A PropTech chief technical officer says the more technology is used by agents, the more they will win leads.

Damon Bullimore of the nurtur.group says: “There was a time when having a website and online presence was seen as being progressive, now it is the bare minimum for businesses. Having a website and hoping it will draw attention of potential customers is not enough. A business’s online presence needs to be more, it needs to be working for the business to produce leads, which can be converted into revenue.”

Buillimore claims that 30 per cent of customers choose an agent who is within the first three positions on Google search. The number one position generates a Click Through Rate as high as 28 per cent, the second position gets around 15 per cent, while dropping to 10th position gets about seven per cent traffic only.

“Around 55 per cent of leads received don’t actually make it into an agent’s CRM, which highlights the importance of having a process in place to nurture leads and take them along the right path. This should include various touchpoints and forms of communication that support the journey such as live chat and social media advertising, along with nurturing and developing relationships through email marketing” he adds. 

“Given that the property market in 2023 looks to be more challenging, maximising potential lead conversation should be a priority for agents. Automation saves time and the need for agents to generate and manage leads themselves, it also allows teams to focus on priority appointments. Valuation bookings can be received and actioned, logged for agents in their CRM system.”

According to Bullimore, estate agents of all sizes, whether a single branch, multiple branches or a franchisee will have data lists of varying sizes. Within these data lists there will be active contacts, who are currently in the market and looking at property with a certain level of interest. The much larger portion of a data list will be archived, however. These are contacts that aren’t active and because of this are often forgotten about. There is a lot of value in these archived contacts.

In response to this, Craig Vile of The ValPal Network said: “Whilst we can try to predict how far the market will shrink over the next 12-months, there is little doubt that 2023 is going to be challenging, for some at least. Many agents will look to cut costs, reduce their marketing, and hunker down and wait for the cloud to pass. Other agents be actively increasing their marketing spend now, make sure they are effectively nurturing their databases and new inbound enquiries to position themselves to claim market share from those that decided to hunker down.”