There’s a popular misconception that online leads for commercial property are worth less than represented ones.
I’ve heard it put less politely than that.
You might be a commercial agent looking to dip your toes into the water of online lead generation or trying to
manage the leads that you have.
It’s quite tempting to throw your hands up and say “all online leads are bad!” But what we’ve seen time and time again at Realla is that online leads can be incredibly valuable and that commercial agents can miss a real opportunity for growth.
As an example, think back to the pre-portal era in the residential space. Today’s commercial market largely relies on represented tenants and introductions from brokers.
Before 2000, the residential market held similar legacy habits from the pre-digital age, relying heavily on inefficient, costly and hard-to-measure newspaper advertising.
The famous quote about half your marketing budget being effective but not knowing which half was largely true of residential property in that era, for those of us who were around at the time.
Today’s residential market is nearly unrecognisable from the pre-2000s world.
Commercial agents are now using advanced digital marketing tactics such as PPC advertising, retargeting and e-mail lifecycle nurturing to draw prospects through successive layers of the marketing funnel to a close.
And the value they’re seeing from those leads is amazing: not just in terms of marketing effectiveness, but in overheads that they no longer have to absorb. Some think and act like tech companies, not provincial estate agents.
This has been a necessary shift, brought about by the changing customer journey.
More than 90% of house buyers rely on the internet as a search tool and more than half of all property pageviews happen through mobile. These customers heavily research listings themselves and once they engage with agents they are well “qualified” and worth the attempt to convert to a sale or letting.
We’ve seen first-hand how this shift is now happening in the commercial space, too.
Since launching Realla, our traffic has grown 20% a month to more than 80,000 users a month, all researching commercial property.
In April, we launched our lead-generation product. Agents who are wise to these leads are now receiving strong inbound leads through Realla.
Tenants and investors are spending a large chunk of their decision-making time online researching what is on the market.
However, often we see the same attitudes crop up around the value of online leads. But online leads aren’t going away and as time goes by they will become an increasingly critical commercial differentiator.
With Propertylink, Realla and others in the market, the combined user total per month is extremely sizeable and lead generative.
How you go about managing these leads will have a very real impact on the success of your business in the long run.
Conversely, ignoring online leads for fear that they will take a little more validation than represented leads will hurt your sales potential in the long run.
There’s a gold mine of leads out there for commercial agents to tap, if they put the proper emphasis on their online communication channels.
New opportunities will also open up – to measure listings views, email click-through rates and conversions to sales. Cold calling and e-mail spam could even become a thing of the past.
At the end of the day, it will be the commercial agents who can recognise the value of serving leads properly and converting them who will prosper.
