Focus on Early Funnel Leads to Succeed Post-NAR Settlement

In a recent webinar hosted by LabCoat Agents, CINc CEO, Alvaro Erize, joined Tristan Ahumada as they delved into the evolving dynamics of real estate lead generation, emphasizing the importance of early funnel buyer leads following the NAR Settlement.

They discussed:

• Doubling Down on Buyer Leads:

  • They stressed the importance of focusing on buyer leads, noting that 30% of buyers are also sellers.
  • Asking the right questions is crucial to identifying potential sellers among buyers.

• The Importance of Online Presence:

  • Alvaro Erize highlighted that buyers conduct extensive online research before engaging with an agent.
  • A strong online presence with good reviews is essential for attracting and retaining clients.

• Focusing on Early Funnel Leads:

  • Early funnel leads are prospective clients searching for homes rather than agents.
  • Building long-term relationships with these leads can lead to significant conversions.

• Advanced Tools and Strategies:

  • The integration of advanced tools like RealVerified Leads leads ensures high-quality lead verification.
  • AI-driven follow-up systems provide immediate and efficient customer engagement.

Watch the full video for valuable insights into optimizing real estate lead generation strategies.

Transcript

Alvaro Erize: Lead cost per sale is how much money did you spend on leads to get one more sale, right? So if you have a 6 lead and you're converting at 1%, it means you're buying a hundred leads to make one sale. That's 600. That's a pretty good number, right? If you're making GCI, you can see it as you're making 20 times your money, which is awesome.

Or you can see it as you're spending a 5 percent of your total GCI on the lead generation, which is good. I usually do try to tell my clients. Whatever you're spending on lead generation should be less than 10, certainly less than 20%, but at least less than 10, but hopefully less than 10 percent of what you're getting on each of the deals that you close, right?

Tristan Ahumada: Let's talk about capturing clients leads opportunities early in the funnel. I think it's something that we don't talk about often. And so you hear conversations happen, this online leads, they suck. You know what? I tried online leads, but this is nothing ever happened. It's and I think it's because no 1 focuses strongly on the funnel at the very beginning. And I think that's where it all starts. What are your systems, processes? What do you have in place?

Alvaro Erize: I think, the biggest, we particularly at CINC have many clients that, succeed at early funnel, right? I think you and I made a webinar some time ago looking at the different, at the different sources and what you should expect.

And I think everyone that is in this game agrees that early funnel is probably the most profitable way of growing your business, but it's also a tough one, right? It's not, for improvised people. You're going to have to call a lot. You're going to have systems, accountability, and all of that without rehashing the whole, the whole presentation that we did a few months ago when we talked.

So this was at a very, high level when I was comparing you the different types of lead gen, right? It's compared if you do, of course you're sending your own referrals. You don't pay anything on those referrals. CPL is your cost per lead, right? You don't pay anything in your own referrals.

You convert a lot of them, very high profitability, right? But if you're doing early funnel if you're doing, and it doesn't have to be with saying if you're doing with any kind of good Google, Facebook advertise. Thing should be getting leads at six, seven, $8 per lead. And, this is difficult if you're doing all your follow up on your accountability, right?

You should be converting at 1%. And I always try to con to, to get my people thinking of cost per sale, lead cost per sale, lead cost per sale is How much money did you spend on leads to get one more? If, you have a $6 lead and you're converting at 1%, it means you're buying a hundred leads to make one sale, that's $600.

That's a pretty good number, right? If you're making $12,000 in GCI, you can see it as you're making 20 times your money, which is awesome. Or you can see it as you're spending a 5% of your total GCI on the lead generation, which is good. I usually do try to tell my clients. Whatever you're spending on lead generation should be less than 10, certainly less than 20%, but at least less than 10, but hopefully less than 10 percent of what you're getting on each of the deals that you close.

Okay. Now, of course, agents get naturally attractive to easier deals, right? Like a Zillow deal and forget Zillow Flex for now. If you go to the old style Zillow, you buy leads at 400 or 300. You know better than me, Tristan, how much is a Zillow lead these days, if you're not in Zillow Flex.

Tristan Ahumada: You're at about 500. I just we just went through this yesterday. So it's perfect timing. 500 a lead an average.

Alvaro Erize: And what would you say is your conversion on those?

