Tristan Ahumada: Welcome everyone. Hope we having a nice, sunny, snowy, rainy day, whatever that looks like for you. We've got Jeff. I'm always excited to talk to CINC because I learned something. I think I take the most notes when I talk to anyone at CINC, Jeff. And then we take the notes then we make our own graphics and obviously we give credit to CINC. But it's exciting to talk to you, man.
Jeff Walker: No, that's great. Yeah. And we love we love the data.
Tristan Ahumada: I love the data.
Jeff Walker: You love the data.
Tristan Ahumada: I love the data, man.
Jeff Walker: We're on the same page.
Tristan Ahumada: I love the data. So Jeff, for those of you who don't know, works at CINC. He's the head of product or VP product. He comes from Carfax. And he was, I think, head of product there. Was that right? Did I get that?
Jeff Walker: Yeah. For the used car listing product. Yeah.
Tristan Ahumada: That's pretty cool, man. Bringing you into real estate.
Jeff Walker: [00:01:00] It's not my first go around in real estate, actually. So I've been in yeah, so I've worked, at Market Leader slash when it was owned by Trulia back in the day.
Tristan Ahumada: I remember that.
Jeff Walker: And then for another company Alta Source, which is in the, real estate space and we were creating a brokerage under the Owners.com brand. So I was there helping them with the digital brokerage for about five years.
Tristan Ahumada: Oh, cool man. Nice to have you back. Let's talk about lead quality. What do you got for us?
Jeff Walker: Great. Yeah, so I shared some metrics with you last time and so I can, bring you up to speed on how things have changed since the last time we talked. And then I wanna chat a little bit about the testing we've been doing on lead verification as well, which is a topic that will be near and dear, I think to, our clients and other agents' hearts as we look at, Hey, how can we [00:02:00] get more leads that are providing correct contact information when you're dealing with these registration type internet leads. Yeah. So I'm just gonna jump in. We looked at this last time to start with. This this shows this is the NARA data, existing home sales rate, and we can see, I think we talked in September and we were on this downward trend. Last year was not a good year for transactions. Worst year since 1995. And hopefully this is the sign here in, at the end of the year from October to December that things are bottoming out, leveling off and we can expect to see some gains. So we're looking at how this kind of correlates with the data we're seeing in terms of user engagement across the CINC websites. And what some of those may be early indicators are of trends that will portend of, the [00:03:00] success that we'll have in 2024.
Tristan Ahumada: Okay. I like it. I still see, a stain around the low fours. For, the next few months. I don't know that we're gonna get to the fives by the end of the year, but it's tough, man. It's tough, but I like.
Jeff Walker: Yeah it'll be, interesting. Obviously I think I don't think we're gonna see it lower.
Tristan Ahumada: Yeah, I don't think so either.
Jeff Walker: For sure. Getting back to the fives will be great. And we know that there is a lot of pent up demand so that the time will come when we see that spike. So it's a question of where that spike is going to come. Yeah, so now we're dealing with just, it's, this is seasonality too with just this, the winter months usually being on the low side.
And this is the first thing that we're looking at here. So these, this we looked at this last time. These are what we call the heartbeat. So these are the percentage of leads that are being generated across all CINC [00:04:00] clients that are being updated to the contacted stage in the CRM. So how many leads agents are reaching and having that quality conversation with. So you're supposed to move it from new stage to contacted stage when you have that quality conversation.
And last year, so we can look at this from last year we ended up at about 17.5%. And so we can see that there's some peaks in the beginning of the year. There's a lot of higher intent at that point. People are more likely to pick up the phone during the pre-spring season. And then things leveled off. Then we had this dip in November and December, so getting down close to 15%. We don't like to see it there much prefer to see it around 20% because this indicates that the leads themselves had less intent at this point. They were less willing to talk to an agent when they were being called.
Tristan Ahumada: That makes sense at that [00:05:00] time, because the rates had skyrocketed in November and Yeah, people were freaking out, dude. But I have a question about February 23. What the hell happened there?
