Jeff Walker, CINC Chief Product Officer, shares key insights on how buyer leads remain a powerful growth engine post-NAR settlement. Despite early concerns, commission rates have held steady, and most buyers today are also homeowners—creating more two-sided transaction opportunities.
Walker also introduces CINC’s new AI-powered “Nurture Engine,” which personalizes lead engagement, automates follow-ups, and helps agents focus on the most ready-to-convert prospects.
Our latest release introduces improvements to how CINC AI uncovers buyer and seller motivations and keeps conversations going even if the lead expresses hesitation.
CINC AI is now trained to:
These upgrades help CINC AI do what top ISAs do best - get to the “why” behind the move.
Watch the full video here or read the transcript below.
Jeff Walker: [00:00:00] All right we're gonna talk about just buyer leads post narra settlement. And that's another thing I wanted just to celebrate, is that in the day and a half that we've been here, I haven't heard those words. Narra settlement or narra lawsuit when last year at this time. That's all we were talking about.
And what was it gonna, what's it gonna be like after the new requirements and what were they gonna be and. We were busy like trying to modify the product to support all these different features and buyer agreements and concessions and all kinds of things, but it turns out things are pretty normal.
So we're very excited about that. And we just wanna talk about both like what's happening since then with with the way commissions are and the buyer profiles, how they're changing, and then how will buyer behavior change in the future with the tools that we'll be seeing around AI in particular, that might create some new opportunities for agents.
And new skills that they're going to really need to focus on to continue to be successful and take advantage of those things. So we'll go ahead and kick [00:01:00] the next slide. So this is my TED Talk. There's world a squirrel and so we can go ahead and hit the next button. Alright, so buyer leads continue to be an engine which drive long-term success for our clients and there's some really interesting things happening.
That I wanna show because when we refer to buyer leads, I'll put this in like quotation marks because really a buyer lead is not necessarily just a buyer, it just means that they came in through the buy channel. They came in by looking at properties and registering on a website or submitting a property inquiry where seller leads, when it comes to online, they're most commonly coming in through a, what's my home worth?
Channel. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's a seller. It could be just someone kicking, tires. And just like a buyer lead doesn't necessarily mean it's a buyer. It could be a potential seller as well. We have some interesting data on that. So we'll go to the next one. Alright, there's, yeah.
Oh, we're gonna, these are the, little chipmunks guys. All right. Go ahead and click All right.[00:02:00]
I just said that. So we'll go ahead and skip the next slide. Alright, so thinking about the journey of a seller. So if you've ever sold a property it's pretty common that before you list, you might not be going and saying, what's my home worth? As a first thing that you do to get re-engaged in real estate.
A lot of sellers are going to start by thinking about what is the next dream? What's my dream for the next place that I want to live? And our little girlfriend here is sleeping, go ahead and click. And he's thinking about dreaming about that next property that he's going to buy. And so that means that a lot of sellers will enter via the buy channel.
'cause they'll be looking on agent websites, they'll be looking on the marketplace sites and looking at listings before they ever start thinking about in, meeting a listing agent. And go ahead and hit, you can go ahead and hit three times. We'll get this off. So the [00:03:00] really interesting data point right now that this is the highest it's ever been in the marketplace, 76%.
So this is the NAR data. 76% of home buyer home buyers in today's market are home owners already. And so that is the highest that number has. Ever been. So I didn't realize that until I started putting this together and I looked at the data and a homeowner coming through that buy channel.
This is something I'm actually looking to see if we can get some data to to prove this. It's a bit of a hypothesis that if you have a homeowner who's looking through the buy channel, I suspect that they're already far along in their thought process because that they're, they've gotta list.
They have a home they're going to list and they're now thinking about. Where are they going to move next? Not just thinking about what's their home worth, but they're thinking about where they're gonna move next. And one more click for me, and then also an all time high right now is 26 percent of home buyers are paying cash.
Of course that makes sense because a lot of [00:04:00] these folks have equity now because many of them are homeowners and something that's not in the deck. The average age of a first time home buyer today is anyone guesses what am 6 59 32? It is it is 38. Yeah, so it's not it's not 25 anymore. And so we'll look at the actual data.
And we see this at CINC too. So one of the questions we ask in registration is are they paying? Are they, and do they need financing or not? Are they paying cash and that number matches up exactly. So 25% of the buyers we see coming through our client websites are paying cash. And that's also an important consideration because when you think about talking to your agents about buyer leads and the objection of interest rates and that only applies of course if you are financing mostly through a mortgage.
