I reported already a while ago about the lack of professionalism of real estate agents in Belgium’s main city.
I decided to look more factually at the situation and prepared a little experiment which I launched last Sunday. The experiment consists in sending the same request to the 50 main real estate agencies in Brussels and study the reaction. To trigger a reaction in a market where the average transaction price for houses is around 300,000€, I send on purpose requests for a house priced at 1m€ and defined precisely which qualities the house should possess (MUST HAVE’s) and which characteristics should be avoided (NO GO’s).
I can already report that the results will be catastrophic and will prove the complete amateurism of the profession. Five working days after the requests were sent, the return rate (including description not matching the requests and apologies that no house matching the description was currently on sale), is less than 10%.
My take:
I had long thought that lack of response by real estate agents in Brussels (and it seems also in Belgium) was a consequence of their focusing on the goods priced the highest in order to increase their sales. My experiment seems to confirm the contrary, namely that the lack of response is not dependent on the type of request received. More expensive goods also fail to trigger the attention and the response of real estate agents.
In spite of 25 years of marketing research proving the importance of customer service in the overall customer satisfaction, real estate agents seem not to have understood its importance. In their business quality of service is shaped in first instance (as in many other businesses) by the first contact. Unfortunately, in my experiment, 90% of real estate agents don’t even take the time to set up this first contact.
Tags: marketing agency belgium, service
