Our listing syndication partners tell us they are sending our listings to over 160 different websites. Sounds great, right? Here’s the problem, some sites do not update as frequently as others and other sites come and go. The honest fact is that we have little control, if any, of what happens to them once the listings are initially entered. All property management companies have access to these same resources and suffer these same problems. On top of that, some of the sites consistently produce leads that never turn into applications or renters. That just wastes everyone’s time.
We have a way around this nonsense. We track every single inquiry to our properties and every showing they receive. This data comes to us from numerous resources and it’s all analyzed on a very regular basis by a custom-built solution so our team is on top of activity related to your listing. Why did we expend the resources to make a system like this possible? It allows us to react to listing activity more quickly and more accurately than anyone else. Just another example of how Pyramis offers a better service for the money.
Analyzing the Deluge of Data
For the last several years, we averaged around 400 inquiries every month (and frequently over 1,000 inquiries per month during peak months) to our office about listings from all of these real estate portals. The numbers are quite staggering; it can get really overwhelming.
At Pyramis, we see the most interest in our rental homes from only five services: MLS, Hotpads, Zillow, Trulia, and realtor.com. Only five of the 160+ sites provide 86.6% of the interest to our listings. That’s powerful information.
Zillow Who?
Remember above when I said that some sites produce leads that never convert to tenants? Since the start of 2018 (as of January 2021), the Zillow Network (Zillow, Trulia, and Hotpads) generated over 11,158 inquiries about our rental listings. Impressive number, right? But, the truly staggering number is how many tenants those 11,158 leads became: 10. Did you read that correctly? Only 10 of the 11,158 leads from the Zillow Network actually became tenants. The quality of the leads coming in from the Zillow Group sites for rental homes in the San Antonio area is generally horrible. The bottom line is that while they think they’re the 800-pound gorilla, they’re more like a mosquito.
What’s the Solution?
The solution is to focus our efforts into the real estate portals that generate quality leads. We have the data to enable us to do just this and we monitor it closely.
The short answer to your next question, “where do the quality inquiries come from?” Two sites have produced over 70% of the leads that turned into Pyramis tenants over the last three years. Those two sites: realtor.com and pyramiscompany.com. We will continue to leverage these sites and monitor their performance going forward.
This is just another reason why Pyramis continues to be a property management leader in San Antonio.