How do top performing agents convert more leads?
Zoe Pointon is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of OpenAgent. Over the years, she's had the privilege of collaborating with some of the brightest minds in real estate, amassing over a decade of invaluable experience and a treasure trove of insights around the property buying and selling process.
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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 on 2049 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% of performers attempt to contact 100% of their leads, while the bottom 10% sought to contact just 80%. The data also shows that top-performing agents respond to leads within 98 minutes, compared to more than four hours for the bottom 10%.
"The data shows the top 10% of performers attempt to contact 100% of their leads, while the bottom 10% sought to contact just 80%"
While contact was not always made, top performers had a much higher connection rate, reaching 75.4% of the leads they were given. This allows them to conduct nearly five times as many appraisal appointments, of which they convert 63.7% into listings.
Bottom performing agents sought to contact just 80% of their leads, of which they would connect with just 42.7% and turn just 8.3% 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 that 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 attempt to reach 96.7% of their leads, and if you ask most agents if a 96.7% score is good, they’d tell you it's excellent.
"Most agents attempt to contact 96.7% of their leads and take on average 146 minutes to reach out."
But that 3.3% 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 causes a ripple effect on the rest of their performance, as they succeed in contacting only 69.9% of their leads - possibly because a better performer got to them first.
From there, they win appraisal appointments with 20.4% of their leads and list just 10%.
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.
Want to read more about our analysis? Our Behaviours of Top Performing Agents Report is available and free to dowload now.
