Donna Richey, a Dallas-area agent we profiled a year go , has just celebrated her two-year anniversary with lead generation service HouseValues. So how's it going?
In the interim, Richey got married. She's now Donna Harris, but other than that, she's still sticking to her HouseValues game plan: work the system so the leads will take care of themselves.
Online agents working Internet leads appears to be the industry's future -- anywhere an agent has a computer and Internet access. Donna, a Realtor with RE/MAX HiNet-All Cities, has already closed 18 transactions this year and has several more in the pipeline. Every one of them resulted from an online information request. In Harris' case, all of her leads have come from HouseValues Inc.'s JustListed.com and HouseValues.com lead-generation consumer websites. They're the only sites to which she subscribes.
No cold calls. No neighborhood canvassing. No mass mailers. Harris conducts her business through savvy online marketing, word-of-mouth referrals, knowing how to nurture online leads, and a commitment to superior customer service.
Despite her impressive stats, Harris is downright modest when discussing her growing success. "My numbers are in no way the best out there," she stresses. "There are many, many people who have had much better results than I have had, so take these numbers as you wish. I have closed a total of 18 transactions totaling $2.879 million in volume and over $81,000 in income this year. Sixteen of those are from JustListed.com, and two are from HouseValues.com."
Factor in three more transactions expected to close over the next several weeks, and that puts Harris around $3.6 million in volume and $102,000 in income so far this year.
Not bad at all for someone who collects the vast majority of her business online.
Harris, a six-year veteran, has relied on consumer introductions from JustListed.com and HouseValues.com for the past two years, and has noticed a trend during that time: The average sales price of her listings has increased substantially. Before she signed up to receive the online leads, her highest average sales price was $134,000, in 2004. Last year, it rose to $159,000.
"That average even includes an $85,000 house, a $64,000 condo, and a $96,000 condo," Harris says. "So I haven't lost my roots with the lower-priced buyer, but I sure am getting a much higher-priced buyer with the JustListed leads."
Given her impressive (and sure to become even more so) successes, it's no surprise that Harris is an ardent advocate of online leads. But even so, she cautions rookie agents about relying too quickly and too heavily on the Internet. It's best, she says, for new agents to master the basics of customer service the old-fashioned way, just as she did.
New agents need to learn how to market themselves in a variety of ways offline first, Harris believes.
"If you can't market yourself and your services and show someone why they should work with you, you're not going to close that business," she says. "I don't think newer agents should do the door-knocking and cold-calling of the old days, but they should do property desk time or open houses for the agents with current listings.
"Newer agents should always be out there, prospecting and meeting new people, not just hanging around the office waiting for a call to come in," advises Harris. "They should go to their previous corporate-world jobs and hand out all their cards and make sure everyone knows they're in the business. They need to present themselves like they know what they're doing, or they're not going to get referrals from others. They need to meet their neighbors and let them know who they are."
And then, once they master the basics, build an online business, Harris says. That's where customers increasingly are headed -- and it is where they expect real estate agents to be.
And it is where smart, successful agents like Donna Harris already are.