Tristan Ahumada: From the national averages directly from Zillow, you're at 6%. Do some people go higher? Yeah. Do some people go lower?

Alvaro Erize: So 6%. And that's the thing. Imagine that you're at 10%, right? Imagine that you're at 10%. 10% on a $500 lead means you're gonna buy 10 of those to close one. And I'm being optimistic with a 10%. It means you're paying $5,000 per deal. $5,000 on a deal that then you're gonna make 10 12 000, you're spending almost half right and that's what makes it now again If you're an agent on the receiving end on this You of course prefer a lead that you're going to have to call 10 people To get one sale than a lead that you're going to have to call 100 people to make a sale But it's a team leader that are trying to find profitable growth it's just if you are paying 50% of your GCI on the lead generation itself, there's no way that's gonna work.

Can it always be as low as 5%? No. Okay, but 10%, 15%, but you cannot be paying $5,000 for each deal that you're gonna close. When you're only making 000 a deal, right? Now, in Zillow Flex, you're not paying anything upfront, but you're paying at the end, right? And you're paying a 40%, right? But, which is huge, 40 percent is a huge thing.

Except many team leaders split that payment with the agent and say, go I'm only paying 20 percent because the other half it's going to the agent. Which is initially a good thing. But then the bad thing is you have agents that are making 30 percent on the deal. And then those agents stay with you for a year and then just go directly to an home light agent advise any of those to try to get their full

60 percent on a deal, right? It's more difficult to do on the early funnel, because in the early funnel, if an agent wants to leave you, they have to go buy a software like Zing, they have to invest upfront, they have to get an ISA to go, all things that are difficult for them. But in a Zillow Flex deal, it's just a matter of them deciding, Oh, you know what, if someone is going Someone that is not my team leader is actually paying for these leads and follow up with them.

I can go directly to the source. I don't need to. And I think that's the ultimate goal of Zillow Flex, which is I have a ton of very well trained, successful agents that work directly with Zillow Flex. And that's why for me, the role of the team leader gets muted there, right?

Tristan Ahumada: Yeah, I agree with you there, man. Plus I think what we see when it comes to portals specifically like realtor. com, Zillow. In essence, somewhat Redfin and even Homes now is when they capture the lead, they want to make sure that they're assigning it to an agent with the new laws coming into play where they're going to have something signed to be able to work with them.

I think this is why you saw Zillow come up with something. What? Like a month ago saying, hey, here's the contract. Let's lock them in. A contract that's really not a contract let's lock them in because they, understand what happens to leads coming in now. It's hey, I can no longer sell as many leads as I was selling before because it's going to end at some point, because they signed a contract. I can no longer sell that lead down the line.

Alvaro Erize: And that's, precisely it, right? And so that for me, there's two things that, that people think might be shifting. And one of them, in my opinion is, and the other is not. So this shift is in this new world, do late funnel leads become more valuable or early funnel leads become more valuable?

So before you could wait until someone was a month away from buying a home and get it through Zillow for 500. Or you could get it six months before for 6, but then you had to do all the followup, right? And you might lose it at the end to Zillow and the last month. For me, what this and Zillow realized this, and that's why they, reacted so, so damaging to the industry.

They realized that this new change with all the bad things that came, there was a good thing that came, right? NARS said, you're going to have a buyer agreement, which gives the agent a good argument. To speak with our consumer and say, Hey, look, we do need to have something. If I'm going to be working with you, we need to put something in pay.

I think Zillow realized that what that did is a lot of those 500 leads. When you get them are going to go Oh, but I already have a buyer contract that I signed three months ago with whoever has been helping. And so that was going to damage Zillow significantly. Therefore they came up with what I believe is, a blatant aggression to the industry, which is a non contract specifically designed to tell the consumer, Hey, the agents are telling you that you actually need to sign something. You don't, just get this so that we can skirt the rules around them. And that's it. And no, don't sign anything real. How did you see the Zillow contract?

Tristan Ahumada: Yes, I did. I saw the exact same thing. I made a video about it and I was like, what is this? Okay, this means we're going back to how we were. It's that, that makes no sense, right? It keeps us as door openers, right? That's it. We're door openers.

