Introduction
Traffic alone isn’t enough to increase sales and grow your real estate business. Whether residential, commercial, or new property development, improving the overall quality of traffic and converting that traffic into higher-value, qualified leads is what ultimately brings lasting growth to any real estate operation.
In this guide, we’ll explore customer conversion in the real estate industry, recent trends, and by going through multiple ideas and tools, how to help you improve your business.
Everything in this guide is designed to be practical, easy, and simple to implement.
Who is this guide for?
This guide is for any marketer, business owner, or web user interested in benefiting from online real estate marketing insights – in particular conversions.
To get the most out of this short document, matching the following criteria and prerequisites makes you a perfect fit for following this guide and making a difference in your real estate business.
- You have a website, AND
- You are driving traffic to your website through digital paid campaigns, SEO efforts, and traditional marketing
- You want to qualify your leads and save time
- You want to stand out from the competition
- You want to convince interested buyers and sellers that you are the best and only choice
If you’re trying to figure out how to drive more traffic to your website, then this isn’t the guide for you. Learning about trends and conversion rates may still be useful, however.
To benefit from this guide, it’s important that you already have people visiting your website, i.e., regular traffic, or that you’re implementing strategies to drive that traffic.
With this guide you’ll be able to:
1. Aim to double your website conversion rate
The minimum goal is to increase your website conversion to higher than the industry average. The average across the industry is 0.62%. This is low in comparison to other industries, and we’ll uncover why in this guide.
How much you can improve depends on the amount and quality of your traffic. With this guide, you should be able to reach at least a 1.5% conversion for your website. If your current conversion rate is higher than this – great, but this means you should aim at doubling it!
Turning conversion rates into revenue means, for example, if you have 3000 daily visitors, increasing your conversion by 0.8% to 1.5% will increase your yearly leads from 8,760 to 16,425.
If your average lead value is $500, this would potentially be $4,380,000 to $8,212,500 of additional lead value generated by simple changes – changes that can be implemented at a very low cost and in very little time.
2. Compare your conversion rates against the industry
We’ve compiled statistics from over 147 agency websites to arrive at industry averages. You can compare your own statistics to the industry average, and if you don’t know your conversion rates, we run through that as well.
3. Explore new tools
We explore new conversion tools of the last few years, and how they can be used to give website visitors a better experience. These tools can often have a big impact on lead generation.
4. Understand what conversion rates are and how to set up tracking
Knowing how your website visitors convert is almost as important as the conversion rate itself. We’ll explore this as well.
5. Be mindful of industry trends
We quickly touch on trends in the industry in 2022 and what we and other sources expect to happen in 2023 and beyond.
6. Implement practical conversion optimisation ideas
Lastly, we’ll be exploring website ideas for any budget to improve conversion rates.
The data in this document is compiled from 147+ globally renowned websites. We don’t focus on a single market, but rather explore trends globally within real estate businesses.
Terms and Definitions
Before we go any further, let’s clarify a few things. It’s important to define keywords we’ll be talking about so you’re not confused. Below is a quick overview of the most important terms. If you feel unsure about a term, feel free to check back here.
Website conversion marketing
Website conversion marketing refers to specific efforts spent converting site visitors into qualified leads.
This includes things like; website copywriting, website conversion tracking, installing tools, optimising, A/B testing, and more.
What it does not mean is focusing on driving traffic to your website, outbound sales, or other areas of marketing.
Website traffic
Website traffic – or visitors, are the people visiting your website. They can be visiting for the first or even the tenth time. They’re browsing your website and reading the information you have.
They may have navigated to the website because they searched for a term and then found you on Google, saw an advertisement on Facebook or other social platforms, a real estate listing platform, or even because they’d heard about you on the radio.
There are different types of website traffic that can be further broken down but these are the main types:
Organic traffic means visitors that come from search engines, such as Google or Bing. Nowadays organic also includes social media traffic that’s not paid for. For clarity and purposes here however, we’ve separated them.
Social traffic means visitors that come to your website via any social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et cetera.
Referral traffic means visitors that come to your website from any other non-social media/search engine source. This could be, for example, a blog linking to your website.
Direct traffic means visitors that type your website URL into their browser and enter your website directly.
Paid traffic means visitors that come to your website from any source of paid traffic, to include social media and search engine advertising.
The most common form of digital paid advertising is through pay-per-click, or PPC. Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is a good example of this.
