Agents take an average of seven working hours and 11 minutes to respond to email leads - and just over a third are not responded to at all within two working days.
The results come from a survey of 85 branches conducted between June 24 and July 9, in which emails were sent via portals and included a ‘soft valuation request’.
The exercice was conducted by lead control system Callwell, a service recently relaunched by entrepreneur Rob Wellstead and the former managing director of Countrywide estate agents Bob Scarff, through their new firm called PropTech Solutions.
“It’s become so normalised for branches not to deal with some leads at all that potential clients clearly remember those that do respond, and respond quickly” claims Callwell’s managing director, the ex-raterAgent chief executive Mal McAllion.
He claims that if a business does not get back to a client within a day, only three per cent are likely to call them on day two.
There has been a series of analyses undertaken in recent months regarding leads and requests for valuations.
Rightmove and Zoopla regularly produce data on agents’ leads based on their agent members, and a recent assessment of some 2,100 agents by ValPal - a product from Angels Media, which publishes Estate Agent Today and Letting Agent Today - shows there were 22,432 online valuations made during June on the websites of its customer agents, with the most popular time for requests being between 2pm and 5pm on weekdays.
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We respond to e-mails as soon as they hit our inbox, and I cannot believe that ANY branch of ANY agent would take so long to do so. If they come in overnight, we respond before 0900 hrs the next day.
This just seems like a tout for business really...
Agreed.
Email leads are a priority but if they wanted an immediate response they would have called the office. We find lots of leads are sent when they either don't need an immediate response or when the office is closed.... of course it will take me longer to respond to these.
A lot of leads are duplicates, most are time wasters. 99% of correct leads work from actual voice calls, emails are still not popular despite what all the Online Portal state.
Telephones still win hands down.
We respond first thing in the morning and as soon as they come in during the working day. if they come in out of hours of course we're going to take longer to respond, especially if after closing on Saturday and we are next in on Monday (when its bound to be over 11 hours taken to respond) and yes 99% are time wasters and duplicates. if someone is a serious buyer they will pick up the phone instead of being a keyboard warrior.
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