Alvaro Erize: Why do you think NAR has not come out more vocally against it? Because they put in their specific settlement. They said, Hey, look, now, the only change in this sense is you do have to have a buyer contract to really see a house, which means you need to define your conversation with the consumer ahead of the work because that was what generated the problem. And now Zillow is saying, no, I'm going to invent a Turing contract that actually does the opposite of what NAR is saying. Why do you think that they didn't come up more vocally against it?

Tristan Ahumada: 2 reasons. 1, they rely on the states to develop their own contracts because they all have different laws. That's number 1. And number 2, they're waiting to see what the Department of justice weighs in on and says, hey, by the way we want it to be more like this. And they, haven't been super clear about what they want, and.

Alvaro Erize: They never are.

Tristan Ahumada: They never are man, but the date for the MLS is to decide whether or not they're going to be part of the settlement or not is June 18th. So you saw just a couple of days ago the Northwestern MLS, which is not part of NAR, they said, hey, we're actually not going to abide by this portion of the law that you're saying we should, which is showing what the payment is to the buyer's agent. We're actually going to continue to do that. And I was like, whoa, and that's 33, 000 agents, man.

Alvaro Erize: Not to correct you there, but it's not really a law, right? It's a rule from NAR, right?

Tristan Ahumada: Rule from NAR. You got it.

Alvaro Erize: And we at CINC, we're thinking about this because. The whole thing that generated all this problem is the accusation that agents were colluding with each other and looking at who was going to share or not and steering plans, which is ridiculous plans will go to whatever house they want to see, and they will not care if the agent steers one way or another, but there's a big difference between not having a secret channel for agents to talk about each other about commission versus If I'm a seller, me covering the buyer commission is a seller concession, like any other seller concession.

If I'm going to provide 10, 000 in seller closing costs, in buyer closing costs as a concession, of course I want to put it on my listing, right? Why would I not? It's part of what I'm offering. And also for me, in this particular case, this, is the seller concession by excellence because the only reason, independently of who's paying for the buyer commission or not, the only reason that it is makes more sense for it to be on the seller side is because that way it is in the, mortgage, right?

And, in the end, no one, not the DOJ not, the U. S. government, no one wants buyers to have to pay buyer commissions out of pocket because the first thing that would kill is first time homebuyers and VA's ever being able to get any house, they would be reduced to a very small amount of house that they could afford because they would not be able to afford a 10, 000 commission to an agent, right?

Tristan Ahumada: Yeah, very true. Very true. Yeah, you make a good point there. And I put up the, response from the NWMLS too, in the link. So if anybody wants to read that.

Alvaro Erize: And that shows you like, this is a big MLS that is saying, you know what, we have to show it because consumers need to be able to see it. And so we, for starters, at CINC, what we are going to do is we are implementing a place for you to put in your listings, how much your seller is agreeing to give, which is obviously totally kosher. It's a, even NAR said you can still do that. In fact, one important thing for anyone, sorry to jump around, but for anyone that is worried that the DOJ will say, no, you cannot really share commissions. I think this is a very important, let me see if I find it.

The DOJ in February actually came out specifically saying the opposite. Now they still want more transparency, but, this actually would be less transparency if you don't, if you're not able. So, if you look at this I'm not gonna read it whole out loud, but the final phrase there, while some buyers might choose to pay their buyer brokers out of pocket, other buyers might request in an offer that the seller pay a specified amount to the buyer broker from the proceeds of the home sale.

So what this says is, Even if the, seller hasn't agreed a priori with his seller agent to give interest to the buyer agent, it could still happen that at the end of the whole process, the buyer goes, you know what? Just add another 3, 000 or 5, 000 to my sell price and you cover the, agent. And so the game doesn't change at all if that happens, right?

Tristan Ahumada: That's very true. It's very true. I think all of this is really clearly showing us one thing though, and you and I were talking about it earlier on. It's saying The early funnel becomes even more important to. To us being able to close online leads at a higher rate, because.

Hey, Zillow wrote to dot com homes dot com. They're all trying to pivot. Because they understand that this on the buyer side is a detriment to them, right? They're trying to pivot in 2 ways. 1, we were trying to see that. That not contract from Zillow. The other 1 is they're trying to pivot into more seller leads, right? So we're seeing both. I'm like, interesting. And they're in the middle of figuring it out because they don't know. They don't know they're like, they're fumbling.