There are different classifications for website traffic, but we’ve found above to be the most common and meaningful way to classify because of the separation of terms allowing you to focus on each one individually.
For example, to improve paid traffic, all you need to do is run ads. And to increase your organic traffic, you need to focus on your SEO.
Website conversion rate
A website conversion is a visitor engaging and taking action on your website. This action is usually completed by their entering details on a form, through a bot, or giving you a call.
These actions are also known as conversion events; any event is defined by your own parameter(s). This could mean they left their contact information because they were interested in a certain property, subscribed to your newsletter, or took another action and left their details allowing you to continue a conversation with them.
The Conversion rate on your website is simply the percentage of people who visit your website that, through an action, become a lead.
Calculating your website conversion rate is very simple:
Conversion rate % = (Number of people who converted on your website / Number of people who visited your website) x 100
For example, if 1,000 people visit your website in a given month and if two people express their interest by leaving their contact information, your conversion rate is 0.02%.
That’s 2/1000 = 0.02%.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is an older term but still widely used. It’s both loved and hated as it’s a very hard thing to define; when defined right, knowing your bounce can be very useful. In further attempts to clarify, Google Analytics has replaced the bounce rate number in their newest version with the friendlier term ‘interaction rate’.
What Bounce rate means is how many people immediately exit your website after seeing it. If you get 100 visitors, and 50 of them leave very soon after, your bounce rate will be 50%.
This can be used to track the effectiveness of your copy as well as user interest in your website’s content. The average bounce rate for the real estate industry currently sits at approximately 41%. Factoring into that, don’t ignore your page loading times; it’s an important number to know and work on keeping as low as possible.
For an industry bigger picture and to compare with where your website is at, below are the 2022 average bounce rates across five key webpages:
Average page bounce rates for the real estate industry
Conversion Ideas
Improve your landing page copy: Explain why a customer should choose you
We’ve analysed over 200 real estate websites and noticed a recurring theme:
Most real estate brands don't explain their value proposition clearly enough for potential customers to understand why they should be choosing that particular provider (you) over someone else.
Most websites focus on brand, i.e., making things pretty with a goal of projecting size and all-knowingness. But why really does a customer choose a particular real estate company to sell their property?
Assess your copy for why Brand A (your brand) deserves a chance instead of Brands B, C, D or E. What’s your speciality? Are you a trusted authority? Can you really help the customer with what they’re looking for?
Don’t leave your main page empty or vague on brand details. Unless you’re Facebook, Apple, Zillow or a similarly reputable business, no one will really know who you are – your strengths, unless you let them quickly know then and there.
Let's look at an example:
Strand Properties is a real estate agency focusing on helping you find the best properties for resale and developments in Marbella, Spain.
Screenshot of the front page before
Immediately, you see that the front page is clean and simple. As soon as you arrive, you read the words ‘Strand Properties’ set against a background image of an uncluttered interior. With this information, a foregone assumption is Strand Properties has something to do with real estate.
However, beyond this, you don’t have enough information to find out what their speciality is. Are they more rental focused? What locations do they concentrate on? Are they a developer or constructor?
For a lot of people buying their first home, holiday home, or even retirement home, it’s a big experience with no shortage of commitment required on their end. Your unique selling point should readily and quickly communicate one thing: why you’re the right choice for them.
Back to our example, Strand Properties’ focus was in fact hidden on the bottom of their main page when it should have been highlighted in a prominent place at the top of the page.
In improving their brand communication, they soon after implemented a chatbot to bring out or better highlight any missing information.
Screenshot of the front page after
Let’s take a closer look at what the chatbot is saying:
The chatbot simply welcomes the website visitor by saying “Hello! Welcome to Strand Properties.”
Then it tells the visitor what Strand’s unique selling point is by saying, “We sell properties all over the Costa del Sol with a focus on Marbella and its surroundings.” This highlights that their main focus is properties in Marbella. If a visitor is looking for a property in Barcelona, Strand Properties might not be the right fit for them – but if they’re looking in and around Marbella, the visitor quickly knows they’re on a highly relevant and useful page.
Turn your high-traffic blog into leads with popups and chatbots
Great content comes at the cost of time. Hours on hours go into keyword research and crafting the perfect, eye-catching headlines. Being intriguing should always be a content goal of yours or your marketing team.
Most marketers spend their time making sure enough people read their content, but don’t stop to think if their readers actually like what they’re seeing or whether they’re looking for something else.
