From frenzied COVID-19 housing market to today’s tight attention economy and penchant for instant gratification, for years agents, team leaders, brokers and technology providers, stressed that the “speed to lead” was the key to success, but Jeff Walker, the chief product officer at CINC (Commissions Inc.) is challenging that narrative.
“We’ve talked a lot about speed to lead in this industry, and that’s still important. But increasingly, we believe the bigger opportunity is speed to signal — recognizing when a lead’s behavior or conversations indicate an opportunity and acting on it,” Walker told HousingWire.
Real estate sales cycles have the potential to last upwards of a year, depending on when a consumer first contacts an agent during their transaction process.
“The sales cycle in real estate can be very long — it could be up to 12 months, which makes leads nearly impossible for agents to nurture,” Chao-Ping Wu, the co-founder and COO of Flair Labs, told HousingWire in an exclusive interview. “Additionally, in a perfectly competitive market, all agents are fairly homogeneous, so not only the speed, but the consistency of nurturing becomes so important.”
Lead nurturing
At the Virginia-based mega team, The Yeatman Group, leads are funneled through a team of online sales consultants that match the consumer with the agent that will best be able to serve their needs. However, not all of these consumers are immediately ready to transact.
“They get put into our CRM and they are assigned a stage, which will help determine if they are put on a drip campaign and also make sure that the drip campaign is designed to meet their needs,” Margaret Nuckols, the director of operations at the Long & Foster-brokered team, said. “We really focus on organizing them in a way where these people don’t fall through the cracks.”
Nuckols said leads that are assigned an agent will also have a meeting scheduled with that agent, which could be anything from just an introduction call to going to tour a property, depending on where they are in their journey.
“Typically it starts an appointment with the agent and then we also organize those leads into what we call ‘Smart Lists’ in our database, which categorize people based on their timeline and their needs and this helps the agent have an idea of what the appropriate cadence to follow up with that client is,” Nuckols said.
When it comes to lead nurturing, Nuckols said it is finding the balance of meeting clients where they are at, letting them know that you are there to help them, but not being a pest.
“With that comes a lot of people and clients, so it’s really a matter of how can you best organize them, so people don’t fall through the cracks,” Nuckols said. “I think one of the big battles is making sure that you are always able to help those that maybe are going to start looking in a year, but aren’t ready right now and just not forgetting about those people.”
Keeping leads warm with AI
This is a problem Flair Labs and CINC is looking to help agents and team leaders with, as the two firms are coming together to deploy Flair’s AI voice calling through CINC’s lead generation and conversion platform.
Flair Labs had previously deployed its AI voice agents in the mortgage space, announcing a partnership with West Capital Lending this past July, but this partnership with CINC marks the company’s entrance into the real estate space. CINC is using the newly integrated technology to power CINC Call AI, a product that contacts new and high-intent leads, holds qualifying conversations about their timeline and motivation, and connects those who are ready to speak with an agent through a live transfer. The goal is to help teams respond quickly even when agents are tied up with showings, negotiations and other client work.
“Flair has been able to bridge that gap between a lead that has shown active intent in terms of buying a property and filling that nurture gap so that agents can actually have more active conversations with buyers and sellers and leads enabling them to close more deals,” Samir Sen, the co-founder and CEO of Flair Labs, told HousingWire.
Walker said agents can use transcripts from Flair’s calls to determine what next steps they should take with a client.
“Someone who’s six months away may need a different approach than someone who’s actively looking at homes this weekend. And as their circumstances and behavior change, the engagement strategy can adapt with them,” Walker said. “Real estate agents have a lot competing for their attention. They’re showing homes, negotiating contracts, working with clients, and trying to stay on top of hundreds or even thousands of leads. The challenge isn’t just responding quickly to every new lead. It’s recognizing when someone is ready to take the next step and making sure that opportunity doesn’t get missed.”
AI voice, human touch
Flair Labs firmly believes that AI voice integrations are the way of the future for real estate agents looking to maintain strong lead generation engines, but Wu and Sen acknowledged that creating an effective product has been challenging, especially in a transaction that historically relies so much on human connections and relationships.
“The first part of what we do is concierge sales, which is the sales pitch, but the other part is qualifying a potential client because we want to send the agent qualified leads. What we have had to focus on is the overlap of these two segments because we don’t want to over-sell, as that is the agent’s job and we don’t want to over qualify because then there may be missed opportunities,” Wu said. “So, finding that overlap, I think, is the key for this type of product in the future.”
While they don’t currently use AI calling with any fresh leads, Nuckols said The Yeatman Group has implemented an AI agent that calls older, “very cold” leads to re-engage them.
“The goal is to book an appointment and then hand the lead over to either one of our agents or part of the online sales team to take that next step,” Nuckols said.
According to Nuckols, The Yeatman Group has most recently used Mod AI to do this, but they are in the process of exploring multiple different companies and providers. “At any point that the AI can’t answer the question, it will transfer the call over to a human, but really the goal is to just reengage those clients and get them further down the funnel,” she said.
For the most part, Nuckols said these cold leads have been responsive to these AI voice calls, but she said that some have a bit of “AI fatigue” and do not want to engage with the AI call.
“It is a tool that is to be used alongside humans,” Nuckols said. “The goal is always to always connect the lead to a human as soon as possible.”
Although AI, including AI voice products are gaining steam in the real estate space, like Nuckols, Sen and Wu are aware that they are entering an industry that has historically relied heavily upon human connections, especially as consumers look for emotional support as they navigate what can often be an emotionally fraught experience.
“The whole goal of what we built is not to replace real estate agents or that human touch that people are looking for when they buy or sell homes — we don’t think that is going away — what we are providing is an engagement tool that agents can use to close the gap in nurturing, so that they can have more real conversations with people that are actually looking to buy and sell homes,” Sen said. “Today, because of missed calls and inconsistent follow-up, real estate teams and agents are missing out on opportunities that they could be closing.”