Jeff Walker: Yeah. It's interesting, this little outlier here. What actually happened was when we look at the other driver for this, it's the lead volume and there was a big spike in leads across our network that month. And so I think what happened is there was this flood, this only counts leads that, graduated from new to contacted within a thirty-day period.
So some of these, the contact rate's gonna be actually higher than this, but this is, shows that immediate intent and there was a big increase in leads. So agents were being flooded with leads and probably had more than they could handle at that time. As a result that denominator of lead volume was caused the the rate of leads that went to contacted to be a little bit lower. And then they caught up in March, so things got back on track. Yeah. [00:06:00] So if there's a ton of leads that come in that can also depress the number that actually may get to contacted just because of, the ability to make all those phone calls.
So, yeah, so this, and we can see last year too, November, December is typically a little bit lower.
This people are busy. They're, it's the holidays, they're less likely to be picking up the phone at that point. And then there's usually a bounce back in January. So we'll see. In January, if we get back to that 20% mark the leading indicators we're looking at, are the number of inquiries that are coming in.
So these are the leads that are submitting either a showing request or some type asking a question about a property. And so this is the trend for last year, this initial spike. August was because of a product change. We made some improvements to the listing details page. And so we got a really big jump where we doubled the number of inquiries that were coming in, and then since then, we can see [00:07:00] more of what the what the market trend is.
So in November and December we have this decline it flattened out on on the number of inquiries, but January, we've got January data in now on this where we can see that there was a nice increase in an upward trend from November and the number of leads that are saying, Hey, I wanna see this house, or I wanna learn more about this house. So this should be a good indicator that we're, we should see an uptick in transactions and and, interest from buyers as well.
Tristan Ahumada: I definitely see that on our end, man. Google PPC, Facebook lead ads, that's the primary source for us when it comes to online leads. And we, are having better conversations 100%. Yeah, it makes sense.
Jeff Walker: Great. Yeah. Yeah. And the one other one to take a look at is favoriting. And so favorites is another good indicator of future transactions and future success, and we can see that there was a dip here in November, [00:08:00] December where buyers were favoriting fewer properties. That has bounced back in January.
Actually January is our highest number of property favorites since last August, so that's a great sign. And then the number of favorites per user. Who are favoriting properties has also progressed really nicely. So in January there's a big jump up from that. That's probably the highest we've seen in terms of buyers finding more listings that they're interested into, which is another good sign. So that suggests that not only are they, they're looking at more listings, they're finding more that they actually want to keep track of and that are potentially going to be once they see in person.
So, good news there. And, this is just our trend upon when we look at, we looked at showing requests and property inquiries. This expands it out a little bit further and looks at all the different types of inquiries that come in. We have [00:09:00] our home pulse inquiries, which are the home seller inquiries. We have the AI agent ready inquiries where. A lead is talking with the ai and then they ask to talk to the agent. And this shows that nice positive trend up to December as well.
We'll have January's number on this next time, but we can see that there's been a really nice increase throughout the course of the year. Some of it's from product changes, but this trend here is more aligned with the market where we're seeing a lift here of people being more engaged. And asking for contact from agents more frequently across the board. So I think that's a, an indicator that we'll have a good start off to the year.
Tristan Ahumada: That's really good, man. Mary Jo brings up a good point. Jeff, I'm gonna pause. She's saying yeah, she's got requests to show properties, but when the team or her, she tries to reach out to them, they never answer back.[00:10:00]
And so I've got a great process for that because that does happen. It's normal. They ghost us. Sometimes they get busy, who knows what's happening. I put up a link to a really short episode I had, it's six minutes long that I shot. And it goes through the process of just doing a much better job on your part for improving your chances to connect after requests or getting an online lead and how to convert.
So Jeff I tend to think because we've been doing this since 2007 online leads. I tend to gravitate towards the reason online leads don't work for you, not you, Jeff, but you, is because you don't have, you haven't optimized your processes, your systems, your dialogue, your tonality, your approach, and once you've got that down. Better and better You'll see much better [00:11:00] results.
