BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

If you’re familiar with time management concepts, you’ve probably heard of “time blocks” or setting aside specific times for specific activities.  It has been proven to work to make people more productive.

In fact, you need to work on a task uninterrupted for 45 minutes in order to make headway.  Any less than that amount of uninterrupted time, and you will continue to take one step forward and two steps back (I used to teach time management in another life :-). 

Setting aside time to do specific tasks can make you more productive.  But, incorporating that concept with the results of the MIT Lead Response Management Study can also increase your sales!

The MIT study was focused on answering one central question.  Simply stated, it was:  When should you call web-generated leads for maximum results?

Non-Time Block Results from the MIT Study

While this article is about using time blocks, there are some very important results that should be reviewed before diving into that topic.

When it comes to responding to leads from your website, time is critical.  The MIT study found that:

• The odds of reaching a lead via telephone decrease by over 10 times in the first hour
• After 20 hours, every call you make actually hurts your ability to make contact.

Therefore, the most important thing you can do to convert real estate website leads is contact them immediately after you receive notification.  And, that has implications for connecting your website to your cell phone via text messaging, and a whole host of other issues.  For now, suffice it to say that you need to contact Internet leads quickly.  And, you might as well save your time if you’re past the 20 hour mark.

Time Blocking Opportunities

Where do you follow up with leads?  If you’re trying to contact them at work: When do you follow up with leads or prospects?  Do you set aside a certain block of time in your schedule?  Do you do it when you can grab 5 minutes - maybe while you’re grabbing some lunch?

If you’re not blocking time for that important task, you’re undoubtedly losing business.

The MIT study came up with some interesting results that can help you determine when you should be blocking time for lead follow-up.  Here’s what they found:

• Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call since you’ll be most likely end up actually talking to a lead or prospect.  Thursday turned out to be almost 50% better than the worst day, which was Tuesday.
• 8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to call to make contact with a lead and to qualify a lead.  The worst time to call is - you guessed it - 11am-2pm, or right around lunch.

The Summary

So, what do all these great statistics mean to you?

• Set up a system so that you are notified as soon as someone contacts you from your website.
• Call leads as quickly as humanly possible after they’ve made contact - within the first hour is the goal.
• Don’t spend a lot of time trying to reach a lead if you’re calling 20 hours or more after they contacted you.
• Set aside a block of time on Wednesdays and Thursdays to follow up with prospects between the hours of 8-9am and 4-5pm.

Time blocking - such a simple concept - who knew?