Overview
In the real estate industry, faster lead turn around times mean higher success rates for agents and agencies. Local real estate agency Boston Pads knew this—but because the agency depended on an outdated lead management process, valuable leads were getting lost and going cold before agents could respond to them.
When Boston Pads reached out to Free Range for help, we worked together to streamline its processes, enhance the lead management experience, and improve conversion rates.
Boston Pads relied on basic contact forms to gather information about leads interested in a given property. The valuable data collected from these forms were sent to a few Boston Pads email accounts, where agents would often fail to find them before it was too late. The agency needed a way to keep these interested potential buyers from falling through the cracks.
Working with the Boston Pads leadership team and other stakeholders throughout the agency, we envisioned a unified system where all leads would be collected in an intuitive dashboard/mobile app. We designed a new lead management experience, in which all leads would be sent to a common pool—where all online agents would get an equal opportunity to claim them. The new system would be called “PadsFinder.”
Under the old systems, leads would be sent to agents’ inboxes, where they would often go cold due to long response times. To increase efficiency, we designed PadsFinder to to initiate a sales call with an online agent as soon as a lead submitted a form.
We also created an intuitive dashboard, mobile app, emailing tool, and client follow-up tool to help agents respond more effectively to leads. We set up the service in such a way that it can be easily integrated with CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce, allowing client follow-ups to be automated with CRM workflows.
Throughout the process, we tracked metrics such as
- Response % to leads
- Response time to leads
- Success rate
- Average price per lead
The collected data helped us formulate an effective rating engine for agents.
The new system significantly improved turnaround times on crucial leads. By gamifying the lead management process, we helped individual agents improve ratings with clients, and gave Boston Pads valuable data which they could use to analyze and incentivize members of their agent pool.
Before the introduction of PadsFinder, agents reported that it could take 12-48 hours to respond to leads. After agents started using PadsFinder, average response time dropped to 5-35 minutes. The more robust online tool has also helped Boston Pads weather the shift to a hybrid work model in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
