68.8% of foreign buyers do not get an answer from the real estate agents
You would expect that 100% of foreign buyers get an answer from the real estate agents they contact. After all, real estate agencies pay to list on property portals, to attract domestic buyers as well as foreign buyers.
At ListGlobally, we decided to conduct a study on this topic. We called some of the buyers that generated leads via www.Properstar.fr (French speaking website) for Spanish and Portuguese properties over the past 4 months. We started this study in June 2018. Out of the 327 French buyers to whom we spoke on the phone, 102 said they had received an answer from at least 1 agency, and 225 buyers said they had received no reply at all.
45% of domestic buyer enquires do not receive a response from a professional: this proportion is worse for foreign buyers !
Last week we were attending RENT2018 Paris, the leading real estate fair in France. We learned during a conference held by Eleonore Rojas (Principal Product Manager and VP, Partnerships and Product Integration) from Move, Inc. (owns Realtor.com, one of the top 3 property portals in the United States) the following statement:
"It is astonishing to discover that almost half of buyer inquiries do not receive a response from a professional" (45%) - Eleonore Rojas
This concerns domestic buyers (United States) trying to contact real estate agents in the same country, in the same language.
At ListGlobally, we can say following this study conducted since June 2018 that this proportion reaches 68.8% for foreign buyers! Over two-thirds of the French buyers trying to buy in Spain or Portugal don't get an answer from the real estate agents they contact! Too much money is left on the table by these real estate agents, and we need to help them with this problem.
Why do the real estate agents disregard the buyer enquiries they receive?
There are multiple reasons why real estate agents do not respond to the buyer enquiries they receive:
- The property is already sold (and not unpublished yet from the property portals)
- The real estate agent has received many contact emails and has no tool to automatically respond to the buyers
- The buyer made an enquiry in a foreign language and it scares the real estate agent
There are obviously many other reasons that I haven't listed above. However none of them is a good reason.
Real estate agents should always respond to potential buyers, and need tools to help them with this
A real estate agent who does not respond to a lead is just like a lottery winner who does not come forward to claim his/her prize.
Last week we lived the perfect example: one of our client agencies in Spain contacted us to cancel their subscription with us. They claimed that they had not received enough leads, and that those buyers seemed like fake buyers. What did we do? We called the buyers who had sent a lead to that agency in the past 60 days and we found:
- One French buyer who was looking to buy near Alicante (Santa Pola), has come twice already in the region to visit properties and still hasn't been able to find his dream property
- One Algerian buyer who is struggling with the paperwork for the visa, who is still looking to buy near Alicante (budget 190.000€)
Both buyers are still active, and will buy in the coming weeks. But not with this agency, who lost the buyer by not responding well enough.
How can we help real estate agents to deal better with the leads they get?
The objective is not to blame the real estate agents, but to wonder how we (technological companies in the real estate sector) could help real estate agents respond better to the buyer enquiries they receive. We could think of:
- CRM / Real estate softwares that include email-automation tools
And that's probably only 1% of the solutions we could think of, to help real estate agents deal better with their leads, especially with foreign buyer leads. If you think of any other solution, feel free to share with us, we'll be happy to hear about your ideas!
