Are you capturing the leads you want from the Internet? If you aren't, there may be a good reason why. Your strategies are geared for the Act-Now Consumer, when your visitors may prefer to act later.

Most marketing efforts by brokers and agents are designed to get consumers to pick up the phone and call "now."

This is especially true of weekend ads in the local newspaper. At great expense, compared to Internet marketing of listings (free on portals such as MSN and Yahoo! Real Estate,) brokers and agents advertise open houses (a preferred offline act-now lead generation tool,) new listings, reduced listings, expensive homes and homes that are about to expire. If the consumer doesn't Act Now, then the ad becomes a trash liner the next morning, and the broker has to tempt consumers all over again the very next weekend, with a whole new set of ads.

Brokers expect the Act-now strategies to work just as well on the Web, and so far, they don't. Act-now advertising works only if the consumer is ready to act now. But what if they aren't? Is the broker/agent still getting something for their advertising dollars?

That's the question of the year for online aggregators and the brokers and agents they serve. Brokers and agents will get results, but that may depend on how they look at leads. Is a lead only someone who is ready to act now, or can it be someone who is ready to act later?

The fact that an Act-later Consumer is difficult to quantify, makes him or her less appealing as a lead, but that doesn't mean that sooner or later, this person doesn't pick up the phone or send an e-mail to the agent of his or her choice.

Matt Heinz, spokesperson for HomeAdvisor, says that consumer behavior studies that he has seen shows that home buyers are using the Internet to gather information but not to transact homes, putting them more often in the act-later category. That's causing HomeAdvisor staff to rename what they call a lead - "customer sends."

"In terms of generating leads and getting customers on the lead, it boils down to being where the customers are," explains Heinz. "And they are on three sites - AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! because most people search for a home using a search engine. To be on one of these sites doesn't take a lot of work and they are extremely cost-effective in the number of leads that can be generated."

But because expectations of what a lead is varies from broker to agent to broker, HomeAdvisor doesn't boast to its brokers about leads, and consumers clicking on an agent or broker's listing without going deeper don't count either.

"A customer send is the e-mail asking for more information, or the phone call to get directions," says Heinz. "We count customer sends as those that can be tracked from the site, such as click-throughs to the agent's Web site."

According to Heinz, HomeAdvisor as a preferred channel gets the largest volume of traffic diverted from its parent search engine, MSN. Sixty to seventy million people a month use MSN to search for something, and five percent, 3 - 3.5 million, of those visitors find their way to HomeAdvisor. In turn, HomeAdvisor uses MLS and broker-supplied listings to send 7,300 "customer sends" a day to brokers and agents, free of charge. While the number of listings viewed daily was not available, nor the number of visitors who take no action, it is these numbers that are the most intriguing. These are the future leads that may have generated from HomeAdvisor, but for which it will never receive credit from the broker or agent. Why? It can't be qualified, unless the broker or agent takes the initiative to ask.

"If a person is looking at homes in a certain neighborhood, and a broker's listings come up over and over again, that broker's name is going to stick in the mind of the consumer," says Heinz. "The Internet offers brokers and agents a chance to reach these people and at a very low opportunity cost."

According to Jupiter Research, 80 percent of homebuyers will use the Internet to find a home by 2005. The National Association of Realtors president Richard Mendenhall says the number is already at 60 percent.

"When you look at how they are buying homes, what they aren't doing is looking at newspaper ads, flyers and the other ways that Realtors use to attract customers," says Heinz. "For all these people to be looking online, and agents are still spending money on newspaper ads, but research is showing that fewer people are paying attention to those. They are using the information they see online."

How real is the Act-later Consumer? "Traditionally, spring has been the big home buying season, and online we see the largest amount of traffic, but if you look at traffic in the real estate category, it really spikes in January, not in late March or April when you have the most homebuying activity," explains Heinz. "This traffic means that consumers are starting to do their research."

"By the time agents start advertising online, those buyers have already made their decision who they want to work with," says Heinz. "Agents who aren't online will miss out."

There's another lesson to be learned, adds Heinz. Online research doesn’t lead to online spending, but it can lead to an affirmation with a live salesperson.

"For every dollar spent on home ownership there is three times that spent offline," says Heinz. "Consumers are going online to find out how to make purchasing decisions, and they are going offline to the stores. When they go to the store, they confirm what they have decided with a live person. If they are going offline to make the purchase, there is a direct implication for agents there."

Published: September 11, 2001

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Blanche is a renowned author of five real estate books. Her newest, Bubbles, Booms and Busts: Make Money In Any Real Estate Market, McGraw-Hill, was rave-reviewed by The New York Times. She was also selected from hundreds of real estate experts to contribute to Donald Trump's book, Trump: The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received: 100 Top Experts Share Their Strategies, Rutledge Hill Press, and is featured on page 68. Order Now Review - Honors In 2006, Blanche was selected among scores of candidates to author two consumer real estate guidebooks for the National Association of Realtors: The NAR Guide to Home Buying, and The NAR Guide to Home Selling, Wiley & Sons. She is currently planning two new books for the NAR and its members.       Known for her keen insight into real estate industry issues and for her ability to make complex subjects easy to understand, Blanche is a sought-after keynote and continuing education speaker. Real estate organizations from MLSs, to brokerages, to franchisors, to associations hire her to provide up-to-the-minute analysis of real estate industry news and advice on how to improve revenues. Her passionate delivery, peppered with stinging wit, is a huge hit with audiences and fans. Don Klein, CEO Greater Nashville Association of Realtors, Blanche Evans, Richard Courtney, president 2007, GRAR "The GNAR membership meeting last week featured Blanche Evans as the keynote speaker. Her comments and insights resonated extremely well with those in attendance and we have had many requests for copies of her PowerPoint Presentation. She was a terrific part of the membership meeting and convention program!" - Don Klein, CEO Greater Nashville Association of Realtors Coverage from WSMV, Nashville - 8-14-2007 That Interview Guy - Get Inside The Head Of Today's Generation 2007 AE Institute Session - To purchase 2006 AE Institute Session - Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 HouseValues Mastermind call - Parts 1 2 Blanche's fireside chat with Jeremy Conaway, HAR - Click here. For more articles by Blanche, click here.