Jeff Walker: Yeah, and that's one of the interesting things here, and I've actually looked at I've got some data to share on this. I'm gonna just jump ahead. About why they matter and what the appointment rate looks like in comparison to a lead that hasn't submitted a property inquiry.
But one thing to keep in mind is. Lots of times when somebody is submitting that, you know, oh, I want more information. They might not necessarily be expecting to talk to a buyer's agent. Meaning they're thinking they, they're expressing interest, but they still have that defensive wall up. They're still like, I was hoping maybe it's just like somebody would send me something or something would magically happen on the website if I clicked this button. And so there is that skill, which is how do you get somebody to get off of that defensive mindset, build that rapport so that they open up. So it sounds like you've got some good content on that.
Tristan Ahumada: Oh yeah, dude it's short. But here's the thing. I think we, [00:12:00] we overemphasize the script. Just throw the script out the door. Know that people aren't going to be interested in what you want to say until they know that you actually care about them and that you're not gonna pressure them into doing things or talking about things they don't want to talk about. And I think the further you go away from that. The easier it is to talk to them.
Jeff, we had a few Google PPC and Facebook lead ads. We call live on Thursdays every Thursday, three P.M. Pacific, and sometimes we catch people and we talk to them for 20 minutes. First time we've ever talked to them, it's like coming in through CINC, Google PPC, Facebook lead ad and we convert them. And it's like, how the hell? And I'm like, you just talk to people just. Just talk to people, stop trying to close them and just listen. And I think that is so key in converting long term.
Jeff Walker: Yeah, that's that's the, old [00:13:00] school skill of just like being interested in them, wanting to get to know them. Yeah. Building that trust.
Tristan Ahumada: Rosemary says, they say they clicked by accident. Rosemary, that is the number one response we get. Oh, we clicked by accident.
Jeff Walker: It's funny 'cause like we. And we've looked at this, we've had clients say this to us oh, they click, they, we can actually go back and play back some of the sessions the and look and see, did that lead click by accident?
And granted, of course, there are always some cases where they do, but in the majority, they clicked on purpose. But it's the easiest way to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Yeah. And so it's you moving past that, they were on, they registered on your website, they were looking at that property.
They were scrolling that property and clicking on things in that property. Odds are there's something about that property that's interesting to them. And so how do you get past that? Acknowledge it, and then find out what they were really, what their motivation really [00:14:00] was.
Tristan Ahumada: Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, sometimes that's it, and sometimes just make them laughs like, oh, you know what, I always accidentally click on things too, but now that I have you, and then they laugh, right? Anyways.
Jeff Walker: Yeah. That's great. And yeah, and I think the key is be prepared for that. Don't get stuck on it. You've got someone on the phone who's interested in real estate, right? And that's, half the battle.
And, so one reason that's come up too. On property inquiries, I took a look at our most recent data. So I looked at about 30,000 leads from July. So this is just in the last six months, and found that they were about, the ones that submitted inquiries are about two times more likely to be contacted getting them on the phone, but about eight times more likely to convert for an appointment.
So there is a lot more gold to be found when you're mining on those areas where there's inquiries. And so [00:15:00] this section here where we've got the request Info form, it takes a lot of intent to fill out this form and hit submit. You gotta click request Info, look at it, and hit submit. And then the tour home where you actually pick a date and then, send the request. Very difficult to do that by accident. So there's, a lot of intent when you're completing.
The one that's a little, the one I actually had a question about. So we decided earlier in the year when we redesigned the listing details page to create these one click talk calls to action on the screen. So I'll make that a little bit bigger. We are just, you can say, I want more food about this home with a single click. And it submits that inquiry. So this is the one I've been really curious about myself. Okay, is that gonna be just noise? Is it gonna create inquiries that don't matter? Or is it going to create quality conversations?
And so [00:16:00] this was, really interesting to find out that in Looking at those leads the, these leads were about 7.7 times more likely to convert to an appointment than a lead that didn't submit an inquiry. So it was nearly as good, not quite as good, but nearly as good as folks who filled out that form. So even if there are some accidents in there, there's intent in there as well. And some clients are obviously having success at at converting those to appointments.
