens I ask other agents to follow up; maybe to see if there is still a chance for us. We have sold a few properties this way. What that means is that if you mark a lead dead/bogus because it was your friend (or because you didn't want to deal with the update process involved with LeadRouter) that person is most likely going to hear from another agent - and that agent is going to work hard to sell them a home.

Finally, some of you have noticed that some leads do not come from LeadRouter, rather, they come via email from me. That is because some of the web forms that exist out there are not compatible with LeadRouter so I distribute them personally. Sorry I am not as fast as the LR system but I do try my best. In each of those cases, however, I also use my handheld phone or my laptop to look up the listing agent before I send that email lead.

As we get into the warmer months I hope lead traffic will continue to increase. We do pretty well now, I want to see us do even better. With that said I wanted to provide a quick refresher on how things work. If you have a question post it here - none are off limits - and I will answer for the whole group to see.