Owning Your Area

Become the Go-To Expert in Your Region With realtor.com®

Name: Randy Durham
Official Title: REALTOR®
Company: Randy Durham, Keller Williams Downtown Realty
Region Served: Greater Chattanooga, Tenn., and Northwest Georgia
Years in Real Estate: 25
Number of Agents in Office: 326
Number of Offices: 1
www.randydurham.com

How do you and your team work to expose your brand online?
We have a strong presence on social media, a heavy campaign through Facebook, and we do lead generation through realtor.com® programs as well as independently. We also have various URLs that we use for lead generation and I work with the CINC platform out of Atlanta, but overall, we rely heavily on realtor.com.

How do you track what is effective?
We carefully analyze dollars spent versus return, and we shift our spending based on what pays off. While we use several lead generation platforms, the majority of our online budget is spent on realtor.com.

From your experience, where are most of consumers browsing listings?
We’ve found that 98 percent of our buyers are looking online first, and buyers out there today are looking online long before they ever contact a REALTOR®. They often are looking for months until they actually make an initial contact.

Realtor.com, for me, has the best conversion rate by and far. It surpasses the rest of the platforms we use, and has done so consistently for some time now. I think that’s because the buyers coming to realtor.com have recognized that that site has the best information, so the more serious buyer tends to gravitate toward the site that has the most accurate and important information.

Why is it so important for buyers to see your branding repeatedly?
Researchers say it takes 8-10 impressions for a buyer to recognize who you are, and operate on that recall. This means you need to not only have your name out there in your targeted areas, you need to be the agent that owns that area. When a consumer searches a city or zip code, I want to be the largest presence there. With realtor.com’s Local Expert^SM program, a buyer is seeing my branding as they move from page to page in that area. This also works with past clients; if you’re out there consistently where your past clients are looking, they will see you and realize you’re still relevant. And home sellers also start their agent searches on the internet, so it works for both buyers and sellers. If they see your face while they’re doing their searches, that’s in your best interest, always.

How are you using your online marketing capabilities to attract clients?
I showcase my Local Expert results in my listing presentations. It’s powerful to have that mechanism, to be able to say you’ll be in at least 50 percent of searches a buyer makes in an area. I’m essentially showing the seller they will get continuous exposure.

What would be your top tip for agents looking to become a “name brand”?
Pick an area and make yourself the expert in that area. It doesn’t matter if the area is just your own cul de sac or a whole city, but you have to really commit to that area and make yourself top-of-mind in that region. Don’t try to be everywhere and anywhere—you’ll end up being nowhere.