GO FISHING!
Fishing is an art form which calls for the right type of rods and reels, attractive bait/lure and active patience on the part of the fisherman or woman. Applying the same attributes to your selling of close-outs and other properties completed over 30 days can cap the drain on your bottom-line.
The Right Tool Makes for Success
Just like you wouldn’t use a stand up rod when fly fishing, using the right tool is the basic premise of capturing home-buyer prospects. Technology offers new tools which make for easier online capture, such as integrated website and CRM products, and onsite capture tools such as NterNow. NterNow is a consumer-access lock system that captures the drive-thru traffic in your communities and sends the information in realtime to your sale associates. With such a tool, you can significantly capture more prospects whether in a manned or unmanned community. More fish collected!
The Right Bait Works!
Fish are always biting – you just have to use the right bait or lure at the right time to attract and capture them. Your close-out properties can be just the bait to ramp up the sales for the rest of your hard-to-sell homes and others.
Here’s why: Builders either discount or add goodies to their close-outs that make them attractive to buyers and easy hooks for promoting. That extra barndoor, firepit or price reduction can bubble the property to the top of buyers’ home searches. NterNow research shows that close-outs have significantly more drive-bys due to these promotional strategies.
Such a promotional effort coupled with a tool that collects the driving-by prospects can result in the capture of hundreds of prospects you may never have met otherwise.
Case Study 1 – Sales Results at Savvy Homes of Raleigh NC
Savvy Homes installed five NterNow consumer access locks on “impossible-to-sell” homes. The results will astound you:
- The unmanned homes attracted 590 leads in 6 months. That’s 4.5 leads collected per close-out home per week
- Of the close-outs, 4 of 5 were sold
- Other leads were converted into 13 other sales during the 6 months test
Case Study 2 – Lead Collection by TX Builder
A Texas builder installed 5 locks on their difficult-to-sell homes and these are the raw lead collection results in 10 weeks:
| Property
ID |
Property Disposition |
Total |
Aug17 | Jul17 | Jun17 (Partial) |
| 13631 | Available | 64 | 25 | 18 | 21 |
| 13643 | Sold | 24 | 0 | 14 | 10 |
| 13645 | Sold | 9 | 0 | 7 | 2 |
| 13646 | Sold | 19 | 0 | 15 | 4 |
| 13651 | Sold | 7 | 0 | 5 | 2 |
| 13656 | Available | 36 | 21 | 15 | 0 |
| 13657 | Available | 69 | 54 | 15 | 0 |
| 13667 | Available/Sold | 20 | 4 | 16 | 0 |
| 13670 | Available | 19 | 19 | 0 | 0 |
| 267 | 123 | 105 | 39 | ||
| Locks in service | 5 | 5 | 5 | ||
| Mo. Leads per locks | 24.6 | 21.0 | 7.8 | ||
The Right Technique Turns Leads into Dollars!
Fish-whisperers see the most success because they know their fish and adjust their technique accordingly. According to BDX research, almost half of buyers on the internet who are driving by your properties are 6-12 months from buying a home. Unfortunately, these future buyers are often considered “worthless” leads by onsite sales consultants who have a short-term focus. As a result,long-term leads fall thru the cracks of the onsite agent’s everyday worklife.
In addition, since drive-by buyers travel thru your communities sun up to sundown, a significant portion of the prospects visit outside your agents’ workday. As a result, drive-by leads often sit for hours or days without followup. Since leads go stale quickly, NterNow encourages agents to quickly call prospects while they are still touring the home for best results.
Employing your online sales associate to work long-term leads FIRST is a more successful technique. They have the active patience, followup skills and motivation to convert these nurture-needy leads. In addition, they work almost 24/7! Its easy to create a smooth handoff from the online nurturer to the onsite salespeople who will close the sale.
Unsure how many buyers are traveling thru your communities before or after hours? The chart below shows the hours solo buyers and agents with buyers were captured over a 10 week period by the TX builder using NterNow locks.
Leads captured before 11 am and after 6 pm are highlighted. Yes, in this area, 37% of leads came before or after sales center hours!
Collecting drive-by leads, using your close-outs or other difficult-to-sell properties as bait and NterNow as the rod and reel, is a great way to aid your bottom. You’ll gather hundreds of leads for now and future sales. Channeling the drive-by leads to your online associate first and then out to the onsite people is the best strategy for converting today’s prospect into tomorrow’s buyer.