Typically, 75% of our business has an underlying transaction attached, be it a landlord undertaking and extending their buy-to-let portfolio or a consumer moving into their dream home.
This ready-made stream of quality enquiries and leads has meant that we perhaps haven’t embraced other sources of lead generation as voraciously as other brokers and one area where we may have lagged a little behind in comparison with others is in the online arena.
Over the last three years, Countrywide has invested a great deal of time, effort and energy ensuring that its portal presence in estate agency is unrivalled in comparison with other agencies.
This has led to us taking a strategic stake in Zoopla, developing our own Propertywide portal utilising the 47 estate agency and lettings brands within the Countrywide stable and deepening and strengthening our already close ties with Rightmove.
An area that we haven’t optimised, but are going to look extremely closely at (as announced at the CML MICE conference last week), is how we generate significant and extensive quality mortgage and advice leads from our significant online traffic.
In time, I expect us to consider this a separate business line in its own right.
It could possibly end up as its own division, but for now, we will look, learn and optimise our sites and traffic to ensure that we aren’t missing out on leads and introductions that others may already see as standard operation.
Nigel Stockton is financial services director at Countrywide
