Relola wants to make real estate leads chase YOU

Quick question: how many houses have you seen this month?

Now imagine if you had written a blog post about each house. First of all, that would be a lot of great content. And second, who has the time to do that?

Heather Sittig Jackson can help with both of those.

She’s the Co-founder and CEO of Relola. And that’s exactly how she felt as a real estate agent and broker for more than 20 years. She was showing many, many houses every month and sharing her expertise on each one. But that expertise was shared  with one client at a time. Then it was lost.

So she wondered, what if she could capture her insights and make it visible to more than just her client? Like product reviews, only for listings? After all, nearly every product on the market has online reviews. “You can get more information in reviews about a toaster than you do about a house!” Heather exclaimed. And she’s right.

And thus Relola was created.

Relola is a community platform for real estate agents to share their hyper-local expertise.

There, they publish insights about the market and current homes for sale that they have seen firsthand.

Take a look at these posts from actual agents:

“By switching the use of the current living room and dining room the dynamics of the house would be changed. This would provide more entertaining area.”

“I feel like the kitchen island is a little far away from the kitchen. I’d move it a little closer so there’s more living room space.”

“The large bushes/trees next to the driveway need to be trimmed way back or removed as they interfere with getting in and out of the car.”

So how do reviews of shrubbery and kitchen islands create leads for real estate agents?

As you publish your insights on Relola, Heather explained, you create a digital footprint. You shape your brand and share your voice. Then house hunters read your notes and see what you look for in a property. Sellers read your notes and sense your savviness for what buyers want. And of course, they will all want to work with you.

“The quality of a lead that chases you is 100 times better than a lead you have to chase,” said Heather. Because by the time that lead reaches out to you, she’s already gotten a sense of who you are as an agent. She’s an informed consumer.

The average agent shows 25 homes a month that they don’t sell. That’s untapped opportunity to  demonstrate your expertise. “It takes about a half an hour to show a home that doesn’t do anything for you,” she said. “Now you can make better use of your time and turn it into content marketing.”

Plus your notes aren’t pigeon-holed away on the Relola site. The functionality can go on any website. Agents who provide insights and photos can embed those on any site with widgets and plugins. So you can be all over the internet providing your hyper-local expertise.

The data is pretty compelling. Enough so that Heather is willing to make a prediction.

“Right now, the window of searching for homes is about seven months. I predict that with Relola insights, that period of time will get shorter.”

And, perhaps, fewer people will have shrubbery that blocks their driveways.