Should I Turn On the "Guest Book Log In" on my Real Estate Website?

Should I Turn on The Guest Book Log in on My Real Estate Website?

When it comes to selling real estate on the Internet there are a lot of different opinions as to what works and what does not work and also how to go about getting leads to a real estate website.

Many people have different opinions on how website should be formatted, how it should look, what information should be on there, how long the homepage should be and a host of other different subjects.

One thing that seems to come up time and time again is whether or not a real estate website should have a guestbook login turned on for people looking to do an MLS home search.

Over the past 10 years I have sat down and listened to many different viewpoints on this subject and also put both opinions to the test doing my own Internet marketing.

As some of you may know my real estate marketing career started in working at a large real estate website company. I started off as a salesperson and later was a sales manager and ran a large office of about 60 telemarketers. During this time we were trained and worked very closely with our e-coaching department and took to heart everything they said about how a real estate agent should go about marketing their website and setting it up for the best success.

Since I was a salesperson and not a marketing person at that time I listen to everything that I was told and repeated that information to the clients that I worked with.

It was not until a year or two later when I had my own websites that I was able to really put the information that I was taught to the test and see in real time what worked and what did not work. It was at that time that I realized that a large chunk of information that I had provided clients in the past flat out did not work.

One of the myths that I often told real estate agents was that a guestbook login was obtrusive and turned off clients. I started off my marketing of real estate websites by turning off the guestbook login section and waited for people to voluntarily come to me and found that I got almost no leads from this process. The frustrating thing was I could see that every day I was getting at least 40-50 or more visitors and yet I was averaging about three to maybe four leads a week.


On average a real estate agent may need 40 to 50 leads or more to sell a home so if you're averaging 12 to 15 leads a month you are on pace to sell 3 to 4 homes a year, which although brings a return on your investment, still leaves a lot of room for improvement.


When I turned on the guestbook login on my real estate websites my leads nearly tripled within 48 hours and all the myths that I'd previously heard from the so-called experts were dispelled instantly why started getting contact information and people to call.

A guestbook login form, in my opinion, is the most important part of a real estate website. If you are running an IDX or an MLS search without a guestbook login the amount of traffic to you will need to sell a home will be at least five times to 10 times more to get the same result if you had if you had the guestbook login turned on.

There are a lot of real estate agents out there who feel that a guestbook login is to obtrusive for their online visitors.

My response to that is that anyone who wishes to remain anonymous and not give out their contact information can still easily search the MLS on the website by simply putting in John Doe and generic information. This allows the visitor to get the information that they are looking for while at the same time putting information in the guestbook which is clearly inaccurate, which in turn is a blessing in disguise because the real estate agent knows that this is not a person to waiste time with.

I have heard hundreds of times real estate agents whine and complain that they will get leads that have a fake phone number and my response to them is always the same. Great! That is somebody you will not have to waste time on. If you get a fake phone number and you make the call to lead where the number is not accurate you have wasted less than 30 seconds of your time. As a salesperson for over 25 years I know that the more phone calls I make the better my chances of getting sales and nothing frustrates me more than spending a half-hour to an hour on the phone with the prospect who has absolutely no interest in making a purchase. If I can sort out people who were interested from the people who are not interested by simply getting a wrong phone number to me as a salesperson this is a very fast way to eliminate deadbeats.

Since the average sale for most real estate agents will result in anywhere from a 3000 to 15,000+ dollar commission the faster you can get on the phone with qualified prospects the better your chance of making sure your time is well spent on people who have the best chance of following through and making a purchase.

Some other reasons that I give to agents for turning on the guestbook login include the fact that if somebody calls a brick-and-mortar office and has questions about buying a home the agent on floor duty whole fully is to ask who it is that they're talking to, and how they can reach them to provide more information in the future. How many brokerage firms do you know that have the same policy for inbound calls which is we don't want their contact information we want them to be a look call-in the company freely and not feel that they have to give us any of that information. In addition when agents hold an open house to they also maintain the same policy? When they have an open house today provide a way for the clients to log into a guestbook or throw a business card in a fishbowl with a glob the backyard and sit on the patio and say come get me if you need me?

