Ontario eXp Team's Online Real Estate Lead Generation Success

A 2017 market correction in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) made Gary Semeniuk and his team realize that they needed to shift from being as listing-heavy into focusing more on finding buyers via online lead generation. Discovering CINC and following their guidance allowed them to quickly turn their business around and achieve success. Now, Gary's small team routinely hits 70-100 deals each year by leveraging CINC automations, AI, and scripts.

In chatting with us, he emphasized the importance of follow-up and leveraging the CRM to prioritize and manage leads effectively. His team takes advantage of website activity insights to re-engage potential clients. They use the CRM to create labels, set up follow-ups, and track conversations, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

He also covers his team policy for lead distribution, ensuring that each agent handles a manageable number of leads and follows up promptly, especially in a world of overstimulation. 

See the highlight video and complete transcript below for more on Gary and how he uses CINC to maintain and grow his business.

Transcript

Gary Semeniuk: [00:00:00] My name's Gary Semeniuk and I'm with the Capstone Real Estate Group, eXp Realty here in the Toronto area about one hour north of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I run a team, have been running a team since 2016. We're a small team. We keep it small on purpose to stay in control of what we're looking to do.

And we discovered CINC back in, around 2017 when we actually had a market correction here back then in the GTA. And we needed to pivot away from just being listing heavy, which we always were, into buyer mode. And by pivoting and finding CINC and following what they told us to do, we pretty quickly were able to turn our business around and change our lives.

It wasn't just about us tapping into buyers, though it was actually learning things that we didn't know at that time how to be really good at and effective. And that was getting into role playing and scripting because we were typically door knockers and also, referral based realtors.

So a [00:01:00] lot of what CINC operates on the fundamentals of, we had zero experience. We learned how to get really good on the phones, and then we really learned how to convert leads that are coming in. I never call them cold leads. They're warm leads because they're registered on our site, and we treat them with care.

Even when we went in through Covid, where nobody quite knew what to do. We just moved into a caring conversation as we always have. And it's been critical to our success and, growing and staying productive. Our goal is always to hit anywhere from 70 to 100 deals a year, and we've managed to be able to do that through utilizing, your platform.

Richard Kaiser: That's great. And one of the things you're talking about there, Gary, is just in terms of getting better at converting online leads as they come through. They're a little bit different sometimes than a warm referral. One of the things we'll oftentimes hear is teams right before getting into CINC, they've got some experience where maybe when they're an individual agent are just getting started out.

They're very focused on sphere[00:02:00] and referrals, and that's still a huge part of their business. But sometimes they kinda hit a growth potential, right? Or a growth ceiling, of, of how fast they can grow from that. And then we know a lot of other people who are looking to grow beyond that, go and look more of the home buyer portal side, whether they're doing Zillow Premier, they're paying for a lead, but they're sharing out with other realtors or they're doing pay after close where they're capping ROI.

Can you speak to how you guys think about some of those other channels and then how your approach changed as you guys did more higher volume, PPC lead generation.

Gary Semeniuk: Where CINC became really purposeful and beneficial for us is we were never fanatical about phones myself and even door knocking.

I was never a door knocker until I had to be and was coached into it. However, after a few years of doing a few thousand doors a year, we discovered CINC. And that was just a critical point for us. That allowed us a couple of things. Frankly, it allowed us to get coached into being good on the phones, which then in turn has improved all of our conversations.

[00:03:00] So the scripts we use through CINC have been primarily the only scripts we really use, and we have a very high conversion rate because of them. And it allowed me to do something else as I, mentioned that. I always have the mindset that I'd like you to come to me versus me going to you. And when you're door knocking, you're always having to go find those people and walk and knock.

Whereas when we have a site like CINC, It allows everybody to pour in, right? We know people are searching for real estate, they register on the site, we just have to get them on the phone, right? And that's something that CINC We love has always coached us on the five minute rule - be really tight on getting in touch with those leads and then follow up critical to initial reach outs so that we can do that.

And what I do love about that is that, since we've been in the platform, CINC is always growing just like we are. And has, introduced AI and all the other stuff that supports what we really need as a function so we don't have to work as hard on the follow up. So frankly, the automation has been critical for us, and we're actually seeing quicker [00:04:00] turnaround on leads than we used to prior to it all being, an existing element of technology.

So for us, AI has been really, purposeful and beneficial to get our leads talking to us even quicker.

Richard Kaiser: That's right. One of the other things I think we, we get feedback from oftentimes on, on the CRM side is the ability to prioritize leads in the database.

You had mentioned earlier that one of your team members has been closing two to five year old leads in there. And one of the things that's really critical is having a way to filter through leads in an intuitive way in, in the database.

