3 REALTORS® Discuss How IDXPro® is Vital to Their Success

Here at iHOUSEweb, we believe that the best way to decide whether a product is right for you is to Take a Free Test Drive. But a Test Drive may not give you all the information you need. Sure it sounds good, yes it looks nice, but when push comes to shove, does it really work?

To answer that question, we interviewed 3 REALTORS® who are using IDXPro. We asked them to share their experiences to give you a better idea of how IDXPro works for them and the kind of results it can generate.

1. Eric Miller – Keller Williams Realty Professionals

Eric Miller has been in the real estate business for almost 10 years. He specializes in the eastern areas of Fort Lauderdale, which encompasses the resort and second home areas of the city. Eric has 2 full-time agents working with him at his Keller Williams Realty office (www.ftlrealestate.com).

Though times have been tough, he said that things are starting to pick up. “At the peak of the market, we had 8,000 properties available in Broward County. We got to the point where we had 40,000 properties available on the market. In the last couple of months, our sales are up about 130% and our inventory is down about 30%.”

Eric has used iHOUSEweb for his website and IDX services since 2001, through the good times and the bad. He said that he loves that “It’s basically idiot proof. I almost never have a client call me up and say, ‘I don’t know how to use your website.’”

“The other thing that I love about it is, if I had more hours in the day, I could go out there and create some of the funniest searches and have them on the front page of my website. As an example, I know all the buildings that are dog-friendly in Fort Lauderdale and I could go in there and create a search called ‘Dog-Friendly Buildings’. You’d be surprised how many different, crazy criteria come up that people want to search by. I love that it makes it easy for me to setup those criteria.”

“I think clients overall like the Google Map Search. I think there’s a huge advantage to Map Search, especially for an area like Fort Lauderdale because when they pull up the map, they see the ocean. So it gives them a perspective of where they are in relation to the ocean, which is what everybody here wants.”

Eric also uses pay-per-click to generate more traffic to his website, but he has another idea for why his website regularly gets over 4,000 visitors a month. “I think my custom search links actually help generate traffic to the website.” Custom search links allow agents to save searches and place links on their website that go straight to the search results. “Search engines pick those things up, but I think it also gets people to stay on my website.”

“People want to see properties quickly. They don’t want to see my mug shot! They don’t want to hear about Fort Lauderdale. They want to get to the website and see available listings quickly.”

Given how important property search is to homebuyers, it’s essential that agents use a search tool that will convert those visitors into leads. Eric says that his IDXPro is absolutely the best page on his website at converting traffic to leads. “They all come through IDXPro, there’s a very small number that actually go into the Guestbook.” So how many leads does Eric get from IDXPro? “I currently have 4,300 people in my database”, he said. He already has over 90 leads this month alone, and there’s still a week left in the month!

Eric set his IDXPro page to allow visitors to look at 3 properties, “and then they need to kiss me goodbye or register.” He has also customized his registration forms and he says that helps qualify his leads. He gives his visitors the option to say that they’re ‘just daydreaming’. He says, “If they’re daydreaming, I’m OK with that. I just want to know about it because I don’t want to put too much energy into the daydreamers.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he just gives up on them. “Daydreaming could also mean that they simply don’t want me to call them yet. So we’ll get back to them with some cute email, like ‘You’re just daydreaming? If you ever really want to talk, we’re here to help.’”

He also uses IDXPro’s built-in LeadTracker™ system to further qualify leads. LeadTracker is a searchable database of every IDXPro lead: who they are, what they are searching for, how long they searched, when, and much more. But to Eric, some information is more valuable than the rest. “If you see a waterfront unit in Fort Lauderdale and you’re sitting in Chicago, the perception is that the waterfront unit is on the beach. The reality is that it’s on a little pond. So it’s not always valuable to see what they’re searching for. The activity is what we’re more focused on. If they’re spending 2 hours on the website, that’s a great sign for us that they’re serious… or they need a life. One way or another, it’s time to call.”

Overall, Eric has been very happy with IDXPro’s performance and results. “I think it’s a great tool”, he said. “I’d say in the last year we’ve completed about 20 transactions that have come directly from IDXPro. That would be about $3.2 million in transactions.”

2. Jason Burke – Classic Homes GMAC Real Estate

Jason Burke manages a 15 agent real estate office in Orlando, Florida (www.classichomesrealty.com). “Our office is right behind Walt Disney World”, he said. “We do residential and vacation homes and we’re doing fine. The overseas market is very strong right now and we’re selling a lot of foreclosures.”

