Your real estate marketing plan should contain an estimate of how many listing leads you are trying to get each month. Depending upon your type of marketing and how you advertise, you should be gaining 3-20 listing leads per month.
Am important part of gaining listings is a real estate phone hotline. You have to point your prospects to a phone number with your advertising. This should be a 24//7 phone line with a number of extensions for different aspects of your real estate business. It should also be able to collect the name and phone number of the prospect that is answering your listing advertisement.
There are a lot of different phone technologies available for the real estate agent. But they basically fall into two categories. First, there's the "box unit" type that relies on the local caller id. This can loose you contacts as some of the numbers will come up "unavailable", "out of area", or "anonymous".
The second type of phone hotline uses Automatic Number Identification (ANI). This type will always capture the phone number but often fails to get the name of your prospect. Although there are a few of this type that will guarantee both the name and phone number.
Each type has monthly fixed costs associated with them. The first system will lose you at least half of the potential capture rate each month. The second will at least get you phone numbers, but it's nice to have the names too so you can be personal when you make your call-backs.
Phone hotlines are used by the real estate agent on both sides of the marketing plan. There are listing strategies and buying strategies associated with the real estate phone hotline. Plus you can provide various customer services through the phone hotline and follow-up systems.
Much of the use of a real estate phone hotline revolves around your real estate marketing strategy and advertising campaigns. You need good, direct response scripts to use with your phone answering service. These are essential to your business and capturing leads. A good script brings a response from you prospects and begins a relationship that can lead to future referrals.
The system you choose should be hassle-free and not bring up any red flags and resistance on the part of the caller. Most real estate sellers and buyers are wanting to be impersonal at the beginning. They're doing their research and not making commitments. This is why cold calling has gone by the wayside. It tried to force the issue on the prospect.
In the modern day, "no call" law environment, things have changed for the better. New real estate marketing techniques are coming to the forefront and those that use them are dominating the market. The real estate phone hotline is in the center of this new revolution.
By using a diversified game plan, utilizing both online and offline techniques and having your phone hotline and email campaigns as the center of your push, the modern realtor can climb ahead of the competition. Both online and offline techniques should point the prospect to either an email opt-in form or your real estate phone hotline for the lead capturing method.
This give those that prefer an old fashion phone call or a newer email contact an advantage. But, the moral of this story is that you have to be unique and possess both aspects of this modern age. Each works on a different type of individual. Take advantage of both and you will become a realtor that is on top of the game.
I've "googled" for many a real estate phone hotline system and the best that I can recommend is ProQuest technologies. This phone hotline system seems to provide a 100% capture of both name and phone number of the incoming call. Plus they provide you with some pre-made scripts that are killers. You can go to their website at:
http://www.realtystar.com/proquest.htm. 