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.