Buncy Real Estate Website and Lead Management System

Overview

Buncy Real Estate, a quickly growing realtor serving the Western New York region, is ranked by Buffalo’s Business First as one of the top 15 WNY Residential Realtors. Buncy Real Estate’s recent growth to over twenty mobile agents and two office locations has been a testament to their superior services in a highly competitive market. In an effort to maintain high customer service and agency effectiveness, Buncy Real Estate embarked on an initiative to redesign their website to make it more visually appealing and a functionally superior resource for real estate buyers and sellers in the Buffalo and Southern Tier area. Simultaneously, the principals at Buncy Real Estate wanted to integrate their website closely with their lead management initiatives. They were concerned that having a top-notch website that generated leads which, then, weren’t followed up effectively on would render their web investment ineffective.

Buncy Real Estate, though working closely with a local web design firm, opted to engage the services of Lance Technologies LLC to create a powerful marketing and lead management solution. The final solution was a visually engaging website that provided visitors with unprecedented amount of information derived from a variety of sources including real-time listings acquired from the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors. The website was also closely integrated with a web-based lead management system that allowed Buncy’s staff and agents to manage the lifecycle of every incoming lead from contact to close.

Overall, the Lance Technologies solution cut application hosting costs 400% a year for Buncy Real Estate while delivering about 5 hours a week of productivity increase for Buncy administrative staff. At that rate, Buncy Real Estate expects to reach return on investment in just over a year.

Problem

The Buncy Real Estate website was considered a great informational resource. Nevertheless, unattractive design, an ill-developed user interface, and various other shortcomings such as broken links detracted from the site’s potential. Furthermore, Buncy Real Estate’s website suffered from out-of-date information due to slow turnaround times from their web design service provider.

Buncy Real Estate’s principals realized that to deliver superior service in a highly competitive market, an aggressive customer management strategy, in general, and a website strategy, specifically, had to be implemented. At the core of the strategy was a revamping of their website - one of their most effective marketing tools – and a tighter integration between the website and their back-office operations to increase the efficiency of lead management and reduce operational costs associated with it.

Buncy Real Estate realized they required the services of a unique technology firm - one that was strong in both design and programming and one which understood the underlying business case. Furthermore, because Buncy was managing aggressive growth at the time, it also needed a stable technology firm that could provide a solution in a financially viable way.

Solution

Lance Technologies delivered a new website and a custom-created lead management system to Buncy Real Estate in less than a month’s time – primarily due to an effective project management strategy. The website had the same scope of information as before but the visual aspect of the new site no longer detracted from the information. The website was also programmed to integrate seamlessly into the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtor’s MLS system, saving staff members over five hours of listing update work a week. The website also included Lance Technologies’ proprietary content management system that allowed Buncy’s staff to take over management of their website, thereby eliminating their dependency on a web design firm to make content changes. The content management system quickly delivered return on investment by drastically reducing time-to-web and the hourly cost of changes.

The lead management system developed by Lance Technologies further reduced operational costs and enhanced customer service. Any lead that comes in via the web is automatically entered into the lead management system. Leads via phone or mail can also be entered into the system. Staff can, from there, assign it to agents. As agents manage the lead through its lifecycle, all activities are logged in the system and extensive reports can be generated that measure agent productivity, time-to-respond, and more. A lead management system replaced the sticky-note approach to keeping track of prospects that was both inefficient and added significant overhead for Buncy’s employees.

The website and lead management solutions were made even more attractive by the fact that Lance Technologies finances its software solutions for qualified clients. Lance Technologies financed Buncy Real Estate’s project over the period of a year, allowing Buncy Real Estate to conserve cash.