Tristan Ahumada: Jeff, have you tried repositioning that button to a higher location? That simple button? I want more info about this property.
Jeff Walker: It's, no, we haven't we could experiment with that. This is sticky. This form is sticky, so it's very prominent on the page.
Yeah. And so what we did is in every section we added a button that goes with that section and asks a question like, there's questions about rates or mortgages or [00:17:00] schools as you progress down the page.
Tristan Ahumada: Okay. Got it.
Jeff Walker: And then one, one other one I was really curious about, so I just got this data for the first time. We started sending notifications to clients, to agents when somebody, fills out the mortgage calculator. So when somebody clicks this button which says, see your monthly payments. That means they have to put in some information there. And this isn't a true inquiry. This isn't somebody asking for anything. They're not saying, I want you to send me information. And we don't label it that way. We just say, Hey, somebody completed the calculator and here's the numbers they put in.
But this still was a strong indicator of interest. And so the leads that use this calculator were four times more likely to convert to an appointment. So again, not as strong as an inquiry, but still they'll get an indicator. And that's what we're really trying to do here is this is a volume game.
It's the leads are very inexpensive and so it's about getting as many as you can. But then [00:18:00] how do you know which ones to really spend the most time with? And that's what we're trying to do is, provide more guidance about which leads are most likely to convert so that you can invest more time calling those leads where you're gonna have more success.
Tristan Ahumada: That's a good point because we filter them out. So in CINC you can filter out whose favorited properties, and we typically start with who visited our website the latest. So we do a twenty-four hours back and start at the top start dialing, right? And in the messenger here, I put in here, I'll put it again. That's the exact process we do with the CINC leads. So that you have that boom, done next boom, done next. And then we go we go one to one. So we don't usually have a triple dollar outside of CINC or even a dialer in some cases. But the key [00:19:00] is filter them out to identify which ones are the most ready. Did they favorite, did they share? What did they do? And what are those actions? Jeff, what do you notice, man?
Jeff Walker: That's what we're. We are making changes in the product to make that process easier. We see our job as Hey, we need to make it, make the work less as least amount of work as you can do to convert those appointments.
And so that's oh yeah, just one follow up to that. So these leads that have those inquiries, they represent, they represented in the six months, about 8% of all the leads. For all the leads the clients got, these were Google leads. 8% had inquiries but they represented about 36% of the appointment. So it just goes to show that the small segment is very, you don't wanna miss out on. Targeting this group because the efforts you put in on this slice are [00:20:00] gonna generate a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to appointments.
Tristan Ahumada: So if, they raise their hand, pay more attention to them.
Jeff Walker: For sure. And that's why we did this launchpad update, which you probably have seen now, which is on the agent launchpad, we're now elevating those leads. Any inquiries that come in are put in this new section called Contact Requested which shows the inquiry and what they asked for, and so you can keep track of it in that dashboard. And so that's new. We rolled that out in December, and then the app update is coming in the next two weeks. And so we're updating the agent app. The Launchpad page is being redesigned on that. So all of those inquiries are front and center, so you make sure that they don't slip through the cracks and you don't forget to keep following up with those ones. 'cause you, you don't.
Tristan Ahumada: That's probably where I would go first.
Jeff Walker: Yeah. And that's kinda what we're trying to do is [00:21:00] help you organize in what order should you go after these leads? And so you've got contact requested. Then you've got your P1s, which are new leads, the retries on leads, and then the active users.
Tristan Ahumada: Wait, Jeff. Is that the order that you guys suggest?
Jeff Walker: Don't wanna speak for training,
Tristan Ahumada: Outside of what they train on, what do you think is the order that, or what have you seen is typically best? What would you recommend?
