There are many real estate portals, I am sure that if you have a real estate business you will have your homes listed in one of them with the aim of attracting clients and giving visibility to your real estate properties on the internet. I am talking about portals such as fotocasa, idealista or if we go to international markets such as Kyero or Rightmove.
But have you ever wondered if they really work?
Do you know exactly what you get for that investment in advertising?
What is the quality of the leads that refer you?
They really respond to the profile of the buyer you are looking for or you know how the cost per lead comes out or how many sales you close thanks to them.
If you still do not know the answer to all these questions, in this article you will know the main international real estate portals and why they are not the best option when it comes to capturing contacts with a real purchase intention.
You will discover why these channels are not giving you the results you thought and why it is that the leads you receive hardly show interest in your homes. What’s more, many times they consume the time of your sales team and they become frustrated.
The international real estate portals
As you know there are a large number of vertical portals specialized in the sale and purchase of homes, in this article I would like to focus on international portals.
In particular, those that allow you to publish on their platform a list of your catalog of homes with the promise of ensuring a channel for attracting leads interested in buying said homes.
But the reality of this millionaire business is as follows, the real clients of these real estate portals are the agencies and marketers that maintain this type of portals with their monthly fees in exchange for poor quality leads and with a very questionable interest in housing.
This is one of the main problems that arises when real estate agencies and developers opt to invest monthly in a marketing channel of this type.
On many occasions the situation is as follows, several real estate agencies publish the same property or a very similar one on said portal, so potential buyers interested in the home leave their data in dozens of forms for the same home and several agencies.
This is a basic problem, since all agencies receive the same interested contact. When the sales team responds to the prospect, they unknowingly become a spammer. Also, from the buyer’s point of view, the shopping experience is lousy as contacts are bombarded with repeated emails and phone calls.
If we compare this type of home listing services with a personalized Inbound Marketing strategy, the results are devastating. In this case, the agents work with high-quality leads that go through a segmentation and maturation process to generate greater purchase interest. But we will talk about this later.
What real estate portals are better positioned?
We have made a selection of international real estate portals of companies like Tajarat properties that are mainly aimed at European citizens interested in buying homes in the market. So, you can get an idea of their characteristics, the properties they offer and the real estate businesses that are advertised in them.
Rightmove
Rightmove is one of the largest portals in the United Kingdom, it is positioned as the one with the highest audience for properties abroad, ensuring that it has 125,000 weekly visits from potential clients for properties outside the UK.
In addition, it ensures that these potential buyers come from 100 countries. At the time of writing this article, only in the Valencian Community this portal offered a little more than 27,000 properties, imagine your real estate development lost among all this crowds.
Zoopla
In the ranking of real estate portals in the United Kingdom, Zoopla occupies the second place. It ensures that it receives more than 40 million visits per month, making the necessary information available to potential buyers to make the best decision when purchasing your home.
They maintain that they offer local information, data and tools that allow customers to better understand their possibilities. The number of properties is undoubtedly a lot, the list includes a little more than 21,000 entries from 460 real estate agencies.
A Place in The Sun
What began as a television program showing properties in the most beautiful and sunny places in the world became a real estate portal in 2006. Currently, A place in the sun, offers more than 100,000 properties for sale.
Like the rest of the portals, it also boasts of offering local guides, information on mortgages and other topics of interest to the potential buyer.
Kyero
This real estate portal is specialized, in addition to offering properties for sale, it also gives agents the option of placing their properties for rent.
Kyero is focused on real estate agencies throughout Europe. Offers to run ads in 13 languages and reach buyers in 195 countries. They assure that they have more than 60,000 monthly consultations. To get an idea, only in the Valencian Community it has 78,595 properties listed.
In addition to these 4 international real estates’ portals, we add to the list: Houses, Green Acres, and Prime Location in case you want to take a look.
Start investing in your business and stop investing in them.
As we said, the real clients of the real estate portals are the agencies, which with their monthly fees maintain this type of portals.
Although the prices and conditions of the contract vary depending on the number of properties published and whether they are located in a prominent place, the huge number of properties that each portal shows makes your business become one more.
All the portals offer marketing advice and of course a customer service 24 hours a day. However, you will agree with me that nothing can replace having a personalized digital marketing plan to position yourself as a benchmark in your sector and generate quality leads interested in your homes.
There are hundreds of professionals in the sector that we often find ourselves complaining about the poor quality of the leads received from this type of portals.
I’m not saying that they don’t end up closing a sale, but what is unquestionable is that the shopping experience is dire and the bad image of the agencies that are struggling to gain contact is latent.
