Secret Shopping: 47% of Online Property Inquiries Are Ignored
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This report presents the results of 100 secret shops in real estate, a strategy used to evaluate a business's services, products, and real customer experience.
Why it matters: The results highlight significant areas of opportunity for brokerages and agents in the fundamentals of customer service.
The research: We conducted over 100 secret shops across the U.S., managed by a team of experts who used a standardized method conducted in a professional, repeatable manner to evaluate each brokerage.
Online inquiries: we inquired about specific, median-priced properties on individual brokerage websites (not Zillow), primarily through online forms or similar calls to action.
Open houses: our secret shoppers walked into local, median-priced open houses across the nation and collected specific data points about their experience.
Table stakes for an online lead is simply receiving a response – and nearly half of all inquiries went unanswered.
On average, it took 8 hours and 17 minutes to respond to an online inquiry, although the median time was a more reasonable 39 minutes.
All of our inquiries were made during normal business hours on weekdays.
Open homes didn’t fare much better: 42 percent of the time the hosting agent never asked a shopper for their contact information.
Of the 58 percent of agents that did ask for contact information, a third of the time the agent never followed up with a phone call, email, or text message.
The net result is that 62 percent of in-person, open home shoppers – which some may argue are fairly high intent customers – had no follow-up after touring a home.
We secret shopped over 25 brokerages across the country, shopping each between two and three times.
By far the most significant observation, for each brokerage and across brokerages, was that most interactions were consistently inconsistent.
There was no rhyme or reason to the level and quality of follow-up – or even if there was any follow-up at all; it was a roll of the dice each time.
More details, comprehensive data, and examples will be included in an upcoming report.
The bottom line: This is a perfect illustration of real estate’s Last Mile Problem – and lays bare the immense opportunity in simply getting the basics right: following up with people in a consistently structured way.
In other industries, best practices include secret shopping yourself and your competitors on a regular basis.
If you want to hire a team to understand what your real customer experience is like, drop us a line.