Alvaro Erize: And that's where if you want my contrarian my contrarian point of view, that's where I don't agree with anyone in the industry.

On the early funnel versus late funnel. I think everyone agrees that early funnel is going to become more important and that Zillow is scrambling to try to react. And as someone that has both early and late funnel, because I have Agent Pronto, which is late funnel leads, just like Zillow Flex, I keep telling my clients, look, Agent Pronto or Prolink, you can still use it, but you need to realize that as more buyer contracts get signed three months ahead, many of those expensive leads at the end will come with people that are already somehow constrained, right?

But where I don't agree with most of the industry is you will hear a lot Zillow, but a lot of my competitors like Boomtown, like all of those. Talking about moving to seller leads, right? And I absolutely think that's the bad the, bad direction to go. I think that's like buying expensive stock when it's up and selling when it's down.

For me right now, you have A lot of money going to seller leads, right? And you have to think that, and you probably know this from exterior interest. And like the numbers show that only like 40 percent of people choose their listing agent from someone they met online, but almost 80 percent of people choose their buyer agent because of someone they met online.

It's much easier for you to Connect to an agent online when you're thinking of buying and when you're thinking of selling your home, right?

Tristan Ahumada: Yeah, very true.

Alvaro Erize: And if that's true, then why is so much more money fighting for those seller leads? And again, we do seller leads. I have a ton of clients that come to me and go over.

I want to move from buyer to seller leads. And it would be very easy for me from saying to say we have this new seller product that has this different or whatever. To just to try to ride the wave, right? And I am taking the unpopular position of telling my clients, buyer leads right now, cost per lead is going down because more people are moving out of it for fear of the buyer commission not existing in the future.

But the buyer commission is not going anywhere for the reasons we were discussing. You need to be bringing in these leads and working them. And yes, You need to get them in a buyer contract. So that's, we are trying to release where we're going to release now an easy contract bottom so that the equivalent of the Zillow, but with a real contract where you agree with a price and a timeframe so that you can do it through CINC. But that's for me so when people hear, when you hear so much, hey, we're moving over to seller leads, in my opinion, that's just fear. And it's fear or, or just pandering, right? Like tech companies trying to ride a wave and going oh, I have this. I see more money moving to our seller leads while buyer leads is the same pool of money going to be, amongst fewer people.

Tristan Ahumada: Listen, I doubled down on buyer leads while everybody's jumping off. I'm like, guys, are you not seeing what's happening? 30 percent of all buyers are sellers. We just have to ask the right questions.

Alvaro Erize: Yeah, I fully agree with you.

And, Dave just asked the question, will, the percentage of buyers finding their agent online change with buyers needing to sign a contract?

Will buyers do more research? And so I, here's my, respective answer, Dave, and again, it's for what it's worth, it's just my opinion. It's no, the same amount of people will. choosing still from online, because that's the way that people are doing the research today. What it will mean is that people will research you more when they're, before they're actually wanting to engage with an agent, right?

So having reviews, having a good Google business page that shows who you are. And and having a good online presence that shows your expertise will become more important. Where before someone could say, I don't know who you are, but you know what? You can show me a house or two doesn't matter because in the end I'm not committing to anything.

If that goes away now, I'm still searching for my agent online, but I'm doing what you do when you want to buy a TV. It's you're going to read reviews. You're going to try to find some articles on it and you're going to make some research before you do it.

Tristan Ahumada: That's a good point, man. That's What you're also leading into is it becomes even more important, Dave, it becomes more important that you actually have some type of a portal that competes with Zillow, Redfin, realtor. com because as soon as you have them sign a contract with you. They've got to be able to search and it has to compete with those other companies out there, or they're going to feel like this is Tristan's just, he's not up to it. And then they can easily cancel too. The tech now has to match at least match some of the competitors because they are finding us online.

So great. What a great question, Dave. I love that.

Carrie says I've been saying the same thing about buyers. It's going to be a hotbed of opportunity. 100 percent Carrie. Great point Kristen, what's up, Kristen? Are you saying that CINC is coming out with a contract for buyers to sign?

