For real estate brokerages, internet leads are both a blessing and a curse. The advantage of internet leads is that you can scale up their volume, based entirely on the budget you’re willing to spend to drive traffic to your website. The disadvantage is that their conversion rate is bad. Really bad.
Internet lead conversion is really poor
How bad? Take two otherwise identical leads – one goes to your website interested in a specific home, and another asks a friend for a referral to a real estate agent. The one that went to your website is anywhere from 50x to 1000x less likely to convert to a sale than the latter depending on whose stats you believe. But, whether it’s 50x worse or 1000x worse the point still stands – conversion rates of internet leads are awful.
At its core, the difference is that an internet lead has no relationship with your brokerage – no reason to trust you or to trust the random agent you’re likely to assign to work with them.
It doesn’t have to be that way
What if you could connect an internet lead with an agent of yours that already knows them? One that already has a leg up in terms of trust and relationship? If so, you could dramatically increase the conversion rate.
Last week, we launched the ability to do just this. Here’s how it works:
Because Cloze, with no manual data entry, finds all past and current communication an agent has – from emails to phone calls, text messages, and more – it is able to uncover all of an agent’s existing relationships. We’re not talking about contacts but about relationships: Not only the ones the agent thinks are in their sphere – but also less direct relationships, such as the other parents on their child’s soccer team.
Your agents already know a city’s worth of people
On average, Cloze captures over 5,000 relationships per agent. So, if you have 1,000 agents in your brokerage that’s on the order of 5,000,000 existing relationships across your agent base – a city’s worth of people that your agents already know.
In addition, for every relationship, Cloze uses artificial intelligence to grade the strength of the relationship, now and in the past – so Cloze knows how strong each one of those 5M relationships is right now.
Cloze’s AI understands the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between weak and strong relationships. A relationship where two people worked together closely (calling, texting, and emailing each other) is not the same as one where an agent had been spamming the person with emails, but the person rarely engages with them.
Relationships wane over time if people don’t keep in touch, but if an agent worked closely with someone 5 years ago their relationship can be rekindled much more easily than if they crossed paths once and never talked again. Cloze’s AI takes these and many other factors into account in how it grades relationship strength.
Cloze uses AI to route leads to the agent that already has a relationship with them
When a new lead arrives, Cloze compares that lead to every relationship across all of your agents. If one of your agents already knows that lead (and there’s a good chance this is the case), Cloze will route the lead right to the agent that has a relationship with them already.
You’ve gone from a cold lead to a warm relationship – and your conversion rate will increase dramatically as a result.
And, of course, if none of your agents happen to know the lead, you can fall back to any of the other Cloze lead routing mechanisms – lead ponds, geographic distribution, etc.
The ability to route leads based on existing relationships is a way to break the cycle of low conversion that has plagued internet leads in the past.
