Every Realtor Tells Me Nobody Filled In That Form

The best-built thing on a real estate website is the box the agent doesn’t believe in.

Best-built is too kind and I knew it while I was typing it, because most of the time it’s three fields and a plugin that someone set up in an afternoon and never looked at again.

But it’s there, on the front page, on far more real estate sites than I expected, and on hardly anything else I open.

I lined the 47 trades up by contact form one evening, expecting real estate somewhere in the middle of the pack, and found it sitting at 2 of 47.

A stranger who lands on an agent’s homepage at half past ten at night can start a conversation right there on the screen, which is more than she can usually do elsewhere: 47.2% of these homepages carry a contact form, against 28% of small business sites in general.

Then I say that out loud to an agent, and I get the same sentence back that I’ve been getting for about a decade.

“Nobody ever filled that in. My people call me. Or they text.”

It’s said kindly, most of the time, the way you’d correct a tourist who has the street name slightly wrong. I’ve nodded along to it in a kitchen more than once, because arguing with a woman about her own business is a rotten way to spend a Tuesday morning.

So let me give it its due, because a fair bit of it is true.

The part I agree with

Your business does run on the phone. A buyer sent over by her sister already has your cell number saved before she ever opens your website, and she was never going to type her name into a box.

A form sitting on a page nobody visits collects nothing at all, and that isn’t the form’s fault. It’s a traffic problem wearing a form’s clothes.

I’ve built forms that sat untouched for a year, and I know exactly how fast that hardens into a rule about human nature.

How many messages would it take, over twelve months, before you’d call it worth the twenty minutes it cost to set up?

”Nobody filled it in” and “it never arrived” look the same from your chair

I’ve been called in to look at three dead forms this year, and not one of them was dead for the reason the owner gave me on the phone.

The first was still sending to the address of an assistant who left in 2022.

The second had stopped working the week the site got moved to a new host, and nobody had noticed, because nobody tests a form again after launch day.

The third was landing in a spam folder I had to ask the owner twice to go and look inside.

All three of those look, from where you’re sitting, exactly like proof that buyers would rather call.

Toronto puts a form on more homepages than any city I checked, and for years I never once asked where those messages ended up.

Which one would you bet against on your own site tonight?

So how would you know?

There’s a counting problem sitting underneath all of this, and it’s bigger than the form.

59.0% of these sites run analytics.

Google will keep you a free record of every page a stranger opened, how she got to you and what she pushed while she was there. It starts keeping that record on the day you switch it on, and it holds nothing whatsoever from the years before, which are gone for good.

An agent without it isn’t wrong when he tells me nobody uses his form. He has no way of being right either.

Memory is a poor instrument for this too, because the leads you remember are the ones that turned into a commission, and the rest never became a story worth keeping.

How many people opened your website last Tuesday? If the honest answer is a shrug, the form isn’t the thing you should be certain about.

When did anyone last show you a number about your own website that didn’t come from the person you pay to look after it?

The buyer who was never going to call

Picture her at twenty to eleven at night. Kids asleep, laptop on her knees, third time this week on the same listing.

Is she going to ring a stranger about a house she’s only half serious about?

She’d have to say the thing out loud, to a salesperson, at eleven at night, and then leave a voicemail with her name in it and wait to be called back at work tomorrow.

Typing is private. A phone call is a commitment, and she isn’t ready to commit to a conversation yet, never mind to a mortgage.

The same goes for the owner who is idly curious what his place is worth and has no intention of being chased about it for six weeks.

A form isn’t competing with your telephone. It’s competing with the back button, and the back button is undefeated.

There’s a short list of reasons a stranger leaves a page without doing anything, and having nowhere to type is high up on it.

What did you do the last time you wanted a price out of a company at eleven at night and the only thing on the page was a phone number and an office address?

The form you already have might still be wrong

Now the part where I’d take the objection back off you and hand you a fairer version of it.

Plenty of forms deserve to be ignored, and I’ve been paid to build a couple of those. Nine fields, a budget dropdown, a required question about how she heard of you, and a box asking for a message when she doesn’t have a message, she has a house in mind.

Name, number, which house. Three boxes and a send button.

I keep a roofer’s form on his homepage for the same reason, however often someone tells him it belongs on a contact page.

How many does yours have? Go and count them, because whoever built it was working on the assumption that every extra box was free, and each one of them costs you another woman on a laptop at eleven at night.

Then the reply. If she types at eleven at night and hears from you on Thursday afternoon, you’ve proved her right for not bothering, and she’s already talking to the agent who answered before breakfast.

Every real estate site I build sends its form to two addresses now, because one of them will fail eventually and I’d rather find out about it from the spare.

Real estate scores 70 out of 100 once all ten checks are counted, so I’m not standing here telling you your website is in fine shape. The code behind those pages is where your trade drops most of its points, and I spent years fixing the half of a listing site you can see instead.

The form is the part you already got right. It’s most of the reason I think the rest of it is worth your Saturday.

If you’d rather not test yours yourself, send me the address and I’ll fill it in from here, then tell you whether anything came out the other end.

Do this one, ignore everything else

Tonight, on your phone, off the office wifi, open your own homepage the way a stranger would and fill in your own form. Put a made-up name in it so you know which one is you.

Then ignore every other word I’ve written up there.

If nothing arrives inside a minute, you never had an objection in the first place. You had a broken form and a quiet year.

And if it does turn up? Reply to it. Time yourself, and let me know whether you’re as quick as you tell your sellers you are.