Alvaro Erize: What we're doing is this actually, so I don't know if you probably know, but our sister company is SkySlope, which is a transaction management company. And they've done the whole work of having the buyer contract for each state, according to the state laws and all of that, which would take us years to do. So what we're doing is we've made an agreement with them where we're going to put a widget in in CINC where you can easily use the, without having to pay Skyslope, without having to be a user of Skyslope, you're going to be able to use directly from saying, you're going to be able to send your buyer contract specific to your state, to your consumers on a one click from, our site without having to pay them and using their contract forms.

We're super grateful to Skyslope for that. Hopefully they'll entice you later to use them for other stuff. And that's, a great upside for them, but at the very least we'll have that right away.

Tristan Ahumada: I like that. I like that.

Alvaro Erize: We'll have that before, before it drops in August, before the, everything drops.

Tristan Ahumada: Good. August 17th. So that's good. I have an anonymous question about Google page. I'll see if I have a link for you, so at least you can contact them. They can help you out there. Alvaro, I have a question about Agent Pronto because I did put up the link for where people can sign up. Can you quickly go through what that is?

Alvaro Erize: So people understand Agent Pronto is our referral network and what it does is at CINC if you are if you have your website, we're managing your ad spend and we're creating SEM people looking for homes that then give you their information and those are the leads Agent Pronto basically pre serves people that are looking for agents, either those are internal referrals between CINC agents that are looking for another agent in some other place to refer to, or it's people that are coming to our landing pages specifically looking for an agent.

So of course they are much more down the funnel leads. We're talking about, again, a conversion that's more like a 12 or 15%. And in your, we're doing the follow up at Agent Pronto and then it gets placed on the agent and then you pay a 35 percent referral fee. In many senses, it's like a Zillow flex. I, love to have it and I always say it's a great compliment for your for your lead gen, but I don't want my clients growing their business on it because you should be growing your business on transactions that leave you an 80 percent margin, not a 51.

Tristan Ahumada: That's true. Good point on that. Very good point.

I had another question that I wanted to answer. I wanted you to answer. Where was it? There it is. Kristen. Will there be a new button for the lead to check regarding whether they've signed an agreement with another agent or not?

Alvaro Erize: Huh? We hadn't thought of doing that. That's that's an interesting, that's an interesting point. Something I'm going to write down. We had not thought of adding that to the registration model. It still remains to be seen in my opinion, how much really this gets applied, right? It's now 80 percent of buyers that are going to happen with a buyer contract or not. So we would still want to give you the lead, even if they're working with someone, but it is valuable information that we should ask. The problem is people lie. And so they might click the box just to, tell you so that you don't contact them early. And but it's something worth analyzing.

Tristan Ahumada: All right. Let me answer that one. Good one. These are good questions, man. I like this. Yeah. Good interaction. All right, so in regards to early funnel leads, what are some things what are some things that you've seen that allows us to capture them better and have a better relationship longer term with them so they end up using us?

Alvaro Erize: Yeah, so so on that, the, main thing is. Where I am a pretty boring CEO as you've seen a lot and you know them all of my competitors, Tristan, that are always building some like new thing that will completely revolutionize. I think what we've been doing for the last eight years continues to get better and better.

I think if you have a good, what you need first. Is you need a professional doing your your early funnel lead generation. And again, it doesn't have to be CINC. But what I mean is you might think that just doing Facebook advertising on your own or doing Google advertising on your own. It might save you that 10 or 15 percent management fee, but you're going to be paying double cost per lead, right?

Because it is a very complex thing that to be done right. Like you need a professional who has a team doing that. So my first point is with whoever you want, just have a professional running your early funnel campaigns, right? And then I do think that you, I recommend having a combination of follow up measures.

I think, there's always the discussion on whether you use an ISA or whether you have your agents calling or whether you use AI. I believe in, the combination of them. I think that I've seen a lot of clients fail by just wanting to trust an ISA completely like they hire and look all great companies, verse Rokrbox, conversion, whichever you want to talk about any client that wants to go full on them, then gets disillusioned and leaves them.

Because the truth is, if you don't have your agents calling, there's no amount of ISA or AI that's gonna save you. You need your agents to be in, in the front lines and, having those calls, even if someone is supporting them. So I'd still recommend the ISA the, ISA services. But with that, and then of course, I don't think you can have, not have AI these days.

You do, you cannot have, and we could talk voice AI briefly but, you cannot have, not have text AI, which I think is the most effective way of using LLM models because just people want immediate reaction and follow up and. Unless you are going to have people dedicated to it 24 seven. It's such, such a cost effective way of, doing your followup.