Can you kinda speak to what your team's experience has been in prioritizing and Focusing right on leads right in your database with CINC.

Gary Semeniuk: We have a philosophy on our team and the industry often says leads suck.

That's typically what anybody who's in resistance to online leads says, right? It's usually an excuse for just not doing the work. We're proof to [00:05:00] the pudding that as long as you basically pick up the phone, email, text, one way or another. Even the system when we leave it on is communicating with these people and getting interactions.

We've got leads that we've got over a thousand days old that we've actually pulled business out of. And in our marketplace, an average lead on even the entry-level side, our real estate here is million dollars and up in the GTA. Case in point my, wife and team partner Gina works a lot of the old leads constantly and just two weeks ago, pulled a 2+ year lead out and got them into a deal last week where they won in competition and nearly a $900,000 purchase.

Leads don't suck. It's just the people that don't do the work. And that is part of our philosophy as a team. We listened to you [00:06:00] guys when we took on the system and the fundamentals that CINC is always coached upon. Just follow up is just as critical as answering the phone in the first five minutes.

And with that and what the system does, we find the engagement much higher. Conversion is better. And we just pull out work constantly. We don't have to really think about where we're going to find stuff. In our case. Having been in the system now for roughly five years, we've got around 9,000 plus leads in our system and we mine the old leads just as much as we do the new because frankly, what else have you got to do with your time?

And if you don't wanna walk and knock, this is a perfect place to be.

Richard Kaiser: For sure.

We're big believers in connecting the website with the CRM so the two are interacting and providing your team feedback on which leads have recently interacted. Can you speak to your team's experience leveraging insights from website activity or re-engaging people on the website [00:07:00] in tandem with the CRM?

Gary Semeniuk: Yeah we use CINC CRM capacity solely. We don't have any other plugins. At one time before we got into CINC we were using multiple different platforms for either CRM or client management, whatever. What we found was really great about CINC is that you have a very robust integrated CRM in your system.

It really allowed us to do a lot of things to break down the client into specifics so that we can label them, we can set up follow ups, we have notes in there anytime we have a conversation with a client. We do even have our lender integrated into the site as a partner. So if we have a conversation with a client and they specifically say they need a mortgage, we don't have to worry about whether or not they have to find somebody.

We basically pull them right into the conversation with their blessings to speak to our lenders. What I do love about that is it allows me to pin the conversation. It allows us to tag. [00:08:00] It allows us to label so that we can really specifically start to follow up and set reminders so that we're not dropping the ball.

Because as we all know, in a world of overstimulation, people find alternative solutions pretty quickly if you're not the solution. And that's one of the things that I love about CINC. The calendar, everything just allows us to really manage easily. And we get higher conversion rate. And even what we find is with the way the system works and it's ongoing collaboration with clients, they're often reaching out to us more than we are them now because we've got an ability to automate and put out certain things and monthly touches and et cetera, et cetera.

So we found that. Over the course of the last few years, particularly the last two years with all the AI that CINC has been introducing, it's really making our jobs easier. We have less to manage, we can automate more, [00:09:00] and we're getting better responses. Frankly, the automation in some cases is actually better than what we're doing because we're finding the automation is actually getting responses when we sometimes aren't.

Richard Kaiser: And so in one aspect the CRM and the automations are helping restart those conversations up there, helping you guys prioritize.

One of the things that can get challenging if you've got 9,000 leads, is holding different people accountable to following up with both old leads in the database, new leads in the database, making sure they're getting routed in the right way, and that you also as a team leader have visibility into that.

Can you speak to how CINC has made an impact on how you manage your whole lead generation and conversion system as a team leader?

Gary Semeniuk: Something that we've done as a team is firstly when we took on CINC, we went right to CINC U and took the training.

Steve Murnin and the crew there were [00:10:00] fantastic. Really guiding us on how to manage the system and manage the leads. What we have as a team policy is you typically are not allowed as a single agent on the team to carry more than a hundred leads at any time. And then we have what's called a pond account.

That is basically if a lead comes in that's not assigned to you - we have a round robin system as well. So basically when leads come in, it goes around the list and if it doesn't get picked up by one of the agents, it goes right into the pond. And then everybody knows that within that day or the next day, your first priority is to go into the pond, see what new leads yet, haven't been picked up, and start dialing. And whether it be agent one or agent a hundred, that's the job they have to do every day. And that is get those leads that maybe came in overnight or everybody's busy, right? We're in appointments and negotiating deals.

