Reply! Offers New, Truly Performance-Based Marketing Solution.

Thank you Ron for taking the time to report on your progress with Reply.com

Hmmm....reading this has me tempted to try them out again....but I am not so sure about the prospect of having multiple agents going after the same leads. Ron, thanks for the update. Your expectations and explanation of how it worked for you is part of the reason why I'm seriously contemplating going back to Reply...but I'd like to hear from more folks, first.

here an update on my experience

5 days

19 leads
6 bad #
1 spanish speaking (Ill give this to one of the spanish speaking agents in my office)
2 contacted; not interested
1 voice mail every time I called, (I'll try a few more times before I give up, then leave a message, then do an email drip program)
9 prospects (interviewed and agreed to receive listings to review by email and my follow up phone calls.) My hope going into this was to get 50-60 leads in a month that would result in 20 prospects and ultimately two sales

 Im getting leads at a rate of 120/month (my goal was 60) and Im converting leads to prospects at a much better than I expected: almost 50% of the leads become prospects....I had hoped for 30%

At this rate Ill have 120 leads and 60 prospects. 

I want to share my experience with Reply! and my very negative results with Reply! they contacted me and pitched thier program on me so I thought that i would give it a try since they gave me a 15 day money back guarantee with no monthly fees or membership fees and i only had to pay per lead. Well as it turns out I was having the same problem as everyone else is, invalid leads, when i returned them to get credit they would not credit my Reply! account, after no response to several emails from the customer service I sent in a written email cancelling my account with them just after 4 days. They then got back to me finally and tried everything possible to keep me on board, however, I knew better and went through with cancelling my account. Today, almost a month later, I got a call from them asking me why I wanted to cancel my account, so i explained to the gentleman that I had already terminated my services with them and had a confirmation email stating so, I also advised him that I had also at the same time emailed them written notice as required by law to no longer have authorization to access my credit card. He assured me this wouldnt be a problem and they would not deduct any money. Well, I checked my bank account today and guess what, they took $460 out of it almost a month after cancelling my services. I am actually beyond upset that Activerain would allow this type of scam on thier Website since this a website for Real Estate Professionals and there is nothing Professional about Reply!. Tomorrow morning i am filing a report with the BBB, State Attorney General Office, Rip Off report, as well as the Federal Trade and Commerce Department. This company needs to be shut down and stop ripping off hard working Realtors.

After my post Reply! contacted me today and we are in the process of getting the situation taken care of. I will be speaking with them tomorrow and I will post on here to keep everyone posted as to the outcome.

I will be joining tomorrow after reading this blog and comments.  I received a call from a Reply! representative and although I rarely take these kinds of calls, we had a great, frank discussion.  I promise to update with results.

I was very frustrated with Reply! and I was able to discuss my concerns with them after they had called me on Wednesday to dicuss my concerns. Although it was a communication problem with the customer service person when I signed up, Reply! was very intent on resolving my concerns upon speaking with them this week. They made sure to follow up with me and stay on top of things. Taking this kind of approach with responsive customer care and service allowed me to feel better about my frustrations and we were able to come up with a resolutution together and move forward.

I think that if you are going to use a company such as this one, there is many benefits, however, be very careful in understanding the program and policies. This was not explained to me in complete detail and it seemed confusing for most agents that have posted on here about Reply!. It seems that their new business model may work much better and I am happy to see that they are listening to the agents that are posting and making some adjustments. I am more than please with how Reply! stepped up and took the time to address my concerns and come up with a viable resolution. Thank you Reply!.

They may be making some positive changes, but do your research. See most recent comments here: 1/7/2010

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/scamfraud-c140932.html#c553202

I left a positive comment and it was deleted? Very strange.

If you want to do something right - do it yourself. Very simple concept. Here is an example of it: Greg writes he got 46 leads in a weeks or so paying 99.95 plus whatever he will pay for per per sale deal. I had 164 buyer leads starting from January 1st - result 3 offers submitted already, 8 clients arriving to Naples with cash to buy homes within 2 weeks, over 30 clients who plan to come to Naples within 1-2 months to buy, over a hundred clients provided thei real phone numbers and positively confirmed their interest and plans to buy in Florida, mostly in Naples. 16 property listing requests.