Tristan Ahumada: What do you consider to be early funnel leads? Where do they come from and how do we get them?

Alvaro Erize: So for me, early funnel lead, we call her early funnel lead is someone that is looking for a home and not for an agent. Now The difference is when you have a system like CINC that does forced registration and for, to explain what that is when someone is looking for a home in a certain in a site like CINC, we do ask them, in fact, CINC, I don't know if you know this, Tristan, we have a new product now that we released which, is real verified leads, where we are actually to give full access to your site. Not only are we asking people to register, but we're asking people to do two factor authentication. That actually confirms that, that is their phone, which is something no one else is doing it. What's awesome is not because the idea we had it a long time ago, what percentage of people do you think Tristan are actually doing the bank two factor authentication to tell us that this is their phone only to use our sites?

Tristan Ahumada: Dude, I don't know. . Yeah. What's the number? 20%.

Alvaro Erize: 66%.

Tristan Ahumada: No way.

Alvaro Erize: 66%.

Tristan Ahumada: That's crazy.

Alvaro Erize: And 13% of people are actually changing their phone number after the fact when they see that they cannot access the full site until they do it and put in the right number. The biggest thing it's much less flashy than a lot of the stuff that it's out there in the world today, but it's the most effective thing we've done in lead generation in the last eight years that I've been here.

But outside of whether you're doing this with CINC and you have real verified or not, back to your question, Tristan. Oh, sorry, Tristan, you were going to ask me something.

Tristan Ahumada: No, if you go through the funnel. So, they come in through Google. Let's just say they come in through Google, right? You know what, let's run this live.

I don't know what the hell is going to happen. Okay. But you're going to have fun with it right now. Give me a city Alvaro.

Alvaro Erize: Yeah, you go looking for homes in Atlanta, right?

Tristan Ahumada: Homes for sale in at Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah. All right. So we're looking early funnel.

Alvaro Erize: But that's the thing. So, here, right? This, it doesn't mean that it's a CINC client, but you can see the difference, right?

If you go to homes there, homes. com. Homes.Com is going to give you a site where they're not going to ask you to register and you're going to be able to use it fully. And that's great. As a consumer, you love it. You don't have to commit to an agent. You're going to keep using that site and navigating through it till a month before when you really want to talk to an agent, because now you know what you want to buy.

And that's, I understand why consumers like that, but If you go to that one, fisherhomes. com, I assume if that's, not us but, if it's a site like that, you're going to go to, if you were to go to one of our sites there, when you start looking for a home, let's say that you, press on one of those homes, any, all right, let's take a look at it.

Just choose one of those that, that there. Yeah, it's good . Go there. Just new details.

Tristan Ahumada: Oh, accept it. So it's not, prompting me. Oh let's take a look at this one.

Alvaro Erize: So this one, maybe not right with us. What would happen is you would not be able to navigate as you're navigating. Now it would stop you.

And it would say, Hey, we love you. We want to show you all of this, but you're going to have to give us your information in order to use our site. And in fact, in our new product, real verified, we are, we're going one step farther and saying, if you really want to use all of our sites, you actually need to prove to us that this is your phone.

That is the definition of early funnel because you are. In some ways, forcing the consumer to give you their information before they're ready, right? And then I can understand some agents go I'd rather talk with them when they're ready to talk to me. But that's not the way the world works because a good salesman is going to get in front of them before they're ready.

And you're going to say, Hey, look, I can help you. I can help you early. And if you're not a transactional person that expects something to come back to you, like next month, you're someone that is willing to invest 5 months into a relationship. You're going to get that client much better than the person that is wanting to wait until two weeks before they buy, right?

So it, our system does require people that are willing to invest, look long term and willing to build relationships and are not looking for just a transaction. If you're looking at leads as a transaction, we're looking at people as a transaction, you're never going to succeed in early funnel. You have no option but to wait.

Tristan Ahumada: And just to make a quick point, all of our, as agents, our competitors, Are on early funnel as well. And that's how they grew in the industry. Homes. com. In fact, that's exactly how homes. com grew. That's exactly how Redfin grew. Let's pick up another area. In where, give me another city.

Alvaro Erize: Yeah, but, I don't know. Give us Richard, give us apply. We have Richard in our give us a client site in Dallas.

