Forms Pages Just Aren't Converting in Real Estate

Converting over 2.6%? You’ve got a leading conversion rate.

Keep forms simple—and experiment with other ways of converting.

Forms are one of the lower-performing conversion types in real estate (like they are in most industries). But we wouldn’t suggest property marketers change all their form-fill pages to click-throughs. You need forms to generate leads.

So, how do you optimize? One thing you can try is shortening them to less than four fields. Our data shows that most real estate forms have four or five, but there’s a correlation between longer forms and lower conversion rates. Or, put another way: Each field you add could be costing you valuable leads.

If your campaign goals allow it, try incorporating more ways to convert. For example, you could add a click-to-call button for visitors who are on-the-go (or otherwise reluctant to fill out a form). We recommend using Smart Traffic to track your experiment and pinpoint what’s turning those digital looky-loos into leads.

Want more leads? Shift some of your search budget to social ad platforms.

Search engines are the top traffic source for real estate, driving over half of all visitors to form-fill pages (60.0%). Meanwhile, social platforms like Facebook and Instagram only contribute around one-tenth of traffic (7.9%) to lead gen pages—but they’re converting visitors much better. 

Looks like there’s a sweet investment opportunity here. While most property marketers are using their budgets on search ads, we’d recommend you try marketing in the white space available on social platforms.

Real estate isn’t an impulse buy—so emotional appeal won’t cut it.

The percentage of emotional language on real estate landing pages increased across the board this year—more fear, more joy, more anticipation, you name it. But is that a good thing?

Eh, not so much. We looked at how different sentiments impact conversion rates in real estate, and correlations tend to be neutral or negative. We even dug into whether any specific industry subcategory (like, say, vacation homes) benefited from increased emotion—and fell flat.

This boom in emotional language could reflect a uniquely challenging year, but real estate has also never been an impulse purchase. (Or it shouldn’t be, anyways.) If your page runs high on emotions, you might wanna rejig your copy to focus on the listing details instead.