Jeff Walker: I new leads for mean, so always contact requested because that's someone who's pulling for something from you. And so you don't want those people to wait. That's where that speed to response is critically important because now they're waiting for you. Got it. Of course, new leads yeah, you wanna be, you know that person is online now. They are shopping, probably gonna be on multiple real estate websites, and so being the first person to get them to have that [00:22:00] conversation is great.
Then I think I, I love the ones that are showing some type of engagement. They are someone who is they've registered before, but they're back on your site.
They're favoriting listings. That's the, what we call the active leads. And I guess we probably say P3 is, supposed to go next, but I, for those that are actually engaging, I think you got a better shot at converting those. And the call agains.
Tristan Ahumada: would you put favorited listings above last visited?
Jeff Walker: I'd have to look at the data ultimately to see. Last visited if they were on your site today, there was a reason for that. But Favorited properties and the number of favorites shows that they're getting pretty serious. So I say call. I'd say call [00:23:00] 'em both.
Tristan Ahumada: It's a close, it's a close one. Yeah. That's why I ask.
Jeff Walker: And our next update we're doing on this is about this. So what we're calling trending leads. And so this is just a sneak peek. At the next enhancement we'll be making the CRM. So we've got the contact requested section which shows the ones that have made contact.
And then trending leads are like your hotter leads. They haven't specifically reached out and said, oh, I wanna talk to you. And so this is just a mock-up. But We're capturing all of those behaviors which demonstrate, that they're highly engaged. And so someone who's back on your website, someone who's coming to your site multiple times within a short time period, someone who's looking at the same listing over and over again or shared a listing someone who saves updates, their save search. Favoriting multiple properties. So all, we have a list of 20 different actions that we consider to be highly engaged and we're creating like a running, live, [00:24:00] dashboard where you can spot those things as they're happening.
And so again, the intent is to help you look and say, not have to put a whole lot of thought into. Who can I call that is gonna be most likely to convert, but you can progress through these steps. I'll call my contact requested. I'll call my new leads, but then I wanna call my most highly engaged leads. They're gonna be all listed here in real time.
Tristan Ahumada: I like that man. This is really nice. Can you go through and explain really quick what the P stands for?
Jeff Walker: That's just stands for priority. These are filters that kind of come out of the box in the CINCCRM where you can identify P1 is your priority one call now. Those are new leads, so these are different criteria.
Call again, are leads that within 30 days, you've already tried them once. You wanna make sure you, you keep trying them within that first 30 day period. And then the P3s are your active leads, leads that [00:25:00] are taking some, they've logged into your site for some reason, they've done something on your site in the last 30 days. And so this then gets into more of a nitty gritty and will help you understand what are they doing without having to go and look at all the lead details.
Tristan Ahumada: Got it. And when is this out for everyone?
Jeff Walker: The contact request is out already. This one should happen in the next couple of months. We're working on it right now, so it's the next thing that's up for our CRM team.
Tristan Ahumada: Got it. Sharon's got a question. She says, is there a way to get notified when someone favorites one property or is it when they favorite three that we get notified?
Jeff Walker: You can get notified when somebody triggers like a behavioral message. And so right now it, it takes more than one it, and so it, I believe it's like it, you favorite three properties in five days or something like that, which creates the trigger.
[00:26:00] Yeah, we don't want to overwhelm people with too many notifications so that you get notification fatigue and then don't end up taking action on anything. So we wanna make sure it's something which rises to that level of needing action. So that is that.
I do have content if you wanna keep going, I've got some content on verification.
Tristan Ahumada: Yeah, let's keep going man.
Jeff Walker: Since this is what's really, this is the next thing that's up and we haven't really shared this information yet. So this will be the first time that people are seeing it. For the past couple of months we've been testing a new experience, and I'm just gonna jump past this here. We've been testing a new experience on. The front end of the sites where a user, after they initially pass that registration screen, we send a text to them with a code and we ask them to enter that code into the registration in order [00:27:00] to unlock all of the content that's available on the listing details page. And so the intent here is to help you understand which leads have actually verified their number.