And so a lot of the buyers, one to four buyers aren't, are paying cash. And so they don't even need to worry about that as an [00:05:00] objection. But this is the trend of the profile of first time home buyers. And we can see it peaked here in 2010 at 50%. And now we're all the way down to 24%. So obviously that doesn't signify the healthiest of markets.
That's probably lower than we want it to be. 'cause it means that a lot of first time home buyers. Are priced out or are not financially capable of buying a home or would be first time home buyers. I just say young people, but it also means that the buyers that are out there today are pretty capable as well because they've got property, they've got equity, and a lot of them are bringing full cash to the transaction.
They'll go to the next slide. And so what we see coming through, again, the registrations one of the questions that. Is asked as leads register on our client websites is, do you own a home today? And so it's a little less than that 76% because probably a lot of those folks are still using an agent that they sold with or bought with in the past.
But we still see a really high [00:06:00] number, which is growing, which is 55% raise their hand when they're registering and they say, I own a home. These are people coming through the buy channel. So that means that there is a potential two-sided opportunity on a lot of these. Leads and transactions. And that's grown since last year.
Last year was about 50%, and I just ran the numbers for the last couple of months and it's up to 55% say they own a home today. And and so of course that also means that there's great opportunities to identify those sellers in the database. So we we do that on CINC. We're looking to have them claim their homes, identify their address, and of course, tools like.
Fellow as well who is here, are great at helping to identify sellers in the database as well, because a lot of them, if they're coming through the buy channel, they're homeowners and we need to kind of surface what is that listing, potential listing that they have as well. Alright, so commissions. This is the other interesting thing because there was a lot of predictions about the death of the [00:07:00] buyer agent and the destruction and erosion of commissions with the NAR settlement and, we're very happy to report all of us that commissions are very much consistent with where they've been in the past. So one report and maybe even growing when you look at it, this was a study here done on for 1,290 real estate offices and 224,000 transactions on what commissions were paid to the buyer's agent and the seller's agent post our settlement.
So this was this number here. Is pre NAR settlements we can see for buyers. I think that's the buyers is the red. Yep. So this is about 2.55% and then there was an, there was a drop, but not a big drop down to two point a half percent. So very tiny. After the NAR settlement went to effect 30 days after, and this goes up to about February.
So 150 days and we can see it's actually higher than it was prior [00:08:00] to. The settlement going into place. So we've had recovery in that. Some of that's seasonal too, because we can see that's more, that's a seasonal trend, but there certainly has been no drop in conversion or in commission. And so that's fantastic news.
And we hear from a lot of our clients that they prefer the model that's out there now because it gives them cover to get this buyer's agreement and secure that that agreement prior to a shoring 'cause now they can say, oh, we have to do this. It's the NAR law. And then our law rules.
And then the other thing is we have appreciating home prices, so it's not appreciating at the same levels that we've seen in the past. But the Redfin data here shows that prices have increased 2.5% year over year nationally. And so of course that also raises real commissions commission dollars.
So if we have a slightly higher commission rate, higher prices can see that there's still a fantastic opportunity with buyer leads. The other thing to consider is the cost. So we offer both at [00:09:00] CINC the opportunity for agents to advertise, to generate leads through the buy channel. So these are registrations that are coming through property views as well as through the, how much is my home worth channel, the seller leads.
And this is the difference in price. So I think we always encourage our clients to have a mix, but there's a big consideration here that those buyer leads are a lot. Less expensive. See, yesterday I said cheaper and JB got mad at me. Coachable than the seller leads. $7 as a bar. Lead cost 1250 is the.
Seller channel cost. And so what does that mean? It means that if you are investing in buyer leads, thinking, remembering that over half of them are also gonna be home owners. There's an opportunity to really build a database that is huge. You can get a large number of leads, which is really important because over time, especially the longer that you've been nurturing that database, they start to bubble up and surface and [00:10:00] raise their hands.
So go ahead and click once more. So you think about it at the end of the day, I think you do one more click is you're gonna get 80% more leads at that $7 rate at that 1250. So it doesn't sound like a lot, but it adds up when you're thinking about building that large database that you can then nurture.
So in one year, if I was getting a hundred leads a month on the buyer channel, you'd end up with 1200 buyer leads. But if you only did the sell channel. You would only have 670 leads. So again, important to to not swing just all in one direction and have a nice mix that helps you grow that database.
The other thing is that we have a little guy fish in here and sit. Yeah, there's the squirrel. Verl the squirrel. A lot more buyers end up finding their agent. They end up finding their agent online than sellers [00:11:00] because sellers, the, of course, referral channel is a huge one, and so about three and a half times.
