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LeadStreet: Associates Reap Benefits of Web Traffic

The LeadStreet Internet listing strategy is producing results for Associates and consumers alike.

In the two months since the system was launched, traffic on remax.com has increased nearly 300 percent - from an average of 40,000 unique visitors daily to 113,000. It has resulted in 15 million listing views and 95 million page views, producing 319,197 leads, including 137,615 unique leads that agents would not have received otherwise.

Richard Johnston, a new Sales Associate with RE/MAX OTB Estates in Encino , Calif. , received a lead within a few days after LeadStreet went live in March.

"The buyer was searching for properties on remax.com and asked for more information on one," says Johnston (ABR). "I got a text message on my cell phone, immediately went to my computer and accepted the lead, and called her. She was still on the site."

They made an offer on that very listing, but the sellers then took it off the market. Johnston showed the buyer several other houses, but eventually she settled on another home - for which the listing agent was another RE/MAX Associate - that she found on remax.com. The $587,000 transaction closed on May 26.

The LeadStreet system is a great thing in a slowing market, Johnston says.

"In Southern California , the number of buyers has dropped 60 or 70 percent in the last year," he says. "Finding qualified buyers willing to purchase in this market is difficult. The buyer I got through LeadStreet worked out very well. She knew exactly what she wanted and what was on the market, which helps a lot."

After the transaction closed, Johnston asked the buyer why she had gone to remax.com in the first place. Her answer was a revelation.

"She said it's because RE/MAX is a trusted brand and she knew that people who worked with RE/MAX are successful," he says.

In the Pacific Northwest, RE/MAX Equity Group added remax.com to the sign of its new office in the state capital of Salem , Ore. More than 2.5 million motorists on Interstate-5 see the sign monthly.

"What RE/MAX International has undertaken in building remax.com as a national IDX Web site is huge," says Kathy Ragsdale, Vice President of Business Services for RE/MAX Equity Group. "But the payoff will be just as phenomenal."

Ragsdale says her firm's 1,300 Associates (in 22 offices in both Oregon and Washington ) received more than 1,500 contacts from consumers through LeadStreet in the first two months.

The key to the system's success, Ragsdale says, is education.

"One of the training highlights will be that these leads might have an incubation period," she says. "Our challenge will be maintaining adhesion between the agent and the consumer until the consumer is ready to enter into a contract. As we perform that training and the advertising campaign heats up, we're going to see this thing snowball."

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