Is it helpful to have live chat on the realtor's web site? Do you have any experience? Do you use it a lot? Do your clients like it? Thank you very much in advance for the answers.

I tried ZaZa Chat when it was free. Nice tool and it worked exactly as advertised, but my visitors didn't find it useful and I did not get a lot of chats. I had it on my site for about 3 months and then took it down. I just didn't find it useful.

If you're going to have a live chat on your site, make sure there's somebody on the other end who can handle these chats during the normal business ours. If someone is on your site at 12pm and they want to use the chat feature and there's nobody there to respond, it will be a waiste of time and effort.

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Russell Volk, REALTOR®
Mid-Atlantic Real Estate
Feasterville, PA
Bucks County Real Estate | Bucks County MLS | Bucks County Homes.

Spam

It seems like an inappropriate tool for a real estate website.

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Real estate in Nice France
French Riviera villa for sale
French Riviera Real Estate

I used a Live Chat feature that I paid for so it had quite a bit of stuff that came with it. I used it for one full year when I was receiving high rankings on a previous site. NOT ONE person ever answered me on it. Worse, it is affected by a lot of Pop Up Blockers. I did get a number of people that would click on the Chat With Me Now or Talk Live to an Agent button, but once the window opened and started a conversation, no one responded so I was sure it was other agents checking it out.

What I liked about it was that I could see at a glance when someone went to my site, what pages they looked at or were looking at. I had the ability to push pages to them and I could keep track of how long they were there and follow their browsing through the site.

In the end, $30 bucks a month was too much to be wasting on it. Though, like someone else said here, It is perfect for real estate, but I didn't see it work out for me. I have also noticed more and more companies dropping it from their web sites.

By the way: After that I added my IM to the front page. Since I use trillian, I could chat with anyone. Still no takers. What I did get was a tremendous amount of IM Spam when ever I was live.

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Larry Jensen, Principal Broker
St. Lawrence Properties, llc
www.StLawrenceProperties.net

What's My Mileage?

I wouldn't place a live chat on a site. Mainly because it's my belief that consumers want to browse listings far above anything else.

If the consumer, after getting what they want, wants/needs to contact me they will. That's why it's important to have your phone number and a online contact form prominently displayed or easy to navigate to.

This isn't the belief I share with IDX registrations, however. But that's a whole other topic of it's own.

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Steve Castaneda, Realtor
Keller Williams Realty
The MyHomeHouston Team

Specializing in Houston Real Estate. Feel free to visit my Houston Real Estate Blog or read about Real Estate Technology for agents.

Do you have any examples of sites that are having success with live chat? It seems to me that if you are going to have this feature, you should probably have someone available to chat most of the time. Florida real estate license law does not allow assistants to answer questions unless they have a license. I am usually out of the office most of the day so it would not work for me.

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John Allen
Realtor®/Broker
Allen Real Estate Services, Inc.
Sarasota, Florida
Representing buyers and sellers of fine Sarasota real estate.