Jason initially decided to go with IDXPro because of its look. “I’m very focused on the look of websites.” He has now been using IDXPro on his office website for over a year and said it was very easy to setup. “I had a young lady there help me briefly with the setup. She did a great job.”

“I’m a believer that when people are looking for real estate and they go to a real estate website, that’s the only thing they want from that website. They don’t care about all the closing information or all the stuff I write about buyers and sellers. They want to look at properties. That’s it.”

So Jason makes it easy for visitors to search the MLS. He features his IDXPro Search with a large banner at the top of his homepage, displaying his map search and several other search options. To maximize the number of leads he receives from his IDX search, he uses Teaser Registration. Searchers can view 2 properties before they are asked to register. “I feel that if you give visitors a little bit then they’ll want more.”

The strategy seems to be working. “Right now I have 1,259 people registered through my website. This month alone, I’ve had 103 registration signups.” The quality of the leads has also been good. “We get a few people that don’t fill out the correct information, but overall we get an email or phone number that’s correct.”

In his office, Jason spends a fair amount of time working with the leads he gets from his IDXPro page. “Every morning I come in and I usually have 5-8 leads from the website. Whichever agent is on floor duty that morning gets those leads. Now over the course of the day, more leads come in and our floor duty changes over the course of the day and then those agents get those leads. For any leads generated after hours, I actually handle those myself and then when I get responses back I hand them to the agents the next morning.”

He and his agents follow-up with leads immediately. “I’m on top of every single lead. I’m a big believer that if you don’t respond very quickly then it’s a cold lead. I think that has a lot to do with the successful conversion of my website leads. I also pay my agents bonuses for getting website leads to close. I give them an extra $500 bonus.”

“We have an automatic drip email setup through IDXPro that says ‘Thank you for visiting the website, we’ll be keeping an eye on blah blah blah’ and as they save an inquiry, I get emailed. I respond to every inquiry that comes in. I’ll say something like ‘Hey that’s a great looking house, I’ve been in there’ or ‘Hey that’s my top agent’s area and they can help you with anything in that neighborhood.’”

“I’m pretty intense with my leads from the website. I’m a big believer in them.”

And having sold about 48 homes from his website in the last year alone, who wouldn’t be?

3. Al Thompson – RE/MAX Direct

Al Thompson got his real estate license 3 years ago. “My sister was the one who convinced me to move to Florida and go into real estate. She was a REALTOR® at the time and the market was great then. From a real estate basis, it wasn’t the easiest to get started in a business where typically one would rely on contacts of some sort. Other than my sister, I don’t have Florida contacts. I didn’t have that big database of contacts that you can leverage to build a new business so I had to build it from the ground floor up.” (www.4flhomes.com)

Though it wasn’t always easy, Al has been doing well. “Florida was one of the big areas that was hit badly with the market downturn. Lots of foreclosures, lots of short sales, and prices have come down dramatically. There was a period a year ago when the market was doing nothing. People couldn’t get loans. This year is a much better year.”

And IDXPro has been helping him get the most from his website. “I am definitely converting visitors into clients,” he said. “The way I have my IDXPro setup is they can do 3 searches and then they have to register. I was astounded, and I’m still astounded, that at the very least people give good email addresses.”

“When someone registers on my IDXPro page for the first time, I get an email. That’s crucial. And then I capture their data from that email and I send them a welcome note. Given that it’s Internet-based and from my prior habits in life, I don’t call people that register on my website.”

“I setup an automatic search for them so everyday they get an email with properties from me based on what I’ve seen that they want. Which is why I love IDXPro. I see what they searched for, like the city is Boynton Beach, and they’ll put in the type of property they’re looking for whether it’s a condo, townhome, single family home, how many beds, and the price-point typically. Some people go a little further, whether they want a pool or whatever.”

It’s not at all uncommon for Al to get 200 leads from his IDXPro page in a single month. “I’d say I’ve sold about a dozen properties from my IDXPro leads, but I have lots of people I’m working with now too.”

Not only has Al been getting a lot of leads through IDXPro, he’s been happy with how often people come back to his site. “They do continue to use my IDX. They’re logging in and looking up properties and doing searches. And they may end up buying a property from me. You never know.”

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