Whether the article really got them thinking and generated more questions in their mind? People read blog posts when they are in research mode before making a purchase, wanting to get all of their burning questions answered.
For the reason you’d created a piece of content, you want to get the most out of it. It’s important to continually revisit the question: Is this type or piece of content what my readers are actually looking for? Following: How can I convert my readers into potential customers? You’ll never have the answers to these questions without first engaging your readers, and asking them directly.
Now, you might think you’re interrupting them – but here’s a pro tip: you’re not. You’re engaging them. And on a topic they’re interested in to foster a more dynamic experience.
So, how exactly do you do this? Find a well-trafficked page or conversation on your site and engage: Ask the readers themselves if what they’re reading is interesting to them, and if they’d like to be kept up-to-date on similar content.
Give your website visitors more than one way to get in touch
It’s natural not to want to interrupt or annoy your visitors but it’s smart to look at your website as your own ‘real estate’ – a dedicated space for them to learn about and engage with you. So remember to give them more than one way to do just that.
Looking at mobile in particular, having to scroll up and down for information and then find the contact form all the way at the bottom of the page can be frustrating.
Don’t just have one contact form at the bottom of the page, for example. Give them multiple touchpoints to express interest. Make their experience more engaging. Use a conversational form or a chatbot, and then an exit popup to refocus their page interest.
Qualify your leads – but not too much
When buying or selling a property, the process is virtually the same around the world. However, certain agencies might have their own process – that is, how they do things, or then certain countries might have different procedures in applying and qualifying for a bank loan.
Importantly as a brokerage or agency, if someone is interested in buying or selling a property, you want to pre-qualify them. Quality matters more than quantity. Don’t let someone just type in their name, email, and phone number when they’re interested in a property.
Ask them a few more questions – or points of interest, that matter to you. For example, it could be something like how many bedrooms are you interested in? In what location is it that you’re interested in buying? This question in particular comes into play if the lead is submitted through the homepage, or pages other than a select property page.
Pre-qualifying the customer prior to any of your agents making that first phone call will save both time and energy.
We’ve seen that 5-7 questions for the customer is the sweet spot. You’ll lose some leads, but the quality of leads you do get proves higher with drop-offs after pre-qualification remaining very low.
Always send leads directly to the right agent
Don’t lose prospective buyers or sellers to your competition.
When a person is interested in buying or selling a property, they’re not going to sit patiently on one source and wait for a single agent to get in touch.
Because buyers and sellers want things to happen fast, or to be paid attention at time of interest, they’ll be continuously looking at different websites and providers. Not to confuse this state of mind with rushing the process, buyers and sellers rather seek immediate attention to initiate or start the overall process. It’s all about getting started – and who can help them get started fastest.
If a prospective buyer is looking at a property, one way to ensure you capture that lead is to send the lead details not only immediately – but directly, to the agent responsible for that property. Sending lead details to middle management for further relay is a common oversight in the space.
In another example, if the prospective buyer has a question, the agent can jump into a conversation via a live chat and connect in real time, sharing any relevant information the buyer is looking for. Getting on the phone for a call in real time is another option. Again, it’s all about getting the process started then and there.
However, if the lead goes through an organisation’s middle management and has to be redistributed to a respective property’s agent, that's time wasted you could have already begun engaging with the lead. Don’t let your competition steal your prospective buyer.
Continuing, always make sure to have a picture (also called an ‘avatar’) of the agent. This is so the prospective buyer feels they can trust the company. People as a rule trust people, not companies. See below design choice for expressly this trust building:
Lead will go directly to the right agent. This speeds up service and improves customer experience.
If they can't find what they’re looking for, step in to help
Many times when people visit a website and what’s being said isn’t clear or they can't find the information they’re looking for, they’re just going to leave. This results in a higher bounce rate.
A visitor leaving shortly after arriving on a page usually happens because you run ads with a certain value proposition but failed to deliver on that value. Your advertising needs to line up with or follow from your website copy. When there’s a mismatch between an ad and its landing page, for example, you’re set to lose the initial interest your ad generated.
When a visitor has been browsing your page for more than 45 seconds, it’s smartest to implement a popup or form at this time, essentially asking: Did you not find what you were looking for? The idea is to engage the visitor and zoom in on what they’re looking for, then letting them know you’re searching your listings for a match and will send this match their way. Then grab their email address, and send the listing(s) to them.
