Are you tired of getting names cartoon character names filled out in your real estate forms on your website? How about when someone gives you a phone number of a local restaurant? One has to laugh when you get that kind of information because if you don’t it may just drive you crazy. There is a way to increase the validity of your data and not decrease the number of leads that you get from your real estate website.

Make your data 85% valid

85% valid data is the number to aim for when working with real estate leads. After testing this on over 6,500 opt-ins over a 6 month period we found that there are steps you can take to make sure that the information you get on your forms is the kind of people you want to work with.

Steps to Making Your Registration Forms as Friendly As Possible

The overall theme with registration forms on your real estate website is to make them as friendly as possible. Now since you can’t put a big happy smiley face on the form (you can but I wouldn’t recommend it) you need to follow a few steps to make sure people want to fill in their real information.

1. Make sure the forms take 30 seconds or less to fill out – Long forms have never tested well and the more that people get on the Internet the worse it gets for long forms. The best forms take only 30 seconds or less to fill out. They require only the most basic of information and the user knows they only need to put their real information to get what they want.

2. Make phone number optional – nothing is worse than requiring phone number as it will lead to many 555-555-5555 numbers and you will turn into a data checker instead of a real estate agent.

3. Let them know they will get what they came for – That’s right on the form page make sure you let them know when and what they are signing up for. If you are going to set them up with a custom website with ALL the listings make sure you let them know that. Let them know in bullet point format if at all possible so they can’t help but read it.

4. Have a privacy policy – make it easy for your visitors to know what will happen with their data. It doesn’t have to be right in front of them and in your face or even long but have one so they know who they are giving their data too.

Most of all with all of your forms make sure that your visitor knows when they will get a response and stick so that promise so you have happy visitors and customers.