By Mark Weithorn
Founder/CEO
For the past 25 years I have been teaching marketing classes nationally and mostly at the Miami Association of Realtors. Over the years I have probably taught over 40,000 agents. Some are newly minted while others were seasoned professionals. One basic frustration among agents has been lead generation. How do we get good leads and how do we consistently follow-up.
For decades the lead-gen model for real estate has been the same. It’s basically the Zillow method which has been adopted and modified by Realtor.com, Homes.com and other real estate web portals. It works like this: a potential buyer goes to one of these websites, searches for properties, and (if they have enough courage to prepare themselves for the onslaught of calls, texts and emails), enters their personal information for a real estate agent to contact them.
Real estate agents pay these portals for access to these leads. Sometimes they pay in excess of $1,000 a month. The lead then goes out to one, or multiple, agents. It then becomes a race to see who can reel in the buyer.
This is a very frantic, inefficient and unreliable method of lead generation. First, agents must wait for the buyer (or renter) to physically go to the website, then we have to wait for them to complete their research, (this could take days or weeks), then we have to wait for them to enter their information. That’s a lot of time waiting for a lead that might not come to fruition.
Now, along comes the magic of Ai and it is revolutionizing how real estate leads are generated rendering the old Zillow model obsolete. DPI Showcase Websites, a 20-year-old Miami Beach tech company that creates websites for real estate agents and brokers across the USA, is leveraging the predictive analysis capabilities of Ai to identify potential sellers in an area. The system then distributes those prospects to DPI clients. Then using Ai automation, DPI’s internal client management system, (CRM), starts the nurturing process keeping the agents in the forefront of these potential clients. Unlike traditional methods, this system is not waiting for a prospect to take the first step; Ai is starting the process well before they pick up a mouse. DPI calls this innovative Ai tool “Leads+.”
This new process marries Ai technology with the real estate data that DPI has amassed over its 20 years of working in the real estate arena. “The trick to utilizing AI’s full capabilities is to feed it good clean data,” states Mark Weithorn, Founder & CEO of DPI Showcase Websites. “Without quality data the system wouldn’t work.
Working with Sellers vs Buyers
Most real estate agents know that it is far better to work with sellers than buyers. Representing a seller, the agent is contractually locked into the transaction. Working with buyers, basically the real estate agent is working for free until the deal closes. They show the buyer multiple properties and tries to get them under contract. At any time, a buyer could go dormant or switch real estate agents leaving the original agent with nothing to show for it. Also, the seller has a vested interest in working with their agent to ensure that the deal goes to closing.
The problem with the Zillow model is that is it chasing the unreliable buyer. It could take months before a potential buyer is ready to take action. By that time the original agent has typically lost contact with this person. Out of sight, the prospect then goes and contacts a different agent. Real estate agents are spending thousands of dollars for leads that frequently slip through their fingertips. Once again this is an old and inefficient method of lead generation.
“This is just the beginning of our Ai arsenal of tools”, states Mark. “We have created the DPI Ai Labs. This innovative tech company utilizes real estate data and create various lead-gen and productivity tools for real estate professionals.” Over the next year DPI has several new Ai tools that are being developed and will be ready for launch in 2025. “The future is very exciting.”
DPI Showcase Websites can be found at www.DPIshowcase.com