More buyers are finding their agents through the online channel than sellers finding their agents. And so it's, and that's part of the reason why the price is cheaper too. You're fishing where the fish are and about, I think the number was 78%, somewhere around there of buyers will work with the first agent that they have a quality conversation with as well.
So there, there is that opportunity to be first. And to find someone who has not been assisted yet. Now, one thing to consider that we're really focusing on is that of course we recognize that there's also work involved in buyer leads. And so he's trying, he's struggling here trying to handle the, all those nuts that he wants to store away for the winter.
And so that's an area where we're really focused on the product and we're able to use AI [00:12:00] in a way that you can go ahead and click to the next slide. Oh, before I get there, yeah. This is a demonstration of the work. So we have our, we are our three armed squirrel here, and he's trying to do so much.
He's texting, he's calling, he's writing emails, trying to do the one-to-one communication. That is required to really effectively nurture that database. And then the drip machine is sending out these drips that are the same to everybody. And sometimes those two things are in conflict because a drip might go out that is really impersonal right after the agent's had a conversation.
And that doesn't, that's not a good look because it sounds like, whoa, we just had a great conversation. Now you sound like you don't even know who I am. And so we're trying to move away from that with a massive project that we're working on right now that we call. The nurture engine. And so this is being driven by ai and what our goal here is to bring a one-to-one communication to all leads that has full context of everything that's happening [00:13:00] with those leads.
So this is the future. It's not gonna just be CINC, I'm sure. We'll see, this is gonna be the future of lead nurturing and lead generation, but what we're building right now is everything that's happening with the lead. The AI will be aware of. So every event every time the lead uses a mortgage calculator or clicks on a property inquiry, or has a conversation with the AI via text or has a conversation with the agent via phone, all of those transcripts, all of that context goes into our engine so that the AI can say, okay, here's the next best message to send to this lead, and I can even do it for you if you don't have time to do it.
Yourself. And so we want to move away from generic communication to contextual communication so that over the long term, it's like you can support a massive database and not having to be doing all that texting and emailing and in some cases calling yourself. And so we can go ahead, hit the next slide.
And so what that nurture engine will do then is a [00:14:00] hands off leads, which are much more agent ready because they've been having conversations which are helpful to them along the way. Because we know that buyers often take a long time to move from registration to transaction, and so that can help reduce the work.
And so that's really as a product person, what we're trying to focus on is how can we reduce work so it's more sustainable, effective, efficient for our clients to be managing these large databases and not wasting money by getting leads that they don't ever interact with. Next slide. Yeah. And so then one thing we even, we, we have a texting ai, generative ai, which is texting today, and already we can click once more.
We see that 12% of all buyer leads that come through are being nurtured to a point where they raise their hand and say we say that this is ready for the agent to pick up the conversation. Okay. So without doing anything, these are hand raisers. We find out. Their [00:15:00] motivation, their preferences and tee it up for the agent.
And and then about how many, what percentage of those do you think we see agents actually run with the ball once we hand that off about this is our challenge. Next is about half of them we're seeing, getting picked up. The next thing is call ai. And so this is a, another project that we're working on, which is gonna be really interesting because the tools are becoming so much more human-like and so that we can make sure that you can go ahead and click once more is we can make sure that every lead is getting at getting the touches to I to make, to identify are they a real buyer?
What are their preferences, and to prep those handoffs, those live transfers or appointment setting. With clients, and this is something which is gonna be able to help clients scale their businesses much, much more. Because without having an ISA, which I know a lot of our clients struggle to, to get good help with an ISA, or maybe it's something that they can't afford [00:16:00] to do they can take, I'll take a lot more phone calls and have a lot more phone calls, which are happening.
Next with this nurture engine. We believe that for AI to work, it has to be helpful to. The buyer that if they're going to engage, it can't just be like an appointment setter. It has to be doing something which is gonna make their experience better. And so we have all of our buyers, our squirrels, that have different ideas of what they want in a home.
And what AI is enabling us to do is to personalize searches at a much deeper level so that you're, they're everybody is not seeing the same listing descriptions even in the future. You hit next slide. All right. And so the future of what the consumer experience looks like is that listings are personalized based upon everything that we know about that lead and the conversations that we've had, they've had.
One of the things that we see in the conversations is leads don't, the users on the website, they don't put a lot of [00:17:00] filters in. They don't wanna miss listings, but once they engage in conversation, they start giving up a lot of information about their preferences, which are often very wild, and things that aren't.
