Your Real Estate ISA is Missing 80% of Your Leads

Real estate ISAs (Inside Sales Agents) are becoming increasingly popular across the industry, but a study of over 100,000 leads shows that your real estate Inside Sales Agents may be missing out on up to 80% of your leads.

The popularity of real estate Inside Sales Agents (ISAs) is growing across the industry as many agents and teams are realizing real estate ISAs are incredibly crucial to converting online leads, but data shows your Inside Sales Agents may be missing out on up to 80% of your leads.

A real estate Inside Sales Agent (ISA) can help you realize higher conversion rates and generate revenue that’s 5 times more than it costs to hire one, but data shows simply hiring and training an ISA isn’t enough to maximize your lead conversion rates.

We did a study of approximately 100,000 real estate leads across 36 states in the US and 3 metropolitan areas in Canada. Adjusting for time zone differences, here is a summary of what we found:

Only 45% of leads are generated during business hours of 9am to 5pm

Less than half of real estate leads come in during business hours between 9am to 5pm which is typically when your real estate ISAs are working. Which means over HALF of real estate leads come in outside of business hours as people return home from work and have time to search for real estate online.

What about the remaining 55 percent? We’ve found that the highest lead traffic outside business hours occur between 6pm to midnight. As you can see, there seems to be a noticeable amount of lead traffic between midnight and 8am.

Only 50% of leads reply during business hours of 9am to 5pm

To make matters worse we found that only 50% of replies, in the form of text messages, emails, or phone calls, come in during business hours, which means even if you do contact a lead that comes in during business hours, there is a 50% chance they will only reply back to you outside of business hours.

Assuming your real estate ISAs work only during business hours, the average lead is looking at a potential 8-12 hour wait time before they get a reply. In a business where the lack of a 5 minute response time can make or break your conversion numbers, 8 hours is a lifetime!

30% of leads come in during the weekend

We found that around 30% of leads come in during the weekends when people have more leisure time to devote to searching for properties online.

If your real estate ISAs follow the traditionally set operational hours, chances are, they don’t work on weekends. Leads who come in or reply on the weekends may have to wait between 24 - 48 hours before they’re engaged by your real estate ISAs team.

Putting things in perspective

Putting this data into perspective, if you generate 10 leads each weekday, assuming a 100% reply rate for simplicity, you should expect:

• 4 leads to come in during business hours
• 2 of those to reply back outside of business hours
• 6 leads to come in and reply outside of business hours

Which means 8/10 (or 80 percent!) of your leads will want to engage with your team only after business hours. If you don’t have a team working nights and weekends you could be missing out on the majority of your lead conversion.

So, what can you do to increase lead conversion rates?

Real estate leads are not cheap and they make up the backbone of your business’s growth. In light of all this data, thankfully there are certain steps you can take to keep your lead conversion rates high.

Auto-engage new leads at all times of the day

Take advantage of an auto-response or auto-contact feature in your CRM system to make sure leads, no matter when they come in, are immediately contacted, ideally via a text and an email.

If possible, they should also be on a 10 day drip campaign at the very least to maximize your contact rates. There are plenty of tools out there to help you accomplish this.

Once a lead replies, you or your real estate ISA team can immediately take over the conversation and engage or qualify as appropriate.

Hire an evening-only real estate ISA team

If you’re going to build a real estate ISA team, make sure to only hire real estate ISAs that are amenable to working later in the afternoon and through the evening. Ideally, between 4p - midnight when lead volume and reply rates are at their highest.

Hire two part-time real estate ISAs instead of one full-time

Hire two part-time real estate ISAs instead of hiring a full time real estate ISA and set the expectation that each has to work at least one weekend day. For example, you can have one work Sunday to Wednesday and the other Thursday to Saturday so you have coverage through the evenings and weekends.

Manage replies yourself during the day

If a lead replies during the day when your real estate ISAs aren’t working, you or your agents should manage the leads yourself. Statistically, you should need to only engage around 20-23% of your leads during this time.

Hire a day team and night team

Once you reach a certain scale in lead volume, you can hire a day team and a night team. The day team should focusing on contacting and engaging older leads, whereas the night team should be focused on engaging new incoming leads.

As you can see data shows that hiring a real estate ISA or Inside Sales Team can certainly give your leads the attention they need to help with conversion, but is simply not enough to maximize your ROI on your marketing dollars. Unless you have a nights-and-weekends strategy you could be missing out on up to 80% of your lead conversion potential.