Zoomf Study: Do estates agents respond to emails?
Hundreds of billions of emails are opened and read every day. For many, email is the preferred method of communication, especially for business, but what happens when the person you’re trying to contact only checks their email once in a blue moon?
For estate agents there is no excuse for not constantly checking that inbox, existing clients and potential clients will expect you to be doing so. But from personal house-hunting experience in the Zoomf office, no-one was particuarly thrilled with response times from agents using email.
We decided to test this a little further and set up a small study. Posing as potential clients, we emailed 40 of London’s most established estate agents using the email addresses they had supplied on their websites. We stated that we were interested in using them to sell our house (in an area where they specialized) and that we were also interested in buying a property (again, in an area they covered). We flattered their ego’s saying we had been recommended their services by a friend and sent 40 tailor-made emails into the ether.
You would expect this type of email to be picked up pretty quickly, it’s not a tenant complaining the boilers broken again, it’s a potential new client who is going to list their house with you, and make you a nice comission.
But unfortunately, only 27.5% of the agents responded. And out of the few responses we received, 36% were generic emails that were not tailored to our original questions in any way. The good news was that 45% of the responding agents did so within a day, and all the agents who did respond did so within 72 hours. This seems to indicate that agents are either quick to respond and using email professionally, or are just simply not using it at all.
It seems baffling that somebody who read our email would not get in touch in any shape or form…we were coming to them with business. But those were the results.
Hopefully as we see the internet being more and more utilized in property search, agents will step up to the mark and be using the tools that are on offer to their full potential.
If you are an estate agent and there is an email address on your website under your ‘Contact Us’ section, then either make sure you can be contacted on that address or remove it as a contact option. Otherwise, you are just making the stressful time of house hunting even more stressful.
Filed under: Online Marketing, Property News
Realtor dot com conducted a similar study about 2 years ago with similar results from actual clients. It really is an amazing fact that so many realtors don’t even respond. Granted, junk emails are everywhere but a tailor made please talk to me about selling my home email should be answered within 2 hours.
This is my first visit to your site. Nice. I recently helped a London couple find a place here in Columbus. They had to sell their place in London and for the life of me, I just couldn’t understand the sales process in the U.K. - quite confusing and substantially different than the states.
Keep up the good work.
You should get this out to the press to shake up the industry and hapless clients alike. Such lazy practice !
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