If somebody does that it's a phone number that belongs to them and they got their phone on them. It's their phone because they had to actually enter that code into the site once the text was sent to them. And so we wanna help identify in the CRM which ones we know a hundred percent for sure are correct phone numbers that belong to that person. And and provide some motivation for those that enter a bad phone number to correct it.
Tristan Ahumada: Oh yeah, that would be, that's for sure.
Jeff Walker: And so we've been testing different flavors of this to try to get the right recipe. Because the downside of it, of course, is if you're creating some barriers to the experience, if you don't put in a correct phone number, there's gonna be some folks that are like, oh, I'm not [00:28:00] gonna do that, and so I'm outta here. That's why we're trying to balance.
Yeah. And so what happens there is if they don't enter, if they don't verify, then there's certain content that we lock. Like you can't see all the photos, which is the thing of course, they're really after. And so if they get to this point, they can skip it, look at properties look at searches, do a bunch of stuff, but we're only gonna show them the first three photos after that, if they wanna see them all, now's their time to to verify. And so that's what we're trying to go after, is don't stop them from using the site. We want them to get listing alerts. We want them to come back to the site, but we want to keep this some type of motivation in there that will, encourage them to give us their correct number in order to get the full experience.
Tristan Ahumada: I like. Some questions on this, Jeff. There's a lot of people that are excited about this, so that's awesome. Is this happening now? How do we know?
Jeff Walker: [00:29:00] We are going to be launching this in our early access in about two weeks. And so we'll be taking clients on an opt-in basis and we're gonna put out a message. We'll send it out in a pop-up on your. And we'll send out emails as well. So in, I we're aiming for about February 19th and to go live a hundred percent. So we've been testing this just behind the scenes on a portion of traffic. Okay. And so we'll be taking clients. We wanna make sure it's something that you're ready for and that you want to do and you're opting into it. So stay tuned. We will notify everybody in just a couple weeks when it's ready to go.
Tristan Ahumada: Got it. Victoria says, how does this work with international numbers? Does it?
Jeff Walker: It works for Canada. I know that. And it's, I'll have to double check and see if it's somebody's coming from like a European number if.
Tristan Ahumada: Yeah. England, France.
Jeff Walker: I would expect that it would, but I'll double check and verify. It's a great question.
Tristan Ahumada: Got it. Rosemary makes a good comment. Sometimes it's only one number off and it was put in there by mistake. This is so true, Rosemary. We've noticed that as well.
Jeff Walker: Yeah. By mistake. I guess sometimes and, I do see that because I'm watching the user sessions where people are correcting their phone numbers now. Yeah. And it's true. Like some people just typo it, right? They're on their mobile phone or whatever. And so it gives them that opportunity to correct it. And now in the CRM we're creating this blue check experience so that you can see as you go down your leads, which ones have verified and then are unlocking full access to the experience.
Tristan Ahumada: Yeah. And how do we get notified when people go through the verification?
Jeff Walker: It's really just, yeah, it's just you'll see the difference everywhere where we show a lead will show that they're a verified lead.
Tristan Ahumada: Okay. And Jeff here's an interesting, comment, which I wanna see how you respond. Because it's a real challenge, right?
Burton says, sorry, bad idea. Don't need more barriers to keep people from registering. Look at Zillow, all the data. No registration at all. I got, I. I've been having people register for years, but I want to see what your response is on that.
Jeff Walker: Yeah, so number one, this happens after they register. And so you're getting the lead regardless. Number two, you can, if you we're not forcing anyone to use it, you don't have to use it, but this is really, this game here, it's volume, it's generating as many registrations as you can. I'm always amazed in a way, but anyone can go to Zillow today and get access to all, everything for free, and yet, very consistently, they come to our websites and they register.
Yeah. And that gives you more long-term opportunities to convert them and to get them back on your site. Then leaving it wide open. It's great if you're doing like millions of dollars of national ad campaigns and you're building a brand so that you can get people back to your site, but we don't, the average agents doesn't have that luxury, and so getting that registration upfront is really important in order to get that user to be retained.
