Some of the national brand real estate offices have a computer generated phone lead system that is necessary for several reasons.
The public relations reason that these companies most proudly display to potential customers for the need of the system is how fast a response is made to an inquiry about a particular property. The system is set up so that it places the agents in a move it or loose it situation. The Realtor has only one chance to answer the phone or loose the lead. The second reason and I believe the actual reason for this system is to make sure that there actually is a response. I don’t blame these companies for developing this system. They spend hundreds of thousand of dollars on advertising to make the phone ring and then agents don’t return the calls. So then these companies need to spend millions more upon a watchdog system to ensure the leads are followed up on.
The last study of response time that I had seen is several years old. This study claimed that the national average response time by real estate agents to be 72 hours! I would like to add and that’s if they respond at all. Isn’t this ridiculous? A three day average to respond and that is the national average. Many responses take even longer. I can stand to wait three days for my cable company to show up. Can you imagine if it took your cable company three days just to call you back, never mind show up and perform the repair.
Five days ago I contacted seven different real estate agents that had land listed for sale on loopnet, requesting additional information. I received a response from only two. That’s a 29% response rate and the sad part is from my experience this is not uncommon.
Last fall I performed a test for some very close friends of mine. They had helped one of their sons purchase a commercial piece if land in Savannah and it has become a huge problem in their lives and they now need to sell this land that has a new building upon in and is located at least 1000 miles away from where they live. Neither they nor I know of any commercial real estate brokers in Georgia so I looked up seven of the larger firms and gave them each a call. I pretended to be a buyer in search of the exact type of property my friends will need to list for sale. From this test I believed that I could accomplice several things. First, I could check out the competition. See what’s for sale that is similar to theirs. Second I could get a ballpark value of what their property is worth by comparing it to the competing properties and the third and most importantly I would become familiar with what agent in Savannah is a real go getter that should list this property for sale. An agent who hustles to show me listings, finds out about my needs and perhaps how solid my finances are in order to perform. The results of the test were awful. No office or agent was impressive whatsoever. I spoke live with seven different agents. Some of these included the principle brokers and owners. I left a message for an eighth agent and that was the only agent that ever got back to me.
This was an easy exercise for them to pass. I did not make it difficult. The specifications that I gave out were simple to fulfill and I only heard back from one agent.
Surely the real estate market in Savannah or any other place in the entire country cannot be good enough to ignore a ready, willing and able buyer but how would they know because not one of these agents spent enough time with me to find out.
Keep in mind that this would not have been a waist of time for any of these agents because I was going to list the parcel for sale with the most impressive broker. There now exists a small industrial site that will be sold in their back yard but not through this inefficient bunch.
James Joseph