Why the first hour is crucial for maximising your portal leads

As an agent, you’ll want to sell and let as many homes as possible to enhance your business, boost your reputation and improve your profit margins.

Leads from the portals play a crucial role in finding the right buyers and tenants for your sales and lettings clients respectively, so you’ll no doubt be eager to know about the latest research on when leads are most likely to come from a property listing.

According to Zoopla, it’s the first hour of a property’s listing on a portal that is the most crucial for sellers or landlords.

When analysing visits for the first week of a typical listing, the property website found that the highest number of consumers express an interest amounting to a lead in the first 59 minutes of the listing appearing.

First hours so key

The data found that in the lifetime of a sales listing, 11% of all leads are generated on the first day. Meanwhile, for a rental listing, this figure stands slightly higher at 12%.

For sales, it was revealed that some 34% of all sales leads are generated on day one, with leads then tapering off with 17% generated on day two, 14% on day three and a steady reduction afterwards until day seven.

The pattern is the same for rental listings, but with a slightly lower proportion of leads on the first day, standing at 28%.

Furthermore, when it comes to rental listings, 41% of the total leads generated will fall within the first week of a listing’s life, while for sales leads this is slightly lower at 34%.

Handling leads effectively

As we can see, with the first hours of a listing so crucial and an eagerness to ensure that sellers and landlords don’t miss the boat in selling or getting their home let, the ability to handle leads in an efficient, seamless manner is hugely vital.

That’s far more likely if you have a smooth, reliable software system in place and a slick, user-friendly website offering integration with the major portals.

Software which provides instant portal uploads, real-time portal feeds so you know exactly how many of your clients’ properties are published on Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket, and easy social media integration so you can share listings from the portals to Facebook and Twitter at the click of button, is all going to increase the chances of generating plenty of leads in the first place.

Then, having the right processes and systems in place to ensure your team’s productivity is optimised, which a cloud-based, all-in one software system can provide by allowing you to track performance and create an office diary (synced to iPhone and Android devices), will enable you to ensure that you react immediately to any leads on behalf of your clients. The ability to react fast and efficiently will reduce the chances of leads slipping through the net.

Gnomen offers more

Here at Gnomen we fully understand the importance of property portals in an age where the majority of people start their property search online.

It’s why our software system offers a number of features and benefits directly relating to property portals, including real-time feeds to Rightmove and Zoopla, real-time lead imports from Rightmove and Zoopla (at a small additional cost), the ability to upload to other residential portals such as OnTheMarket, and the opportunity to upload to major French property portals like Greenacre, French Property and France Property Shop, which might prove useful if your clients’ target audience happens to be overseas buyers.

Our system also offers either automatic daily or bi-weekly uploads or manual uploads whenever you like, as well as a review before upload facility to ensure the listing is as good as it can be – clear, accurate, attractive, with extensive property details, top-quality photographs and punchy, persuasive property descriptions.

Equally as important as an excellent software system is an attractive, well-designed website. Here, you may have your own listing facility or one that is integrated with the portals, and it’s another area where you need to have the ability to react to potential leads as fast as possible.

We can help you create the best possible website and we also provide the best agency software system in town.

To find out more about what we can do for you, please call 0208 123 9019 or book a free demo here.