Why responding quickly is the holy grail of real estate
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.
Learn more about our editorial guidelines.
What is the one thing that every real estate agent can do to improve their listings?
New data shows that the answer is ridiculously simple: Get back to your leads quickly.
When we say 'quickly', we don’t mean 'get back to them a bit quicker than you do now'. We mean get back to them immediately - in as close to an hour as possible. Data reveals that agents who responded the fastest didn't just win more listings, they win the bulk of the listings.
The research - the Behaviours of Top Performing Agents Report - was conducted by OpenAgent by analysing the behaviour of more than 2000 agents who received our leads over a 12 month period. Understanding best practice around leads has been a virtually impossible science until recently because every real estate group - in fact, every agency - treats their leads differently. There's been no single overview of lead behaviour.
But at OpenAgent, we are in a privileged position because we see how agents respond when leads are delivered in a consistent and deliberate way regardless of which agency they work for or the team colours they wear. The dataset for the Behaviours report analysed nearly 58,000 referrals sent across the country to just over 2000 agents. We broke them down into 10 groups with each decile containing similar proportions of agents from different states and with similar metro and regional splits.
"New data shows conclusive evidence that top performing agents do one major thing that puts them above their competition: They contact their leads immediately"
The data shows conclusive evidence that the top performing 10% of agents do one major thing that puts their heads and shoulders above their competition.
Top-performing agents - the elite of the elite - attempt to call back all their leads within 98 minutes of receiving a referral.
This compares to mid performers who take 148 minutes (2.5 hours), and bottom performing agents who call back in 271 minutes (which in case you're wondering is 4.5 hours).
And what we can see in the data is a couple of key observations:
- Calling back every lead you receive quickly builds trust with potential vendors.
- Calling back quickly signals to vendors that their business is important to you.
- Calling back quickly conveys to vendors that you'll work hard for them.
From this fast and early call, top agents make contact with 5.5% more leads than typical agents, and these small numbers around being more diligent and getting in contact with even slightly more people has huge ripple effects.
The top 10% of agents get to make 18.7% more appraisals than a typical agent, of which they will win 63.7% and convert them into listings. This compares to a listing from appraisal rate of just 42.6% for average agents.
"Top performing agents make 18.7% more appraisals than an average agent, of which they'll wil 63.7% and convert them into listings"
Most significantly, however, the top performing 10% of agents succeed in winning 42% of all their leads that go to market. In contrast, average agents win just 18.5% of them.
So if you want to do one thing to really improve your performance, smarten up your phone skills and jump on those leads immediately. It's the single biggest way to move the dial, and the flow-on effects will be exponential.
Want to read more about our analysis? Our Behaviours of Top Performing Agents Report is available and free to dowload now.
