New auction site to sell leads for a pound

Former cost-per-lead overseas property portal Lead Galaxy is to re-launch as a lead auction service and will sell leads for as little as one pound, Global Edge has learned. Minimum lead prices will range from one pound to £25 depending on the age of the lead and how specific the potential buyer’s enquiry is.

Dan Johnson, director of TheMoveChannel.com and new owner of Lead Galaxy. “A buyer looking for a property in Nice in France, with a budget of over £500,000 who has enquired within the last 48 hours is a better lead than someone who just has a general interest in France and enquired a few weeks ago. Our system takes this into account and matches supply and demand in a much more efficient and precise way. The aim is to give agents more information about what they are buying so you only pay what you think is a fair price for each lead.”

Winner takes all

Agents are able to set up and bid on specific lead profiles and will be able to select criteria which include the country, location, price point and property type. When more than one agent’s lead profile matches the incoming lead, the agent with the highest bid is awarded the lead and this continues until you either run out of budget or you are outbid by another agent. If there are no matching agent profiles, then the lead goes into a secondary system, where it can be bought for a fixed price that reduces with time.

Two tier system

Johnson has been trialing the system with a number of clients on TheMoveChannel.com over the past few months and has found lead prices polarised, with agents willing to pay less for generic leads and much higher prices for highly targeted ones. “Although £10 is the average price for a lead in this market, there is clearly a wide range of prices agents are willing to pay, depending on the quality of the lead.” says Johnson.

Learning from the mistakes of others

Leads & Agents launched an eBay-like model for the industry in July 2008 but ran into financial difficulties and closed earlier this year. Johnson believes Lead Galaxy won’t make the same mistakes. “They didn’t have any real experience in lead generation and they failed to get the scale needed to make it work. We’ve been generating overseas property leads for 10 years and have an established network of partners and agents already in place. I think Leads & Agents also miss-priced the leads by not addressing the problem that they get less valuable as they age.

Throughout the month of July, new customers can open an account with Lead Galaxy for £10, a reduction from the normal minimum account balance of £50. Click here for more information.

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User Comments

I think £10 for a genuine high-quality specific lead is good value. But most portal leads are not worth even 10p. This move by LG makes a lot of sense. Mind you my client (Overseas Property Centres) has stopped using portals altogether after analysing the success of portal-sourced leads. Compared to their own (natural search driven) leads they are around 15x to 20x less likely to purchase. And anyway (thanks to the SEO-architecture of the web site created by Chilli Digital) OPC outranks the portals for vast numbers of high-value longtail keywords.

Jake Holloway, Chilli Digital

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