Priority one start of every day is for them to go in there, look at the pond, and then pick up anything they can that [00:11:00] is still a new lead status. And we have an attitude. They, train you in the real estate industry that if you just do two hours of lead generation a day, your life is golden.

You're gonna make all the money you could ever want. And I call nonsense on that. Any, training that says where every other career has a minimum commitment of 8 to 12 hours a day, how is it that we're getting away with two hours a day is being acceptable in the real estate industry?

We, have a philosophy here that minimum three hours, and if you're not done or you haven't got an appointment, keep going. Because if you don't have appointments filling up your afternoon calendar, I've lived by the credo don't go home until you have an appointment. And because in, in this job, as we all know, we wake up unemployed every day.

So really the critical thing is to get an appointment to lead to getting a buyer or seller across the line.

Richard Kaiser: Gary, one of the things you talked about at, the beginning of the [00:12:00] conversation was having some kind of prior experience and starting to make a change into online lead gen at an interesting time in the market in 2017.

Recently, when the market got hot. When, interest rates went down, getting the listings a flood of buyer leads, and then trying to get the listings became really critical. And then in the past few months, the market changing again. How's your experience been in managing a lead generation conversion system during I guess the past two years? How, has that changed?

Gary Semeniuk: For me what a lot of people are experiencing right now, they haven't experienced, either because they're too young in their careers, or not enough time in their careers, or the US and Canada for the most part have been on really strong rallies for the last 12, 14 years, right?

Since around 2008, 2009, 2010, when the US had a correction. It's been upward since. The one fortune we had, frankly now looking [00:13:00] back was in 2017 with a pretty hard line correction in the area I'm working. It, became really critical to move quickly and find alternative solutions to listings because I'm hearing this same thing now from other realtors cuz we're not experiencing this problem.

But what we did experience back in 2017 is listings pretty quickly became toxic because the market was what it was. Everybody believed it's just a temporary blip and we're gonna be right back to the train running down the tracks and it's all good. So what we found back then was sellers were highly uncoachable and or unmotivated because they knew that the market uncertainty created potential possibility of uncertainty.

What we found in 2017 when all that happened was we were getting fired and expired a lot, right? So we then knew being listing heavy, we had to move into buyer mode or we would bleed out carrying listings that just weren't [00:14:00] moving. So we quickly started to learn how to better coach our clients, cause frankly that was priority one with the listings we had.

And then also the buyer functionality gave us an opportunity firstly to help bring some of those buyers to the listing side of what we're doing because the system allows us to plug our listings into it. That then gave advantage to the buyers to be able to see some of what we had for inventory and also for our sellers to see that we have a system that's allowing us to plug into people seeing their inventory.

And at that point where it became really critical again is communication. We grew up a lot through taking on the system because frankly, I was not a telephone guy. I was brought up I'm in my mid fifties in a world where telephones are bad and so are door knockers, right?

And I had to overcome my door knocking fear to get good at it. And then same thing with the phones. This was very foreign to [00:15:00] me when we took it on. I had always said I would never be a phone guy. And here we are five years later, we don't do anything else but phones.

That's been really critical to our success is to not just go into the script, but take it at three steps down the road so that we can really cater to those leads coming in because you've got very little time to get their attention before they decide to hang up on you or just drop the line. And I think what we found by virtue of using the CINC script, staying right to it, and then just adding the additional questions that we answer we get great feedback and response and engagement so that then we know how to take them down the line from I'm just looking to sign here.

Richard Kaiser: Along that thread, what are some of the biggest mistakes newer, greener agents make in those first few critical seconds on the phone.

Gary Semeniuk: So [00:16:00] nerves. Because I coach and train a lot of new agents and seasoned agents, so often it's nerves until they really just get into it for a few days and forget about what you're thinking about. Just stay plugged into the process, and people are gonna hang up. It's no, no different than going to doors.

I've had doors closed in my face, and you just gotta walk away from it and say "next," and then go on to the next call. The single biggest thing I find with agents. Especially when we're watching what they're doing, they just feel extremely nervous, right?

That they're gonna be judged. And just drop the feeling of being judged. This is something that's a monumental moment in your life to allow you to change it and improve it. Because I can tell you, for me, just by virtue of not having that fear anymore, My conversations everywhere have improved because I now know, just like the CINC script, I've got a 30 second elevator pitch opportunity, right?

Any elevator I walk into, I can stand and look at the floor. I can look at you in the eyes and ask, "Hey, how's [00:17:00] it going today?" Or not even, Hey, how's it going? "What are you doing here? Why are you on this elevator?" So we can basically engage in conversation and figure out whether or not we should be in each other's lives in the future.