The reality of your website is that it is no different than a brick-and-mortar office, in fact it is your brick-and-mortar office in the 21st century and the mentality that asking people for contact information who come in to this office is obtrusive to me is ridiculous.

Any agent out there in the year 2010 knows that running a real estate website and especially a successful real estate website costs a lot of money. This means that there's hosting fees, marketing fees, IDX/MLS fees and a host of other costs that go along with it. To treat your real estate website different than how you handle calls on floor duty or how you handle getting contact information from an open house does not make a lot of sense to me, especially when you see how drastic the results are from this one marketing decision.

I recently spoke to a real estate agent in Florida who was very proud of the fact that she did not ask people to have to login and they appreciated that, yet when it came time for her to make a decision on doing some additional marketing for her website she did not have any money. Times are slow she said and I need to wait till spring or summer before I'll get another sale to were I can afford that.

We were only talking about spending $200 so was not like this was a huge purchase, but it struck me as a bit funny that someone who was so adamant about her decision to let people come and go in her website without asking them for any contact information was also broke.

I do not claim to be the smartest guy in the world by any means, but after working with thousands of real estate agents and seeing thousands of case studies with guestbook login sections turned on and guestbook login sections turned off, there is absolutely no flexibility in my opinion that having a guestbook turned on is an absolute must if you are serious about selling and least one the home sale per month.

If you are happy selling a home every three months or 3 to 4 home sales a year for you is a success, then do whatever you feel is best for you.

If you want to sell at least 1 to 2 homes per month then you must have the guestbook login turned on to maximize getting contact information from the traffic to you are sending to your website.

A website that runs in IDX or an MLS feed that does not have the option of turning on a guestbook login to me is completely useless. I have worked with a lot of these websites and I have never had results and I will never take money from an agent and tell them that a website like this will be successful when I know the chances of that happening are slim to none. Why waste my time and their money when I have seen hundreds of times this type the website produce almost 0 results.

This goes back to my original opinion that a very large portion of marketing packages and even real estate websites being sold to real estate agents are completely useless because the companies selling them have never put them to use in real time to see how well they really work. It is very much like my experience working for a real estate website and marketing company that told me many things which I later found out in real time did not work.

This does not mean that real estate website companies and marketing companies do not have good intentions, they do, but they are still living in what I refer to as A"lollipop land", meaning they are nothing but parrots repeating what somebody else has told them, yet none of them have put this information to the test and seen if in fact it really works in real time.

They sell the product to the agents and then expect the agents in turn, to have to figure out how to market the product and make it work. That is why even though 80% of homes being sold in the real estate market today come from the Internet, yet only a fraction of agents are actually keeping pace with the number of sales they make from their real estate websites.

I am sure that the guestbook on or guestbook off forum will continue for many years down the road, but to me this is 100% based on what gets results it has nothing to do with people's opinions. It has everything to do with what works and what does not work. For me it really comes down to "do  you want  12 leads a month or do you want 40 or more leads per month"?

Sometimes agents will have two websites and will be able to overcome this decision by having one website which gets traffic from the search engines have a guestbook login turned on and have a second website they put on a business card have the guestbook login turned off. This allows the agent to provide a website to a client where they can search without entering contact information and since they have personally handed them a business card, they ready have the contact information and do not need it.

Different websites can serve different purposes, but if you are a one website agent then my advice to you is to turn on the guestbook login. if you do not have it on now and see what the results are for the next 30 to 60 days. I guarantee you that you will get more contact information and your chances of selling a home are much greater sinse sales is a numbers game and the more leads you can generate the better your chance of selling a home. If you are working with a real estate website that does not have a guestbook login option then try to find another MLS or IDX feed to run into the website. Many IDX companies have developed methods to turn on guestbook login sections and get contact information and normally there are at least 2 to 3 that service most large markets.

My goal for real estate agents is not to get into a battle of opinions, it is simply to get their marketing dollars to convert the largest number sales and bring the largest return on that investment back to them and that is why for me there is absolutely no question as to whether a guestbook login should be turned on or turned off. If it is not turned on I am not working with that website and taking an agents money knowing that my chances of success are slim to none.

Best wishes to your success,

Sean Callahan
www.realestatemarketingnerds.com
www.milliondolarhomesellingsystem.com

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