Described in the MLS data fields, they might say, I want large windows. That's not a, that's not a data field for large windows, but that's something that we can extract. These are preferences and attributes that we can extract by having AI look at the photos read the descriptions and look at local data to supplement that listing data with everything that could be known about that property, so that we can then present those properties to the leads.
In a very personalized way, drawing out the things that are most important. Like our school here wants a cozy hollow tree with a moss roof and close to a park. So these are things that we can surface for them so that now every lead in your database is getting a personalized experience, not just here's a listing alert with the description.
It's gonna be, this is why this property is a good match for you, and we can do a little [00:18:00] bit of selling of that property instead. To give them confidence to reach out to the agent and set an appointment to see what
Audience: are you guys thinking about the AI and the integration?
Jeff Walker: Yeah. And we see that in the conversations where they're they reveal us, reveal all this information where the agent ideally would be going and setting up a search, but oftentimes you can't even do it because you can't set up a search for what they want.
To be able to automate all that so that everyone's getting personalized listings will be a game changer. What they say they want and then what they, we should probably change this to match. Yeah, and we want it to be much more conversational. So for instance, with the ai, they could set follow up and say, what do you think about the li that listing?
If they say I didn't like it because of this, then we'll adjust automatically to send listings, which are a better fit for them. We are not, because what AI can do is append attributes. So basically we can look at all the photos and see what else is in there that wasn't in the MLS or even looking at the description, because oftentimes there's stuff in the description that wasn't listed in the MLS attributes fields.
[00:19:00] So we'll be creating additional attributes of every listing so that we can create better matches.
Audience: So AI looks at the picture. Great way to describe that. Instead of feature based
Jeff Walker: and going away from the idea of right now, filters are based upon perfect matches. If you set up filters, it has to match everything or they don't get it.
And so what we want to see is best matches. It's got four outta the five things that you wanted, and that's why this is a good property. It's nothing that matches everything you want. But how do you like this one, which is a great match for every, for most of what you're looking for. We've been testing out the voice AI as well, and you think, okay, who's gonna talk to an ai?
But even though it identifies itself, because we legally need to do that identified as an AI by voice people, it just goes right over their head because it's a person talking, and it sounds like a person talking. And so they just it goes right over their head and they give their life story on the phone.
And of course we capture all that, transcribe it. And and then that can again tee these things up [00:20:00] because of course our biggest problem, this what stands between our clients and success. Is calling the dang leads. And so we see if we can at least be the first wave, the first line of we would always prefer that our clients be on the phone and doing the phone calls, but we have to face reality that a lot of them just don't.
And so if we can then at least tee it up so they're getting warm transfers on those, we'll have a lot more of our clients who are successful.
Audience: I have a question back here. Yeah. The nurturing is incredible, but at some point the agent's still gonna have to get involved. Yes, of course. To take it and run with it.
So what are some of the best practices you found in terms of handing it off from the AI to the agent? And then the other piece of that is, and you mentioned earlier that you found that 50% of the agent ready opportunities have been generated, haven't been followed up on. So how are you managing that to make sure that.
The ball's not being dropped half the time.
Jeff Walker: Yeah. So this is what we're, what we feel like we need to build for now. And so in [00:21:00] our testing what we've had available to us is a live transfer that can. If the lead says, yes, I'm ready to talk, we go ahead and transfer them, but it's not very effective.
We find the agents often are not answering that live transfer. So that's our question. Love to hear ideas, but one of the ideas that we have is that we start texting the agent while the conversation's happening, giving them the details, because Alex can do two things at once. That's a great thing about an ai.
It can be saying, oh, I'm having a conversation with. Jim and Jim's looking for this property in this location. Are you available for me to transfer this to you If he's ready to talk right now? And if the agent says yes, then we go ahead and transfer. And if they don't reply or say no, we might schedule an appointment as a follow-up instead so that it creates habits, like to be looking for those texts and to raise your hand.
That's one of the ideas that we're thinking of, but we feel like we need to give more life to what's happening with these leads so that an agent is getting millions of phone calls a day. Knows what to expect when that phone rings.
Audience: [00:22:00] So I, I just had a comment that was, so this is how Zillow Flex came up, was that.
Zillow basically saw that leads were not being followed up with. And that was then created a reflection upon them as a company. And so when they integrated and said, we're gonna start implementing Zillow flex, it was the idea that we're only gonna, we're only gonna give leads to the agents with the highest customer satisfaction ratings in these areas.
