Real Estate Lead Generation: Why You Should Be Using Live Chat

Looking for a live chat provider with experience in working with estate agents? We can help, check out our live chat for property programme; expert lead generation for estate agents.

There are a few important challenges to consider when it comes to properly generating leads for an estate agent. This post looks at some of the most important factors and explains why live chat is a great option for any estate agents looking to overcome them.

And the really awesome bit? We’ll share the inside scoop on how to generate up to 50% more leads from your existing website traffic.

Differentiating from the competition

Differentiating yourself from the competition is important in any industry, no matter what aspect of business you are concentrating on. Lead generation, customer retention, increasing average order value, brand presence; you name the area, differentiation is critical to success.

When it comes to lead generation for estate agents (any part of the real estate marketing process for that matter), differentiation seems to be even more crucial in today’s heavily saturated market. 95% of property searches are now made online and traffic to Rightmove and Zoopla is surging. Traffic to Rightmove and Zoopla has surged by a total of 64% over the last 12 months.

If you want to generate more leads, you need to differentiate yourself. Why should home buyers or sellers be interested in using your website? Why should they get in contact and use your services? Your brand and brand experience needs to be memorable. Homeowners and home buyers need an edge to encourage them to choose your services.

Live chat can offer that differentiation on your website. Marketing no longer ends when the customer gets to the site.

You’ve made a promise, now you need to keep it – and live chat ensures the customer enjoys a better experience both before, during and after the sale.

Live chat for estate agents means that potential customers can reach out and get any problem solved.

Potential customers are browsing your site, right now. But they’re just not getting in touch. They face barriers to conversion, barriers to reaching out. This is the gap. The gap between an interested, ideal customer and a lead for your team. Live chat done properly can bridge this gap through the power of targeted, personal conversations. 

It’s what we like to call “more sales through incredible service”.

Building trust

Sadly, estate agents aren’t exactly the most trusted people. Hey, we didn’t say it…it’s just the public’s opinion.

You might be a very honest and caring agent who looks out for your customers’ needs, but how does a potential lead know that? Estate agents are actually distrusted by 79% of the UK population and only trusted by 14%.

So for you to generate more leads, it’s important for you to build trust with your online visitors. Well there are of course the usual trust signals that always seem to be doing the rounds…but then there’s also live chat.

Live chat can signal a whole other level of authenticity. let’s face it, talking to a real person is far better than researching a faceless organisation.

Live chat builds trust because it provides an opportunity to connect with prospects informally and show how empathetic and human you are. If potential leads can have a quick chat with you on your site and get some truthful answers to their questions, they can start to trust you.

A real human interaction is a fantastic way of beginning a relationship with potential leads. It also means that when they do become a lead, they’ll be much much warmer. And you should also know a lot more about them (i.e. they’ll be a qualified lead).

You can’t expect a website visitor to turn into a lead without some basic level of trust. And live chat for estate agents means a basic level of trust and then some.

Provide in-depth information

As a potential customer moves through the sales funnel and moves closer to buying or selling a house, they’re going to need more and more in-depth information about your services and properties.

Obvious, right? But did you know that they’ll be doing the majority of their research before they’ve even reached out to you?

Consumers complete 57% of the purchase process before making direct contact. Is your website being supportive in this research journey OR is finding the right information a turgid experience?

Use live chat to interact when potential leads clearly can’t find what they’re looking for (you can do this with proactive live chat). Answer any questions they may have and point them in the right direction of the right information.

And if you need to provide researchers with quite meaty documents, you can integrate with a file sharing servicesuch as Dropbox to do so.

Qualify real estate leads

Another important part of real estate lead generation is qualifying your leads as you start to do business with them. Do you really want to put all of your time and effort into one lead who is actually just window shopping for a potential move a year or two from now?

If your live chat agents are very personable over chat, they should be able to build a relationship and qualify leads before they convert.

At The Chat Shop, our experts use our Explore Identify Match methodology to help qualify leads whilst they chat. It allows us to answer their questions whilst learning a lot more about them (allowing us to satisfy the lead criteria of our customers too).

Conclusion

These are all important elements for an estate agency to consider when wanting to generate more leads from their website. Implemented and optimised correctly, live chat can be a powerful sales enablement tool that overcomes differentiation, trust and knowledge barriers.

We’ve had plenty of success optimising and managing live chat for estate agents. Live chat has allowed our customers to generate up to 50% more leads from their existing website traffic and deliver customer satisfaction ratings of 98%.

Want to generate more leads for your property business? Check out our live chat for property programme.

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