A Eugene start-up aims to connect buyers and sellers — fast
Published: (Sunday, Feb 5, 2012 05:00AM) Midnight, Feb. 5
A Eugene start-up company, RealLead is trying to bring the speed and immediacy of mobile communications to real estate shopping.
Tech executives Chad Barczak and Jeff Kast founded RealLead in May, in response to the growing use of smart phones, and consumers’ demand for prompt responses whenever they wanted information. (More than half of respondents (56 percent) in a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors said they expect a response from their agent within 30 minutes.)
RealLead has developed technology to help real estate agents respond more quickly to buyers’ questions and also track which marketing channels generate the most leads, so agents can target their marketing dollars. Barczak and Kast invested $250,000 to launch RealLead. CEO Caroline Cummings is leading the charge to raise $1 million more by July.
About 100 Realtors participated in RealLead’s private beta testing.
“I’m excited about RealLead,” said Matt Powell, owner of Windermere Real Estate Lane County, which participated in the testing but has no financial stake in the start-up. “I think the service it provides to buyers and sellers will be great, and it will take off in the marketplace,” he said.
One of RealLead’s biggest challenges will be to get real estate agents to use the service: Cummings recently made a pitch in New York to 1,200 people at the largest real estate technology conference in the world.
Another challenge will be adapting RealLead’s business model if federal lawmakers put tighter controls on corporate “data mining” to protect consumer privacy.
RealLead will set up 10 marketing campaigns per property for a listing agent, at no upfront cost. This includes campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, and a “sign rider,” which attaches to the broker’s lawn sign and lists a QR code that can be scanned to access more information and a local number to send a text message, or listen to an audio recording.
The lawn sign “is one of the most underutilized marketing pieces for a Realtor,” Cummings said. Research shows that buyers will not pick up the phone and call the Realtor to ask questions about a property, and often the holders for brochures on the signs are empty, she said.
With RealLead, when consumers send a text message, or scan the QR code on the sign rider, they can register to access photos and property details on their smart phones. “They’re only required to give their name, e-mail and phone number, but they could fill out more fields if they want to,” Cummings said.
A text message is sent immediately to the listing agent indicating that a lead is coming in.
An agent can pay $9.99 a month per listing for unlimited leads, or 99 cents for a tier one lead, $1.99 for a tier two lead, or $2.99 for a tier three lead. The tier is determined by the amount of information in the lead.
At a minimum, each lead lists the property the person is inquiring about, the time the inquiry was made, a mobile phone number, and a billing city and state. A tier two lead gives that information plus a comment a consumer might enter, such as, “How old is the roof?” A tier three lead would add whether a buyer is working with an agent or whether the buyer is preapproved for a mortgage.
A timer for mobile devices, which RealLead is seeking to patent, would give the listing agent 15 minutes to decide whether to claim the lead, forward it to another agent, or decline it.
If the lead is not claimed, it would be routed to an online Lead Marketplace, where other Realtors, mortgage brokers or contractors could buy the lead at a marked-up price. Depending on the type of property, the lead might be marked up three to seven times, Cummings said.
“We share a 10 percent revenue credit with the listing agent who initially lost or declined the lead,” she said.
RealLead also shares with the broker/owner 20 percent of the monthly or per-lead revenues generated by the agents at that brokerage, Cummings said.
“There are a lot of agents out there watching that marketplace, so if a lead pops up, they’ll respond,” Windermere’s Powell said. “Any licensed broker can answer questions or show the property.”
“Puts it all together”
Other third-party services offer bits and pieces of what RealLead offers, but “RealLead puts it all together,” Powell said.
The agent can track each lead, he said. “It creates a sense of urgency for the agent, so if that agent can’t or doesn’t want to respond to that (lead), then someone else will.”
“It helps the seller,” Powell said. “Our goal is to get it sold, so we don’t want any potential buyer to not have their questions answered in a very timely manner.”
Some agents, however, are turned off by the idea that someone calling for information about one of their listed properties might later get a sales call from someone who bought the lead in RealLead’s marketplace.
“Some brokers are choosing not to use this service for that reason,” Powell said.
“If I were a consumer and was asking (for information from) what I thought was somebody, and it turned out to be somebody else, there would be a level of mistrust about that. That’s how I would feel,” said Ken Howe, technology director for the Prudential Real Estate Professionals franchise.
Leads already are commonly exchanged in the marketplace, though, Cummings said.
“You go to a mortgage site, that mortgage site is sharing your information with Realtors they have as partners,” she said.
RealLead’s plan also raises consumer privacy issues, Howe said.
As mobile devices become more and more ubiquitous, federal lawmakers continue to grapple with the question of how to balance businesses’ need to recruit new customers with consumers’ right to protect their personal information.
“Of course we’re going to abide by the law,” Cummings said. “We’re following the news, and we’ll adjust our data collection and delivery based on what is found in the legislation.
“That’s the great part of being an agile start-up. We track the trends, and we’ll adjust based on what the market demands,” she said.
Howe said that over the years he has watched people try lead-generation services and drop them. What ultimately will determine whether agents use RealLead is whether it generates results, he said. “If I was buying a service ... and I got results from it, I would be likely to stick with it.” Howe said. “If I didn’t, I’d move on to some other opportunities.”
“(RealLead’s service) will take off in the marketplace.”
— Matt Powell, Windermere Real Estate Lane County