And that's how Flex came about. And so you have this lead distribution. Thing that you're doing, but it still doesn't necessarily overcome the problem that you're getting a 50% follow up rate with the people that are purchasing leads. And so I think that like the, there, I think you have two separate issues is like, how do we disperse the lead, but also how do we, figure out the fact that we've got 50% of the people that are actually.
What's that? I want highest likelihood of conversion. Exactly,
Jeff Walker: yeah. And you could score agents based upon their performance on leads, how quickly are they responding, and then what happens after they get the lead as well, [00:23:00] but. Yeah, that's I'm, yeah, of course in inspect what you expect is really important.
'cause I know on Mike's team, we had one person that in the jump ball phase would collect all the leads but not follow up with 'em. So that whole inspect what you expect is huge. 'cause some of those people are really good at banging the one more than anybody. And then if you go back in, and I have a team leader that actually every afternoon they go through all their team leads and say, you haven't called these people you've gotten, so there is a whole bunch of ways around it, like what you're saying.
But the jump ball looks good sometimes, but it doesn't. Play its way through.
Yeah. We've seen that switchboard, Sarah, hack. Yeah. Switchboard where you say, I'll take the call and then hang up while you've got a lead on the line, just so that you can have it in your database. Yeah. That's the worst. Yeah. So
Audience: I am thinking about the process of passing the baton from the AI to the agent. And how do you make that as customer service friendly as possible? You were talking about transcribing some of the initial comments that the customer made, and it would be, to my mind, really [00:24:00] important to have really quick, easy access to that information so that when I take the call, I can very easily refer to that as if I was the person who took the initial call.
Jeff Walker: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And that, and the nice thing is we can do that while it's happening and create a little summary so that way the lead wouldn't have to wait for that step to happen. Alright. I think I just have one more, hold on. Caprice has a question. Ah,
Audience: you're mentioning, yeah, you're mentioning transcription.
And so even on non AI handled calls, is that going to be a thing? Even with our
Jeff Walker: It is, yeah. And so we have a, that's what we just rolled out into beta. Okay. And because we see that as absolutely necessary before our transcription of course was always useful for coaching the, our client your agents.
But now it's even doubly useful because it can be used to create the context to know that if this person said that they have an event coming up that's going to impact their purchase decision. [00:25:00] That we can then time follow ups around that event, or even time the text follow ups or activities that are coming from the AI around that and make sure the agent is staying ont on task.
So you won't need to be sending reminders as much, but we'll automatically create those next steps based upon what's happening in the conversations. Interesting. What we're really focused on right now, and this I think is gonna be interesting metrics to start having your agents, oh, this right here. We're starting to measure.
What that conversion rate is from hand raiser agent ready to appointment set. We want to know how effective are our clients at picking up those agent ready leads and moving them to appointment because it's a lot easier and a lot more effective to increase that number than to increase even the number of agent ready leads.
'cause there's only gonna be so many leads that are gonna be agent ready in the database and we're already seeing, 12%. That might get up to, 20% once you get a large database and a lot of being nurtured over time. But there's limits [00:26:00] there. But what we can do, if we can get that half of people who are picking those up to a hundred percent, which where it should be then that doubles transactions.
If you're actually following up on those. And what we've actually been testing with a couple of our trainers where we've asked them, they're not, they're trying this thing out where they don't call their new leads crazy. They're only calling their agent ready leads. The ones that show up in the platform as.
Contact requested or AI agent ready to see what the difference is. Can they work, do less but be more effective? And one of the things that we found is that if they call within one hour, they're getting a hundred percent answer rate on agent ready leads. They answer every single time because it's being timed with their hand raising.
So it's when they want to talk. But we're still having struggles with them making those calls within an hour, even our own trainers, because oftentimes it happens. And during hours when they're, busy or doing something else, or it's the weekend. And so that's our challenge is like, how can we maximize that?
So that our clients have the most success with the least amount of work.
Verl Workman: Everybody give Jeff a big hand. [00:27:00] Thank you so much.
Hey Jeff thank you for being here and just like we just went through a whole transition, Christy is transitioning some things in her own brokerage and we had to do a transition of her entire BoomTown site, all of the thousands of leads in the back and it was the CINC folks who stepped up and helped her with that whole process.
And it's been really cool to see 'em integrate. And with all the tools and technology. So we're excited about the things that syn building and doing and you just watch for the things inside of businesses and also you guys are around. Thank you for being such a great partner.
We appreciate you and make sure you talk to these guys while you're here.