Sure. Some are going to go away, they go away today because of the forced registration, but we found it to be super effective in both converting leads and getting folks to come back and getting them signed up for listing alerts. And there's a reason they're coming to these sites. Yeah, there's advantages to the websites that Zillow doesn't have. Zillow, their search capabilities are for the masses. They're very generalized. Your sites being based upon the MLS data fields gives a lot more depth to what someone can search on that's very localized. And so there, there's reasons why people are coming to your sites, and advantages for that person to register. Yeah. This is what we're testing too. Like I don't want to. This is the really the big question and can we verify these phone numbers without sacrificing engagement and success? Because it's a hundred percent true, like the more you put in front of that buyer is a barrier, the more reasons you're giving that person to abandon.
And anything we do, we test very thoroughly because I'm not gonna release anything that's going to hurt. And so we wanna make sure that whatever's happening is going to be something which helps our clients. And there's a couple questions we have left on this. That's what I wanted to get your thoughts on.
So number one, the test is going very well. We're finding that, over 60% are verifying their phone number. And so in the experience, they're actually taking the time to receive and enter the code. And we're testing on go on, on Google leads, and then we're getting a lot of corrections too. About 7% are correcting their number. And so that elevates the lead quality. So not only can you see which leads are you, we know for sure that phone number belongs to, you're getting some corrections as well. And so overall, you're getting more folks that you can actually contact. And I had some examples to show. You're gonna trade some engagement for improved contact information, and this is where that, that, that sort of friction is that we wanna manage.
So what we're seeing right now, there's going to be a drop in listing views. There's no way around it. Yeah, because you, there's some segment, in this case 40% of people aren't verifying. So that 40%, they can't see all the photos. Yeah, but it's not a 40% drop. It's only a 7% drop.
We're not seeing a decline in inquiries. In fact, it's up. I don't, see any reason why this should be up, so I'm not expecting that the longer we test that to stay at that level. But it's not down. And so that suggests that those who are verify...
Tristan Ahumada: Jeff, on that man, I can tell you why. And I think it's gonna stay up. In fact, it might even go up higher. And that's because you're getting people in that want to use this. They're serious. Think of how. A normal user goes onto, I don't know if you're familiar with Redfin, but I use Redfin. Oh yeah. A lot. And in order for me to favorite anything I need to register and there's no way in hell I'm gonna register. So I just send it to myself. And that's how I favorite things. So if I was a serious user, you better believe I'd have more property inquiries 'cause I'm fully invested in this. I'm serious. I took the time to go through this whole process.
Jeff Walker: And maybe they feel a little special because they've they've verified and they're like, oh I have now full access to this. But it does suggest that group, which is verifying is also the group that is most likely to stay engaged. That's most likely to stick around to submit inquiries. There's additional cost. Especially for the length of the registration process. There's some folks that are bailing in registration, so some, so we're seeing a drop in the number that answer all the questions.
We ask all the questions are you pre-qualified, is this your first time you're buying a house? What's your timeframe? All that stuff. And so you're trading some increased contact information for folks. Some folks that are apparently the ones that are less likely to transact, at least they're not answering registration questions.
And then the big drop we're gonna have to manage and come up with another experience for is HomePulse registrations, where we ask somebody to, to claim their home during the registration process. That's experiencing a decent drop. And I think the issue there is you only get like the clock is ticking on folks when they're doing registration. They're only gonna stand for so much. Before they're like this is too complicated. And so by having them verify their phone number, we're eating up some of that time. And they're not going to then do everything else that we're asking them to do in registration. So we have to decide what's most important in registration to get, we think verifying phone number is really important. And we can come back and get them to claim their property in other ways.
Tristan Ahumada: I love that. Is this feature. Something that can be turned off on the site? So that we..
