3 factors that influences an estate agent’s online reputation

Running MyProperty South Africa and Namibia, we get regular feedback from visitors on site experience which includes problems like: not being able to reach an agent or being told that the property they are interested in, is no longer available. Based on this feedback and years of experience working in the real estate industry with some of SA’s and Namibia’s top agencies, we’ve narrowed down 3 factors that influences an estate agent’s online reputation:

1) YOUR RESPONSE TIME

Research have shown that companies that contacted potential customers within an hour of receiving an enquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as compared to those that contacted the prospect even an hour later - and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer (Harvard Business Review). Not being able to respond ASAP on a potential enquiry can therefore cost you a valuable lead and hurt your reputation as an agent that can respond quickly.

2) OLD LISTINGS

Another way to earn less commission and hurt your online reputation is to keep old property listing stock on your website (and the property portals) just to attract leads. People visit your website, and contact you only to find out the properties they are interested in were sold weeks or months ago. Will they return to your website? No, and they will probably not be interested in other listings you can offer, as they liked THAT one which probably had a below market value price.

3) LISTING QUALITY

Nothing makes you NOT want to look at a property like bad quality photos or the lack of basic info. We’ve seen this in our statistics: listings with great photos attract more click trough's and eventually more leads. An up to date website will increase your return visitor rate and over the long term build more leads.

These factors have an impact on an agent’s online reputation. You need to manage a positive online reputation for you and your office at all times. Start with the very basics.

reputation

The property search for south africa uses a complex algorithm taking into account more than 20 factors to determine where in the property search results a property appears. One of the ranking factors we take into account is the age of the mandate. We combine this with when the listing was last updated and other factors to better sort results for interested buyers:

At Entegral our mission is to simplify leads management, so we’ve introduced a new feature to import all your leads in one place. From an office perspective, this is great, as you can monitor who gets the leads and follow up with agents on whether they have contacted those leads. We also automatically expire property listings once the listing mandate expiry date was reached.

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