POINT OF VIEW: Editor's Note

Online leads: your call

Much has been made by a few readers about a story we did in February on Internet companies that sell leads to practitioners. Letter writers said such services charge a fee without adding value to the transaction.

That’s an issue for practitioners and, ultimately, consumers to decide. Senior Editor Mariwyn Evans called dozens of practitioners for the story, and many were happy to pay for leads rather than spend money on personal marketing. Others found that marketing was a better approach. Still others pointed out that some of the companies mentioned in the article do add value by providing marketing support along with leads.

REALTOR® Magazine and the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION REALTORS® can’t take sides on the issue without treading into antitrust territory. And we wouldn’t want to: Our role is to be an objective trend spotter, to point out the pros and cons of new business alternatives, and to help you form an opinion. If enough of you find value in Internet lead generation, it’s likely that at least some of the companies cited in the article will sustain. If not, they’ll go the way of many other business models that tried but failed to get in between practitioners and their customers.

On another note, many of you have written to ask when we’ll be publishing our application for the top-ranking salespeople and sales teams in the country. The answer, at least for this year, is that we won’t.

We’ve had several challenges in putting together the lists. Because there are so many different models for how salespeople work (large teams, small teams, pairs, solo practitioners, and so on), it’s been difficult to make a fair comparison. We also find that applicants report numbers in different ways, even though we’re very specific about how to count transaction sides and volume. Although we do a lot of follow-up work on the applications, we again risk comparing salespeople unfairly.

Finally, salespeople can’t “win” if they don’t play. We’ve publicized the lists widely each year but don’t yet feel confident that we’re comprehensive in our reporting of the nation’s top salespeople.

We’ll still have our “Top 100 Companies” list in July. And this September, instead of a salesperson ranking, look for valuable business tips from many of the salespeople who would’ve made the list.

—Editor Stacey Moncrieff

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