Real Estate Lead Capture
Maybe you’re curious about what your home is worth or you’re a serious buyer prowling the web for the latest new listings or price reductions in the area you want to buy a home in, sooner or later a pop up window will ask for more information. Whether you’re a buyer or a seller, getting free information online is probably one of the newest exercises in tolerance.
A home seller called me out of the blue to ask for information about selling their real estate, what the level of standing inventory was and what the probability of selling their condo was. The next question was why it is so hard to get info without “selling their soul” because so many websites require registration before consumers can get to the data or the balance of the restricted data.
Whether you’re buying an airline ticket, real estate or a custom Paul Jr. Designs chopper, there’s someone out there gaming the internet trying to make sure you click their web link first. As a consumer, it may have never occurred to you that there are web placement gamers who pay to be in ads and some pay to have better ranking websites which show up for the search terms specific to what you’ve searched for.
With the great advances of technology and searching for information on the internet comes the opportunity of generating information to make a little scratch, especially when it comes to real estate.
The field is wide open for “lead capture” when it comes to real estate. Yes, a good portion of the websites out there have now sized you, the consumer, up as a lead and not a person. Odds are that you can perform a search for “your city real estate” and the majority of the query shown in the top ten search engine results are mostly “helpful” websites that will ask you for more info so they can sell your information.
It’s not that difficult a task. A middle school student in Boise could create a mediocre website or pay per click ad campaign that focuses on Bonita Springs real estate or Naples real estate and either make money off of ad clicks or collect data to sell later. It’s all about the Benjamins.
What’s more is that there are the recognizable, so called “helpful” brand named real estate websites that appear to selflessly offer their assistance to consumers for a free home valuation only to gather your data to sell to the premium, subscribing real estate agents. Those same websites market to real estate agents with the promise of $X per month for the leads in a city or zip code. You, the consumer, are the lead and thought of with about the same regard as cattle in a herd.
It’s a challenge to get information out there unless you carefully search for a site that doesn’t need to know your blood type before you proceed. There are websites offering information which don’t always require registration or if registration is required, it’s disclosed that your data isn’t being mined and that your email address is simply a means to for automated updates on the saved searches you’ve created.
So if Jo Blow from Kokomo calls or emails you after you registered on a random website, now you know how they got your info.
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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area. Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor. If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.
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