“Paying a vendor just to display some small bits of property data on your website may have worked in the past, but in today’s market, that’s no longer enough,” James Rogers, co-founder and CEO of RealReports, said in a statement. “Brokerages are still reeling from last year’s commission lawsuits and most are looking to cut as many superfluous costs as possible. If your product can’t meaningfully move the needle on ROI, you’re dead on arrival.”
Rogers added that a key differentiator of the RealReports widget is that it leverages data to capture consumer attention, then converts the traffic into leads.
“People want to know what they don’t know about a home — it’s the same behavioral psychology that drove the success of [Zillow‘s] Zestimate,” said Zach Gorman, co-founder and chief operating officer of RealReports.
“We’ve assembled the largest corpus of property information that exists for every home in the country, which is an incredibly compelling reason for a prospective homebuyer to click on the widget and opt-in to learn more. The name of the game for brokerages and agents right now is providing unique value to consumers. Everything we’ve built at RealReports feeds into that need and our lead generation widget is the next logical step forward in our evolution.”
Rogers claims that one firm that used RealReports’ lead generation widget had its first buyer lead less than 24 hours after launching the widget on its site.
“That’s a powerful metric,” he said. “Moreover, it allows us to strike deals with brokerages utilizing the marketing budget, which has a very different strategy and operating capacity compared to the general ‘tech budget’ where we see the purse strings being tightened more and more nowadays.”
The company’s announcement explains that deploying the widget is simple and can be done with a single line of code, simplifying the onboarding process for brokerage clients.
“We have so much in the pipeline for the widget,” Gorman added. “The framework we’ve built is durable and ready to scale, so we can focus on tapping into other caches of potential to drive even more leads to our brokerage clients and making a real impact on their bottom
line in today’s competitive market.”
