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Editorial
Website Portal – The Myth!
I know many of you think – “It doesn’t matter which estate agent I use, might as well be the cheapest, they are all on a website portal.” A perhaps understandable conclusion, but it couldn’t be further from reality and this week I got the starkest possible highlighting of why. The website portal is undoubtedly a key marketing tool for agents and many of you will have used the service to find a home. However you may have been under the false impression from that point on that all agents deal with your enquiry the same way. No, no, no!
I attended a seminar held by a popular website portal this week aimed at helping agents get more business from the site. All agents from Enfield through to Rickmansworth were invited, of which about 60 turned up. (Four Watford agents were represented, not a single one from Bushey!) Now you could reasonably judge that having gone to the trouble of attending, the 60 were probably the most ‘on-the-ball’ companies in that area. The portal had mystery shopped a branch of each attending company the week prior to the event and registered an email applicant who wanted to book a viewing. As leads go, this is about as hot as they come.
You will be astonished to learn that 38% of the branches hadn’t responded to that email at all!!! Furthermore, they said that of the 15 seminars they had done so far, this was actually the highest score. Let’s be very clear here - More than 1/3 of, in theory the ‘on-the-ball’ agents, were ignoring a red-hot enquiry. How bad are the rest?!
Whether this was down to staff cuts meaning they had less people to deal with workloads or just general apathy I don’t know. I do know that either way, if I was selling or letting a property and my agent wasn’t even dealing with red-hot potential buyers from property portals, I would be furious. I’d also question whether they’d be bothering to do much else towards selling or renting my home.
For the record, Imagine had responded by phone 32 minutes after the enquiry and email in 35 minutes, plus had chased again the next day. I’m not looking for a huge round of applause for that, it’s exactly what you’re paying for. What you now know is that it’s not what you get in a staggeringly large number of cases.
