What is Better A Open IDX or Making Visitors register?

[Westin]

Well here's a topic I've not descussed myself in quite sometime... Here are my thoughts.

First I've always believed in putting up as much content and information on web that you can. Content itself helps to attract visitors and also helps your ranking and expands the possible keywords of your site. So you can see how content is important.

On the other hand a website is nothing with out some kind of Return On Investment. In the Real Estate world it's all about lead generation. So without some kind of registration from the user, you're just throwing your money away...

The best solution to these problems is to find a way to display general information about a propery. Like Price, Location, a Picture of the house. Just enough to get them interested in finding out more. Once you've captured your visitors interest... That's when you throw the registration screen at them. Not just any registration screen either. Make sure it's relivent for what they were tring to see, while explaining to them the benfits of registering... Like daily updates, one on one consutations, relocation packages, etc...

At any rate I could go on for hours but that's my thoughts on this subject.

[Sam Dodd]

Westin,

View mine it is exactly what you are saying and it works amazingly. Everyone is exactly right though it is market driven. I do work with lots of bogus leads but I get so many more good leads I feel it is worth it. I also have a full time 10 dollar an hour employee tracking, converting, pre qual, ect ect ect for me. There is no way because of the sheer number of leads I recieve I could adequately keep up while still dealing with everything else I do on a daily basis.

[Joelrunner]

We too have grappled with this issue, but the "scavenger" in me hates the idea of letting a lead (even if a low quality lead) fall through the cracks -- which is what is happening when we give them all the information they need. (Why buy the cow...)

I think the key to making the right decision, however isn't whether or not you require registration -- it's whether or not you can automate your followup with the 90% of the lower quality leads. If you don't have automation in place such as regular property updates, or some sort of a drip followup campaign, the answer is simple -- DON'T require registration because you'll be way too bogged down with low quality leads. As a result -- you'll potentially lose business because you won't have a good system in place to set aside the low quality leads, and give the high quality leads the attention they need.

However, if you do have some automation in place, you can widen your sales funnel & take all the leads you can get by requiring registration. You can put all of your lower quality leads on the back burner and let your automated system handle them. When the time is right for them -- they'll come out of the woodwork. In the meantime, you can focus on the higher quality leads, and have the best of both worlds in the long run.


That is what has worked best for our agents. Every month, our agents have closings from leads that originated a year, two years -- even 4 years ago. They hardly ever lifted a finger working those leads, but had we not captured those leads years ago, we wouldn't have that business.


Just my $.02

[Morristown]

I think the info I gave may have been read wrong, It is my contention that with up front registration you tend to get lots of people who click once on your site see they have to give their info, they are not ready, for many reasons one of which may be they are 12 to 18 months out in their plans, and they move on to someone else who gives them a open Idx and they feel more comfortable there.

Jim

[Joelrunner]

A bigger scavenger than me -- I love it ;-)

I see your point, but our concern was that even when we give them tne information they want, they rarely come back after leaving. Giving them the information for free cut signups by about 80% (and the 20% that did register weren't actually all that much higher quality anyway.)

Our solution is a compromise. All we actually require is an email address, estimated move date, and name. We don't even care if they sign up as "Mickey Mouse" (and they often do). In a nutshell. Our numbers just work better for us by requiring registration -- and that's based on thousands of transactions (a good 40% of whom were customers who signed up more than 6 months ago.) The way we see it, if we didn't capture those customers' contact info 6 months to 5 years ago, we had a slim to none chance of getting their business.