What was broken
The managing broker at Belmont had been writing a $4,200 check to Zillow every month for nearly three years. The leads had been good once. He could roughly date when they stopped being good: the third quarter of the year before, when the platform changed how leads got routed across brokerages in the same zip code.
By the time we met him, he was paying for leads that two or three other agents were also paying for, and racing to leave the first voicemail. His own site ranked for two long-tail queries about specific Brooklyn neighborhoods. Almost no other organic traffic.
There were twenty-four agents on the roster. No system for matching inquiries to whoever knew the inventory best, so most inbound calls funneled to him. He mentioned he'd stopped going to his daughter's evening basketball games a year earlier.