Jeff Walker: Yeah, it's gonna be opt-in. Yeah. So again, no one, if you wanna experiment with it and see how it works for you, that's great. And then these are my questions. We are seeing how it will change the consumer behavior. My question is, how will it change the agent's behavior? Are folks gonna take the same approach to calling? Are you gonna just call all your leads?Are you gonna call the verified ones more often? Because, a hundred percent, this person had their phone in their hand when they registered. So if they're not answering, I'm not giving up because I know they're there. Yeah. Or you're gonna have some agents that say, I only wanna call the verified ones because it's a lot more fun to call knowing that I'm not gonna get any. Walmart, pizza shops, police stations anything else that people put in for their phone number or bad numbers. Interesting. And, and I don't know the answer to this one yet, and so this is gonna be, this is the next phase as we get folks to to start trying this out, to see what do agents do? And what does that ultimately result in? Are we gonna see an increase in conversions and contacts and appointments? And what I'm hoping for is that confidence you get knowing not to give up, that this person was interested enough to verify their number with a phone number that they had in their hand, that you'll be less likely to give up on that lead and stay persistent with it. And that's what I'd like to see 'cause I think that would increase. The, chance of success and appointments with, but I think it, it remains to be seen. What do you what's, your take on it?
Tristan Ahumada: Dude I, think it makes for a warmer call. First off, I think you asked the right question. How does this change our behavior? Because what I've noticed over, and you've noticed too, since you worked in lots of awesome places. The tools that we have available to us change us and our behavior. So this is one of them. You're adding something. So it's going to definitely change how we approach it.
What we've noticed is that when we get verified information, not only does it affect how we reach out to them, but I'll give you an example of Thursday, I call up, it's a verified one. I call up and I say, hi, is this, I'm trying to remember her name, Morgan. Hi, is this Morgan? And she's is this Tristan and Associates?
I kid you not. I was like. I was like, what? I go, yeah, Morgan, listen, you caught me off guard. Nobody really responds that way when I call them. And then we went to talk for twenty-five minutes and we got 'em pre-qualified. And so to me I'm like, wait a second. That's this Changes on both sides, which is great.
Jeff Walker: Yeah and maybe there's that higher degree of expectation I didn't just enter my phone number as my password. I've verified with this company that this is my phone number and I've received a text already at that number. Is that warming them up a little bit.
And it gives you a sense of trust on the consumer side. Like a lot. It feels like this is a legit business that is asking to verify me before I proceed.
Tristan Ahumada: Man and with the changes we haven't even talked you, you didn't bring this up, but the laws just changed with the FCC. So you know, Realtor.com is definitely gonna make changes where now all of these portal companies or real estate lead companies aren't able to sell their leads to multiple people. It's just like a one-on-one. And so companies like CINC, which we as agents jump into, we benefit more on this. Because they're only promoting us. It's like a one-to-one. Guess what? We've been doing it like this for years.
Jeff Walker: Yeah. And we've seen that, that crackdown in texting. Like they very much want to be sure that where you register is the only place you're getting a text from. And it's making it more imperative that we're generating our own leads and getting that consent to call and text them ourselves.
Tristan Ahumada: You got it, man. I love this. This is awesome. See, I always love talking to you, Jeff.
Jeff Walker: I'm excited. Yeah. We can't wait two weeks.
Tristan Ahumada: This is great, man. I appreciate this.
And listen, if you're interested in CINC and you're not part of the CINC Family, we've put in the link multiple times in here. Jump in, and I've got this daily podcast that you can listen in. It's typically four to six minutes long every day. All on real estate. It's called the Daily Real Estate. DRE. I don't know that I did it on purpose, but there you go.
Jeff, thank you for joining us, buddy. I appreciate it. I'm thinking I, wanna know, whenever we talk next, I wanna know the progression of everything you're dropping, like all the new tech, like where are we now, like three months later? Because all of this is going to all the data is gonna help us understand what's been working, what's not.
Jeff Walker: Exactly. Yeah. And we're tracking it all. So yeah, next time we chat, I'll, we'll have some answers to those questions. We just lay it out, so we'll let you know. I like that.
Tristan Ahumada: Thanks Jeff. Always. Awesome buddy.
Jeff Walker: Thank you, Tristan.
Tristan Ahumada: Thank you everybody. Bye now.