Buyer leads are almost always seller leads
Unless it's a first-time home buyer, usually when people are looking for a new home, it’s likely they also want to sell their current one.
This is another instance where with only two pre-qualifying questions, you can identify exactly that opportunity. Simply ask, ‘Are you a first-time home buyer?’ and if the answer is no – great, then follow up with, ‘Are you looking to sell your current home?’.
If they then respond yes, this is actionable news and an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. You can help them find their dream home to define the next chapter of their lives – and you can also be their trusted advisor in helping guide them through the process of selling their home.
"Always asking our clients if they have a property to sell increased our revenue by 17.4% in 2021."
Miranda, Williams Estates
Build content to create authority and trust
This is a hard one, requiring a lot of work. Building authority is actually what we’re doing with this e-book and, ideally, what you want to do with your customers as well. Great examples of this type of content are local market reports and guides on getting the most out of one’s property.
Always offer something to people who are browsing your website. Know that there are people who just browse to see what’s out there. This is literally the digital equivalent of window shopping. For real estate, these window-shoppers are likely thinking of buying their first home but know it’s a major commitment, so they want to explore to make sure they’d be doing the right thing and could ultimately be working with the right agency or brokerage for them.
Visitors who are browsing through websites and/or reading many blog articles are in what’s usually called ‘research mode’. This is a great way for you to learn more about them by asking a few questions. For example, asking them when they’re looking to buy their first home.
If they say in 6 months’ time, that’s great! Add them to an email nurturing list and occasionally send them more information about the steps involved in buying a house, what will be required of them, and the time frame for purchasing as well as moving in.
In about 3 months’ time, you can reach out to them and find out where they’re at in terms of progress. You won’t be going in cold because you’ve already warmed them up and are their trusted authority at this time to help them through the process. In turn, they’re going to be happy that someone they trust is going to help them through it.
Utilise context on your contact forms and CTAs
Make sure you speak to your customers in personalised ways. For example, if a visitor is on a property page, you can have that page’s contact form and chatbot engage and talk to the user about precisely that property.
For example: Are you interested in [address]?
We ran an A/B test on exactly this question versus a generic form and got a 24% lead conversion increase on respective property pages – from 1,948 leads to 2,234 leads.
Similarly and on your website’s agent pages, use copy like ‘Buy with [agent name]’ and ‘Sell with [agent name]’ to personify the process and create a relatable context.
You could also welcome back visitors by changing your website’s H1 (page-top headline) or chatbot copy based on that user’s cookies.
Use These Tools
Many tools have been released in recent years that have positively impacted lead conversion rates on websites.
In this section, we explore newer tools that have seen wide adoption and discuss their impact on conversion rates.
Serviceform's chatbot
Smartly re-engage page visitors before they leave
Remember that feeling where when visiting a website and not even two seconds in, a flashing popup blocks your screen?
Your immediate reflex is to close it because you don’t know anything about this brand, and it’s demanding your attention – or worse, contact details. Who wants to share their email address for a newsletter from a business they barely know or (yet) care about?
Popups when used correctly can work extremely well for lead generation. They can be used for lead generation, growing newsletter subscribers, getting feedback, and directing visitors to other important pages of your website.
When creating one, you should start by imagining yourself as a visitor.
Here are a few key tips to ensure your popups work for you – and not against you:
1. Identify your business goal: What do you want your website visitor to do? Is it for them to leave their contact details, join your newsletter, or send feedback?
2. Don’t request too much information: This popup is potentially where your funnel begins, so don’t make it too challenging for them to opt in. You can ask for more details later.
3. Show it at the right time: This is where lots of websites go wrong. The #1 reason why people get that immediate reflex to close and never visit that page or site again is when the popup appears as soon as the page has loaded.
Show the popup only if they’ve been engaged with the website for a certain amount of time. There’s no best time written in stone as it varies by website. Start with 15 seconds, and then over time reevaluate your website analytics to identify the average time spent.
‘Exit-intent’ is a popup behaviour that triggers when the visitor starts to scroll up to close the page they’re on. If they’re about to leave the website, it’s the perfect time to re-engage and refocus the interest they had when initially browsing the page.
4. How often to show it: For first-time visitors to the website, show the popup once per session. If they’re returning visitors, you can show it to them again.
Engage your customers inside your content
Want to add an additional layer of conversion on your website, but don’t want to bother your users with more popups?
