Landing Leads from Reviews
Kate Viola of Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby’s International Realty maintains an active online presence across several platforms, including Yelp, LinkedIn and Facebook. Her overwhelmingly positive reviews on Zillow and Trulia would be the envy of many agents, and she has continually used them to her advantage.
“I have been told on various occasions by clients that either hired me to list their home or help them find one that they Googled me before meeting with me to get a sense of how active a Realtor I am, how much experience I have, how many sales I have, etc.,” Viola said. “The more sites I have reviews posted on, the more credible the reviews and experiences seem.”
A recent survey by the real estate consulting firm T3 Experts queried 852 agents about lead generation and found that 72 percent believe that agent reviews are important and that 70 percent feel that 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.
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.