Tristan Ahumada: Yeah. Give us a client site, Richard. And then look you've got more of our competitors, Troll Brothers, Homes again. You can go all.

Alvaro Erize: That's the thing, they're always going to show up. And even, and that's sponsored. If you go down to organic, Zillow is always going to show up first. And so the only way that you have of. Oh, great Houston area homes. Let's see John here, but great Houston area at homes. com area. Which we do that in purpose because we want to.

Tristan Ahumada: Get the chat. Let me get go to the chat and grab it.

Alvaro Erize: Copy paste it. But but the reason that we use generic URLs is because we know that it's a greater, Houston area homes.

Tristan Ahumada: I got, Jamie's. So there you go. Or greater. Let's go to this one too. So you guys can take a look.

Alvaro Erize: Beautiful, site. Go try to start navigating it. Yeah. Press on one of the homes. Yep. That's the thing, right?

Tristan Ahumada: So what happens after I click on enter my phone, does it take me to a second page or does it give me the ability to log in without that second funnel piece?

Alvaro Erize: If if you don't have a real verified because not all clients have it activated, you don't have it. Once you put your information, it'll ask you a couple of questions, but you can X out of them if you want, you can use the site. Once you gave an email and a phone number, you can use the site freely. If you have real verified, there's going to be one more step where it says you can already start using the site, but if you want to fully use everything that the site has for you, then you have to

send a two factor that's your phone. And, but again, to be able to do that, you need a site that, that really creates trust, right? If you're not, if you're having a crappy site, that is just a place where you're just driving traffic. You might get some accidental leads, but those leads are never going to come back to the site.

The reason that we invest so much on our, as you said, our competitor is Zillow. Our competitor is not. Whoever the other guy that is building sites is, right? We compete with Zillow for the, attention of, the consumer. And because Zillow is giving it without any registration requirements, that's a hard competition.

And we can only win in that competition by having top level sites that provide trust, that make people want to use them. And with that, you get those early funnel leads. Now I'd still say, and this is, I've looked at over 10 million leads at CINC, even with early funnel leads, 40 percent of all transactions will happen within six months of you getting the lead.

So a lot of people think all transactions happen at the year, 40 percent of transactions from every pool of leads that you get from, a good Google or Facebook campaign will happen within the first six months.

Tristan Ahumada: I like that, man, that's a good stat. I learned that step from you, by the way, and something else you mentioned earlier that we just glanced over or just pass through it. That was important. Everyone, as you're paying attention to early funnel leads. Alvaro said, I wrote it down. Early funnel is more of the client looking for a home. Later in the funnel, the client, the consumer is looking for an agent. So if we turn that around and apply it to how we, as agents reach out to the client's early funnel.

And we're trying to say things like, are you pre approved? When do you want to see this home? Are you working with an agent? All of those things are at the wrong timeline. You should be saying tell me more about what you're looking for Are you open to this area or how about this area? Tell me more about the home, right?

Which is so key That's why I focused in on that. I was like you're so right the consumer's looking for a home They could care less who the agent is, so focus on that.

Alvaro Erize: They'll care about it when they're ready to buy right? In the meantime You need to be just make sure that you're giving them the inventory That you're there for them and that you're creating that relationship, which is one of my reservations with AI, right?

I love AI, but you need to jump in and start creating relationships as early as possible. If you think that a robot is going to create those relationships for you, you're in the wrong business. One, one quick comment. I think Jamie was worried about, when you go to their site, they are paying for that traffic. That only happens. Jamie is there. If they're clicking on your ad, right? So if someone goes to your site, because they're writing your URL, and then go and register or not, none of that costs money to you. What costs money is anytime that someone sees your ad in Google and clicks on it. Yes. Then you're paying for that click.

Tristan Ahumada: Yeah, but a good point. So I just went over here to Google. Typed in homes for sale in Houston. If I were to click on Beezer or any 1 of the, say, sponsored, then they, would get charged.

Alvaro Erize: You can click on Zillow. If you want to hit them. Why not?