A newer solution for this is inline bots, a technology that creates conversations and places them inside content. Another way to think of the tool is an opportunity for choice-driven dialogue that gets started inside your website – and usually inside a blog, after a search, or in other similarly unconventional places.
Inline bots have been proven to work well with highly-trafficked content, especially as another layer of conversion inside a footer or other generic page structures. You can create these types of chatbots using Serviceform.
Create seller leads with automatic value estimations
More and more real estate agencies are utilising tools for automatic real estate home valuations.
The tools are largely still inaccurate and rely on varying marketplace data. However, as lead magnets they’re great, and can be widely used to capture the attention of a large number of buyers on, for example, Facebook. Many of these buyer leads won’t be ready to sell as they’ll be interested rather in getting their home appraised (valued).
Tools for automatic value estimations can be built very quickly by asking the user simple questions and then generating a value based on the responses. To build one, you can utilise APIs such as the Zillow API or get a pre-built estimation tool from us at Serviceform. Our property valuation tool can be white-labelled for your business.
Install a chatbot – preferably a pre-built ‘non-AI’ version
Chatbots have been around for some time now, but have only recently started really impacting conversions. There are a lot of misconceptions around chatbots. Most people we talk to have a feeling that chatbots ‘don’t understand anything’. This is actually true, but only for the artificially-intelligent (or AI-type) chatbots.
Chatbots can be used in a lot of different scenarios: allow customers to get in touch easier with floating touch points; help them find the right property; get a quick home valuation; or talk directly to an agent over live chat. In the case of live chat, the chatbot can be effectively used to pre-qualify the lead, saving the agent unnecessary time on a prospect.
There are two main types of chatbots:
1. AI-driven chatbots
When businesses hear or think about the word ‘chatbot’, they immediately think about AI-driven chatbots, where a bot can answer any question. AI chatbots are, at time of writing, far from being actually intelligent as they require a lot of manual training.
AI chatbots sound nice (and fancy!), but often have a detrimental impact on conversion. At Serviceform we built AI-driven chatbots for dozens of real estate companies as a pilot and saw queries that had nothing to do with the respective business – or with real estate in general.
This is due to the fact that bots don’t have the answers users are seeking, and end up confusing and ultimately repelling customers when compared to pre-scripted flows.
Benefits: Can answer thousands of customer service-related questions and provide fast answers.
Cons: Horrible for lead generation and reduces lead count.
2. Pre-built ‘click’ chatbots
Pre-built chatbots, on the other hand, and expressly with a goal to gather users leads, work very well in real estate.
After giving up on AI-driven chatbots for real estate, we started focusing on click-driven chatbots and saw real success. Through to today, our team has now built over 200 chatbots and with a customer satisfaction rate of 99.4%.
The type of lead generation with click-driven chatbots, to say, just works.
Benefits: Lead increase of 30-40% on most websites.
Cons: Don’t expect it to be smarter than how you build it.
Here’s an example of a very well converting chatbot with pre-built answers. The goal is to explain the unique selling proposition (or USP) of your company and drive the user to immediately choose the actions they want to take:
Agent appointment scheduling
Appointment scheduling tools have been available for quite some time now, but we’ve recently seen them more and more in the real estate space. A good example of what these tools can do is arranging a property visit without emails or any scheduling back–and-forth. You can get your visitor to book a time slot with you that works for them, and then organise everything for them for that meeting. Make sure to reach out and call, as we see a lot of tool-scheduled meetings being ignored.
There are many tools to accomplish this: a popular example is Calendly, and another is Serviceform’s Ourly. If a customer is very interested in a particular property, never make them wait. Just give them access to your agent’s calendar for availability and ask them to book an appointment.
For a real-world example, appointment scheduling tools work extremely well for developers – more so than agencies. But even if you’re an agency and know exactly when to show the house, it’s best to still keep your calendar open. It might not be a live viewing, but a person might just want to schedule to talk to the agent. These tools offer potential buyers that flexibility for anything they need: when they want it, and how.
(Add embedded Ourly, whole calendar)
Tracking Online Conversions
Track all your conversions: This is the only way for you to know, test, and learn what’s working and what isn’t. Things that aren’t working need to be quickly identified and changed out for things that could work or elsewhere already are working.
Most importantly, start with thinking about what numbers really matter for your business. Does it matter for you to know how many seller leads your website generates, or would you rather track your website visitors? Figure out the numbers you want to grow and focus on them.