I've taken that opportunity in everything we do, events, everywhere we go. To use that sort of scripting to really elevate our ability to grow and prosper from everything.

Richard Kaiser: That's great to hear. I think on another line from that, something we've seen, guess another kind of recent trend, some changes in, an uptick in, out of state, out of province leads.

Leads moving across provinces and states, seeing an uptick in, certain areas. And then also seeing people move further out from where they were working. So now the average move distance has increased. How have those kind of trends impacted your business in following up with leads if at all?

Gary Semeniuk: [00:18:00] So when it comes to referrals I have a mentality that I want, whether it's me or our team members, to be diversified in our model. It's not just staying in phone leads or internet leads because that keeps you transactional. What I do is that we have the opportunity for referrals ourselves.

Similar to a buyer, seller being in the system. We've labeled off realtors, so we have about a thousand realtors in our system as well that are sitting in a separate area that anytime we want to communicate a listing or we just want to put out, hey, we're looking for a referral business nationwide, whether it be Canada or US, we're your go-to people because we live in a fairly exclusive area and waterfront here.

So I'm always pitching the opportunities, particularly for Americans because you benefit with our exchange rates. So, if I can build that relationship, whether it be Canadian or American, to me it's a benefit. And [00:19:00] we've gone across Canada in terms of building a strong network and the same in the US.

I'll talk to the US quickly. Where CINC's really beneficial and purposeful is we're dealing with a lot of foreign nationals. So a lot of Canadians are basically over the next 10 years in particular, baby boomers are retiring, sizing down, looking for warmer climates, right? Because I'd mentioned six months is basically winter here, six months of summer.

So they want 12 months of summer. And Florida is a day's drive, three-hour flight. You're there, right? And we're finding we're getting more and more people very curious about the US, Costa Rica, Mexico, and we're plugged into all of that. So we've got a very strong realtor base that's allowing us to then set up the referral side for foreign nationals.

So I would encourage anybody that takes on the system, not just to make sure they've got realtors all over North America in there, but also learn, if you're a Canadian in [00:20:00] particular, about the foreign national side of things. Because it's not a lot to learn, but you can definitely take up handling people where you can take them from wanting to have a house or whatever here in Canada and having a second property or migrating to the US and walk them through where you can become a consultant. And that's exactly what we've done. So that we now don't have to hand off somebody and worry if they're gonna be in good hands or not. We can connect the majority of the dots here, and then we just put them in really good realtors hands down there.

And that is why CINC is beneficial as well, because we can plug in all those little things in emails, texts, we've got links that we're doing, landing pages that we can all put into CINC that just allow us to really cater to the next level. Because as we know, and I've mentioned it before, it's still a transactional system. It's only as good as what you're doing with it. So anything that you know, beyond what automation is [00:21:00] there that we can plug in to allow clients to have an experience where they want to communicate with us, that's the job we need to do as agents.

I say it this way to my team - I'm the most motivated, lazy person you're ever gonna meet because I want to find the easiest way. To make an experience or something happen that we don't have to labor it so heavily, and CINC is definitely one of those tools for us to frankly be lazy in a motivated way.

Jenn O'Connell: Is there anything that we didn't ask or speak to that you think people should know when it comes either starting out with CINC or using CINC better?

Gary Semeniuk: I'm a big proponent and supporter of CINC, so I often talk to a lot of people looking how they can take their business to the next level.

And I, often get involved in calls where they are reaching out to CINC and sometimes when they hear the number to join up and sign up to the system. It can be a bit of a moment because mostly agents don't [00:22:00] invest in themselves and or in systems. So it's definitely an investment.

But what I've found in that is literally be coachable to what CINC is firstly gonna teach you. And also people like myself and/or going to the trainings like CINC University. You really owe it to yourself to show up at these events because they host incredibly good events that are gonna teach you how to really rapidly accelerate the fundamentals of the site front to back, so you know exactly what you need to be doing. And then the rest is just simply show up, right? More than a couple hours a day. Because if you don't have any business currently, you've got more than a couple hours a day that you can invest.

It's critical to go into the system, and learn it so that you can firstly manage all of that side of it. And then again, take the coaching that they offer because the scripts and everything they do, and the ongoing role-playing that they have in different events, virtually and in person, are extremely good.

It changed my life [00:23:00] for the better. Made me a far better speaker, and it taught me how better to hunt for buyers and sellers and ask for the business. Because if you don't ask for the business someone else is going to, so why not be you. Then you don't have to worry about the cost of the platform because at that point your business is gonna grow far more substantially than you're doing anything. If you're just doing organic reach to people, and it will pay you back in spades.