Marketing budget: 0

Source of leads: simple SEO, key words analysis and targeting, blogging, PR articles, bookmarking, video presentations with free video sharing websites.

Do I blame anyone for a bad lead? I just ignore them.

Suggestion: educate yourself on search engine optimization tactics and try it.

If you don't want to deal with marketing on internet - buy leads.

Well, I promised I'd write a comment after signing up for service.  I may have mentioned, I was solicited by telephone about two weeks ago. I sell condos in Honolulu, Hawaii.   Coincidentally, I had been reading this blog and comments at the same time.  To make a long story short, I decided to sign up for service which I did last Monday 1/11/10.  I must say I'm disappointed.  So far I have 0 leads.  That's "0", as in ZERO.  Whenver I log into my account, it says "There are currently no new prospects in your queue."  I was curious that they would be soliciting for new business here in Honolulu, when they have no leads.  They seemed so ready to take my money.  After a couple days of patiently waiting for leads, I finally tried to email my sales rep as well as my services representative.  I din't get a reply, so I emailed again.  Finally, my services rep, Desiree Estrada, emailed me and said:  "We haven't generated any prospects in your area yet but should start receiving leads in a few days. I apologize for the inconvenience. If you need further assistance please let me know."  Three more days pass and I still have NO LEADS!  Let's see, at $99.95 a month, in five days, they have made $16.65 and have sent me NO LEADS.  No that isn't a huge amount to be too stressed over, but what can I say?  I'm disappointed.  Why in the world would they solicit my business when they have no leads in our area?  I'll remain patient and update you again soon.

I appreciate the almost immediate response from the RealtyNow associate, Rudd Lippincott.  While he quickly addressed what he thought was an initial error made in setup, about a half day later I began to receive some leads by email.  Unfortunately, so far, all buyer leads have been from people looking for single family homes on Oahu for anywhere from $150-350K.  Unfortunately, with the median price of a home on the island at well over $500k, most of these buyers either are not well informed or are asking for the impossible, stating wishful thinking.  Since I really just service Metro Honolulu, I did agree to receive all island leads, thinking I would select those that seemed most realistic and real.  I did receive one seller lead, but it was in an area, far far from Honolulu and I decided to reject it, as I wouldn't be able to service the listing properly.  I will remain patient and see how future leads work out.  So far, it appears that the quantity and quality of leads for Oahu and Honolulu may not be as good as other locations on the mainland.  I will continue to keep an open mind for now.

OK, here's an update.  I am now getting both buyer and seller leads, although probably more than 90% are buyers, which is fine.  For a while it seemed like many of the buyer leads were bogus, or at least out of touch, indicating they wanted to buy a singe family home for $150-175K in Hawaii.  So, for the first day or so, I was not accepting those leads, and only cherry picking what I thought were the most realistic leads.  After a short time of doing that, I came to the conclusion that I would accept all leads.  Why?  Well, it's really a numbers game, as many of you know.  I am pretty conservative when it comes to my business budget, but right now I'm spending $300 a month on Google Adwords.  I've been very pleased with the results and meeting my goal of building traffic to my website along with my other SEO efforts I make.  That said, for my $300, I get perhaps 5-10 leads, with email adresses a week from Google (out of about 30 new website visitors a day).  For $100 a month, I'm getting 5-10 leads a week from RealtyNow.  I really don't know if the leads are any better or worse than those I receive from Google.  After all, I really need to do my follow up to see what kind of lead conversion I get.  I've always been in it for the long haul.  I email personal notes, usually with listings weekly, email three different newsletters weekly and monthly, and people stay on my email list until they die or remove themselves.  I've had prospects buy after five years of getting my email and newsletters.  So, the bottom line is that I'm glad to be getting leads in this quantity.  I'll remain patient, work the system and continue to evaluate the RealtyNow service and quality of leads.  For now, I'm ok and happy.