It's not necessary, but, but yes but, that, tristan, that's where I think. I, where I do think that early funnel is going to become more important than late funnel establishing long term the agents that are going to win at this game are agents that are willing to establish a long term relationship with a client early in the process, whether that's early funnel leads or whether you're doing that through, football games, I don't know, but if you're waiting to the last month to try to engage with a client, it's going to be too late. I do think that reputation management is going to become more important. So whatever we had CINC, we're about to release very, soon, a little, a huge like reviews agent reviews pages for you as part of CINC, but independently of whether you're doing it with seeing with what we're doing or somewhere else, at the very least you should have, if you walk with nothing else away from this webinar, if you don't have your Google business account to date with good reviews in this new world, you're going to struggle as a buyer agent. Because they're going to be researching you. And if they don't have a place to really see how good you are and hear from other people, you're not going to be able to get to that buyer contract, which I absolutely think you need to get to that buyer contract.

But with that, just to round it off. I do think still, if I, if it was my money and I as a CEO at CINC, I am betting strong on buyer leads. I think all of the fear mongering of moving people to seller leads, the only thing it's going to do, seller lead cost is going to go up and conversion is going to go down because you're going to have more people fighting for the same amount of leads.

Buyer leads are going to go down in cost and high in conversion. So we at CINC are investing heavily on it. Real verified is our new answer to it, but whoever you're doing it with, I recommend early funnel buyer. That's my bet today.

Tristan Ahumada: Check this out early funnel tax yesterday. I know it says today on the picture that I'm about to show you, but it was yesterday.

And is Google PPC lead, right? Similar to what we went through right now, going on Google, and I removed their phone number on the top, but you could see here, going along with what you're saying. They're looking for a home, not necessarily the agent early funnel. I'm saying, hey, are you looking for Woodland hills, or you open a calabasas or agora? As a prefer Woodland Hills, but open to Calabasas. Got it. Do you have a specific price range? So I don't go over that. And then she says we got 20 percent down. I'm like, okay, sounds good. I got it checking now for you. Stay tuned. Thanks. Thank you and we need at least 2 baths. I go hot definitely need to good thinking.

And then I went through it and then I say, hey, I just got 1 of my agents or business partners, Mark, I shifted it over to Mark and now they're working with Mark. They spoke yesterday. They are pre qualified. They have no agents. Nice. This is this is amazing. Google, right? And it's just early funnel, man. Early funnel. Every once in a while, the early funnels will wrap up in 10 days.

Alvaro Erize: I know. I've been surprised by that. And one thing I think John there was saying, which is also true. We have our HomePulse product, which what it does is it entices home buyers to tell you if they really have a home to sell too. 50 percent of them do.

And again, we're going to be in a world. Where it's going to be cheaper. I, think it already is. It's cheaper to get a seller through a buyer lead than going directly for the seller lead set by someone that has both products. So I have a seller lead product and a barely product, but the buyer leads, if you count how many of those end up being a seller to you almost are better off.

Tristan Ahumada: I love the topic, by the way, I think. I think this becomes even more important. I'm always, ever since I've known you, Alvaro, we've been running Google PPC and I, absolutely love the early funnel. I've become, just obsessed with that. And I love it.

Alvaro Erize: Because you're not scared of the hard work. And because you're a relationship guy that was willing to invest in someone for 5 months before selling them a home. And I think If I leave some I didn't, realize I had so many CINC already here. My, my main, to all my CINC buddies here is I really recommend for you to turn on real verified leads if you haven't yet. I think it's the best thing we've released in a ton of time. I would continue to bet on the buyer side of things. If you call me and you tell me you absolutely want to change to seller, I will, but I will caution you against it first. And I do think that we're walking into 1 of the best periods of online lead generation in history when this market bounces back because after a significant time of decreasing lead gen costs, it's ripe for the taking.

But I do. Same if you saw me in 2020, you've heard me say the same thing when pandemic was raging, which is in the times where you have the downs where people are delaying buying and where people are dragging their feet and not waiting to do the transaction that they know they have to make. That's the times that you need to be making relationships. If you're not making phone calls now and getting people in relationships with you, you're going to miss one of the biggest upsides in the market that, we've ever seen.

Tristan Ahumada: Very true, man. Well said. Alvaro. Thank you so much for your time. This was great. I always love doing these with you, man.

Alvaro Erize: This is awesome, Tristan. It's always great. I love talking to you.

Tristan Ahumada: Thanks everybody. Have an awesome day. Thanks for joining us.