The numbers to track we recommend for real estate agencies are:
1. Seller leads
2. Buyer leads
3. Website visitors (To see the growth of your website)
4. Bounce rate (To see if your users are engaging)
Viewing bounce rate in Google Analytics
How to track conversions
Let’s go through a couple of the most common ways to track conversions.
The most common way to track your website is to use Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive way to track your website traffic and with little setup. Most likely, your website already has Google Analytics installed, and you know to an extent how to use it.
Actively tracking conversions is where Google Analytics demands a little more attention. To track conversions, you’ll need to create JavaScript events – or separate ‘thank you’ pages, and place these events on select pages. To track buyer versus seller leads, you can create two separate buyer and seller ‘thank you’ pages, then add a goal to each page. Remember that you’d still need to do the redirects on all of your forms!
Trends
The importance of mobile is growing
One of the more obvious trends we see is that more and more people are relying on their mobile devices to interact with real estate agents and agencies.
More than 55% on average of all leads in 2021 were sent via mobile devices; compared to our previous data set from 2020, this number was 52%. Following that trend and while now only marginally accounting for the majority of Internet traffic, desktop device usage decreased from 55% to 49%. For the same period through to 2022, mobile usage has markedly increased from 37% to 48%. An important note here is observed user behaviour of browsing on mobile first, only to make their enquiry via desktop afterwards.
Average mobile usage from 147 websites
It’s very important for websites to be mobile-friendly. When browsing products, i.e., real estate properties, and especially when on contact pages and screens, mobile-friendly design makes or breaks a website. If they’re not able to get through to you via their mobile device, it’s a safe bet they’re likely to forget you the next day.
For example, the tools that we build at Serviceform are first built and tested on mobile devices, then implemented on desktop browsers. We can recommend you approach development in much the same way, even if it slightly lengthens development time.
Google: Still the dominant traffic source
Traffic sources have remained similar to the past but with a few changes – namely, with more a spotlight on social media traffic, new search engines, and more direct traffic.
Google still accounts for 64-78% of all traffic for websites we’d analysed, with second being 15-30% from direct traffic.
The second most common search engine for US-based real estate companies has been DuckDuckGo with a 2% traffic share, and that’s replaced Bing for the second spot. Worldwide for 2022, Bing however still accounts for 3% of traffic while for the Asian market, China’s Baidu has grown to capture 8% of all mobile search, placing it second in the respective space.
Social traffic accounts for 1-8% of all traffic – with the top source being Facebook. To add, social media leading into 2020 was the preferred channel by approximately 21% of readers wanting to make a company enquiry.
A lot of social media traffic gets attributed to direct traffic. This is because many applications, such as WhatsApp and Signal, don’t allow us to track their source. This means sharing property links with your family on those platforms, and their clicking on those links, will count as direct traffic, even though it’s actually social traffic.
Social traffic is increasing, but the value is low
More people than ever are coming to real estate websites from social media, especially Facebook. This is due to two things: agents taking use of social media to share listings, and the increase in advertisement campaigns.
However, we see from the numbers that this traffic is slightly lower-quality traffic than average, and that conversion rates are also lower than compared with organic traffic.
It’s our assessment that this is explained by social media users being essentially in ‘browsing’ mode, and not actively looking for something.
Social media serves as a top tool to build awareness – but if you’re looking for immediate conversions, it’s not the best way to go.
Social media sites other than Facebook still account for very low amounts of traffic, especially Twitter and Instagram.
Industry standard conversion rates
Let’s take a look at the standard industry conversion rates for real estate agencies, brokerages, and developers.
For the following statistics we’ve analysed conversion across 126 real estate companies that have 50,000 monthly visitors or more.
Average website conversion rates in real estate are very low compared to other industries, sitting at approximately 0.6%. This is due to the type of traffic that real estate gets. While searching for properties on a weekly or monthly basis, an average person might purchase and sell a home only a few times over their lifetime.
Average conversion rates in other industries:
Average industry conversion rates on desktop and mobile
These numbers are from research on websites outside of the real estate industry whose conversion rates have also been analysed. We’ve cross-referenced our numbers with the averages in multiple articles and found that these numbers are realistic – if not exact.
