Make It Personal

When it comes to lead conversion, the Internet could be viewed as a mixed blessing. Ninety-two percent of home buyers go online to look at houses for sale, according to the National Association of REALTORS®' 2014 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. That translates to a potential boatload of Internet leads—but also to the time-consuming task of separating the casual browsers from the serious inquiries.

Large brokerages such as 8z Real Estate in Boulder, Colo., with 104 agents, assign a customer service team to qualify prospects by all available means—phone, text, or live chat—and match them with an agent. Lane Hornung, CEO of 8z, says the customer service reps help ease prospective clients into the homebuying process. "The consumer feels less pressure because many Internet consumers want to stand back a bit," he says.

As co-owner of a four-person team at Keller Williams Performance Realty in Colorado Springs, Colo., Mariana Wagner assigns the qualification process to administrative staff or does it herself. "Most people get into real estate because they're really good at negotiating or they're really good with people," Wagner says, "not because they are really good at converting leads."

The Human Touch

Wagner, who works primarily with listings, has a strong referral base, but she also gets leads from tools such as zBuyer and AgentMachine and from Facebook ads. She's a firm believer in contacting a lead, usually by phone, within five minutes. After that, qualification can take anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours. But it's vital to make contact when the lead is still thinking about real estate, she says. "If you wait too long, they are on to other things, like Facebook," she says. If leads don't respond to a phone call, Wagner reaches out to them with text messages. "We have a remarkably high response rate when we text people," she says.