Change coming in online real estate leads
Guest perspective: New wave of lead aggregators eye real estate pie
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
By Andrew Coleman
If real estate agents think dealing with online consumer inquiries is tough now, times are about to get even tougher. The really large lead aggregators are just now starting to enter the real estate market, which means there will be more leads being sold to agents and the leads will be lower quality since the number of home sales is not expected to increase.
Until now, there have only been a few tier-one lead aggregators in the real estate vertical, notably Realestate.com, HomeGain, Realtor.com and HouseValues. Even as smaller lead generators and second-generation newcomers with different models like Zillow and Trulia have entered, so far the space has been pretty tame.
But, from the looks of it, that is all going to change. I know first hand of at least five large lead-generation companies that are migrating into real estate. These are companies that have cut their teeth generating leads in perhaps the most intensely competitive online vertical: leads. For two such examples, take a look at Nextag and Quinstreet's Guidetorealty.com (http://www.guidetorealty.com).
To understand how things may change, it's worth looking at where these lead aggregators generate there leads.
Where they get their leads
Only a limited number of channels exist to generate online leads, including paid search, natural search (the "free" component of search), banners, e-mail marketing, affiliates/partnerships and contextual ads. according to our clients' experiences.