Landing Leads from Reviews
Any agent would love to have Matt Liss’ Yelp ratings. The Mark Allen Realty agent’s profile goes back to Sept. 2011, spans 108 reviews and shows a five-star rating across the board.
“The first person to review us was an IT guy who was into progressive technology, and he was very happy with the service we provided,” said Liss. “Yelp e-mailed us when the review went up, and we decided to set up a profile. It’s a great way to initiate contact with new clients.
“The reviews are also very helpful for referrals. A client will come to me who was referred by someone I worked with last year, they’ll have Googled me, seen the reviews and have that next level of comfort.”
A recent survey by the real estate consulting firm T3 Experts queried 852 agents about lead generation and found that 72 percent believe agent reviews are important and 70 percent feel 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.