We’ve broken the numbers down by agencies, developers, and commercial real estate companies. These three segments cater to such different customers that separating the data is necessary:
* Conversion on property pages; out of 100 people who see a property, 1.5% leave their details
** Conversion on homepages; out of 100 people who see a property, 0.3% leave their details
We’ve taken 147 real estate websites, where we have access to the data, and calculated the average conversion from each. The conversion rate in the industry is less than 1%. Top-performing websites pull in around 2-3%, while the worst performers come in under 0.3%. The gap is large and brought on by multiple factors – traffic quality, property value, and website conversion focus, to name a few.
Further, we see that highly-trafficked sites with extremely high property costs often have much lower conversion rates as people have no real purchase intent, but are interested in browsing the properties.
Impact of COVID
Online tools are gaining importance
We’d explored the spotlight currently on online tools in above chapter Use These Tools, but it’s important to note the following. The industry has been relatively stagnant over the past 20 years, but with the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, online tool innovation and ways of working have been radically transformed.
We interviewed 10 agencies in 2020. As of 2022, all 10 are using tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts/Meet, or other video conferencing apps to show properties. Only 2 out of the 10 used the same tools the year prior in 2019.
The real estate industry stands strong
Real estate as an industry has survived the pandemic better than most other sectors. A pandemic housing boom that drove homebuyer demand contributed to that. Commercial real estate and offices have regrettably taken the largest hit. But even if COVID had an impact on early 2020 residential sales, things were normalising almost globally leading into 2021.
A good home sells, just as it did before the pandemic. In the US especially, demand is much higher than supply, which has caused steady price increases particularly since 2000.
Mortgage rates globally, especially in Europe and US, remained low in 2021 and are predicted to remain low until gradual recovery in 2024. Even in Asia, cheaper rates seen in 2020 persisted well into 2021 but in contrast to Europe and US, real estate markets in Asia Pacific are already bouncing back in 2022, setting the region up in outlook to actually lead global growth.
These numbers for Europe and US in particular will encourage more first-time buyers as well as property investors to take advantage of lower rates and take on less expensive debt.
Government infrastructure projects are on hold
An analysis by the National League of Cities predicts that 65% of cities will delay or cancel infrastructure projects due to COVID-19.
This may cause delays to expected property values in addition to land increase in locations where plans for infrastructure improvements had already been agreed.
Offices and commercial real estate are losing value
Due to the extended lockdowns as well as the change in thinking about offices, we have seen office rental prices drop across entire markets; this means Europe, North America, and Asia.
Large commercial spaces in key locations are not worth what they used to be. Around the world we’re seeing key stores closing, and tenants unable to pay rent or then delaying payments.
It’s difficult to predict where 2022 will take us, but the takeaway is clear: In 2019 most employers wouldn’t let their employees work remotely for more than a day during the work week. Now in 2022, it’s commonplace for people to visit their office once a month or less. We’ve seen, in three simple words, a complete reversal.
As industry professionals, it’s our job to find new and innovative solutions for these now vacant spaces, and this is where the year 2022 will be interesting. We’ll update this report soon to include some intriguing developments on the subject.
How to Get Started
In this guide, we’ve explored the conversion ideas, tools, and trends of how everyday real estate companies are improving their conversion rates and, ultimately, growing their businesses. We encourage you to implement a few of these things for yourself in growing your own business and taking your lead conversion to the next level.
Converting more leads today is simple. Know that small efforts can make a huge impact on your conversion, especially if your traffic numbers are high.
Let’s say you have 3000 daily website visitors. Increasing your conversion from 0.8% to 1.5% increases your yearly leads from 8,544 to 16,020. With an average lead value of $500, value generated through these small changes comes to $3,738,000. Again, small efforts can mean big impact.
Your steps to get this done are simple:
1. Set up analytics (key numbers) that matter and you can trust
2. Add new conversion tools to your website while improve existing
3. See your numbers grow
4. Repeat steps (2) and (3)
If you don’t have the experience, time, or just want a professional to do this for you – one who’s done it 100s of times, you’re in the right place. At Serviceform, we focus on making exactly this change for you. We’ve developed a website toolset tailored for both real estate conversion and analytics, that comes with hands-on service and dedicated support.
We can help you get there faster
If you want to double your leads in 2023 and beyond, check us out on Serviceform.com and get in touch for a free website conversion strategy. Our real estate conversion specialists will recommend the best ideas – uniquely for your website, to improve your website conversion and ROI.
Serviceform real estate customers
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