Surely there will be those who still think that attracting clients through real estate portals is an easy, fast and low-cost way to reach the largest number of potential clients in a wide variety of markets and also achieve the much-desired visibility. But all that glitters is not gold and this is an example of how cheap is expensive.
Stop being one more and become the only one.
Do not enter that war, if what you need is to capture quality leads, who have a real interest in buying your properties, we have a proposal to make you. More than 12 years of experience in digital marketing has placed us as the only digital agency specialized in attracting potential clients at an international level.
We know how to provide your sales team with those leads. We focus on buyers and investors from all over Europe, we work in more than 20 countries.
How to manage customer service through Facebook
Social networks are an important customer service channel that you have for your real estate agency. We explain the benefits and how you can carry out this real estate customer service through Facebook and Twitter.
What are the benefits of social media as a customer service channel for your real estate business?
- Costs: When performing the customer service of your real estate agency through social networks, the associated costs are lower than if you had to have a call centre or a personalized attention team.
- Transparency: The customer service and information that you make on social networks is available to anyone, it is practically public.
- Speed: Waiting times and delay in responses associated with other customer service channels are eliminated through social media.
- Proximity: It facilitates you a more accessible and close contact with your client and allows you to quickly define and locate the opinions and criticisms of the clients.
- Image: The image that you project of your real estate agency through this channel is perceived as modern and current.
- Reputation: The use of social networks in customer service in a real estate will help you improve the reputation of the same since the resolution of doubts or possible conflicts of your clients is done in a more efficient and public way.
Keys to implement Facebook and Twitter as a customer service channel.
1.- Specify the Opening Hours for The Public On Facebook And Twitter
In this way, you inform your client at the time that they can get a response on their Facebook or Twitter account from your agency. If you do not specify it, your client may assume that they can receive an answer to their questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week and you create a false expectation.
2.- Train the Personnel You Designate To Respond On This Channel
The person (s) who are in charge of attending the customer service in social networks of your agency, have to receive training to know what answers to give to questions, comments and complaints from customers.
Capital smart city lahore are aware that any error in behaviour or response through this channel can cause a reputational crisis for the real estate agency.
3.- Prepare A Conflict Resolution Protocol
You must develop a protocol with the answers to the most frequent questions that your clients ask through social networks.
This protocol or manual should be a guide for the people in charge of the customer service of your agency through this channel, but they must take into account, not to lose the personalized treatment that should be given to each client, that is, it should not be copied and paste the protocol responses and you cannot answer the same to all clients.
4.- Create A “Frequently Asked Questions” Section on The Web
This section, in addition to bringing together the general questions about doubts that your clients may have, will be nurtured by those that they ask you through social networks. In this way, the response times of the publications that come to you from customers with frequently asked questions decrease.
5.- Respond Quickly To Requests
The response on Facebook and Twitter must be quick, within the hours you establish and advertise customer service. It is important that you do not leave comments, questions, doubts or complaints for a long time without answering since it can cause impatience in the client and complicate the resolution of the same.
If the query is not of a general nature and it will take you more time to answer it because you must inquire about it, you must inform the client of when they will be able to have a definitive answer.
6.- Anticipate Your Customers
If there is a situation, a novelty in the service that may compromise the quality you offer, it is better that you communicate it through this channel specifying the time you estimate to solve it, what measures have you taken to solve it and those studied so that it does not happen again, etc.
For example, you can communicate from a technical problem on the web that suspends the housing search service, to communicate the days that the agency closes for holidays.
7.- Respond in A Sincere and Personalized Way
We have already commented on it previously, in this channel, communication must be personalized, that is, you must address the client by name, speak sincerely and with maximum clarity, thus avoiding misunderstandings and confusion.
8.- Do Not Eliminate Negative Comments
You must be prepared to handle complaints, claims and opinions that are not always positive. A good transparent management of opinions benefits you in the good reputation of your agency. Deleting negative messages and comments causes more displeasure in customers.
9.- Maximum Discretion with The Information of Users And Clients
Avoid using public social networks to send specific and private information to a client or user. To do this, ask him to do it through a private channel on the network itself or by mail.
10.- On Twitter, Create an Exclusive Account For Customer Service
In addition to the account you have of the agency, where you work the brand and its recognition, create a specific one for this customer service.
To finish the article, we advise you to promote the customer service you provide on social networks, from the agency’s website, from the agency’s brand account on twitter, when signing emails or from the protocol telephone service.
We hope it has been helpful to you.
