Every person I come across talks about how much money they’ve spent identifying potential vendors on Google, LinkedIn and Facebook.
I don’t blame them; I use these services myself and they are effective platforms for securing leads. My concern is that agents are doing it prematurely.
They are paying for contacts they don’t nurture and therefore the money they pay is a one-off expense rather than a long-term investment.
In my experience, real estate agents can be so worried about growing their database that they forget to take care of it. They determine its value by the number of people it contains rather than quality of the relationships within it.
This mentality means real estate agents often lose contact after learning that their lead isn’t ready to sell. They write the person off as a dead end and move on to find more immediate prospects.
Instead of watering the farm, they let it run dry and have to get new crops to replace the old ones. This is a lot of work; it’s a gross waste of potential. Just because a person doesn’t have a house to sell right now doesn’t mean they won’t have one to sell in the future.
I’ve conducted extensive research on this.
Within a year and if the right communication is in place, an office with 10,000 contacts will typically generate 80 appraisal requests from their existing database.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t outsource prospective vendors; I’m saying you shouldn’t do it until you have the communication processes to nurture and build a relationship with them first.
