Payam Zamani, CEO of Reply! Inc., will speak at Real Estate Connect, presented in San Francisco July 28-30.
Consumers looking for one stop on the Web where they can find a Realtor to sell their house, buy a car, arrange a cross-country move and secure a contractor to remodel their kitchen now have Reply.com.
Next Phase Media, which owns and operates online real estate lead generation services AgentConnect and RealtyNow, officially relaunched itself today under the new brand name Reply! Inc. The new brand also incorporates iCastle, iMotors.com, OpenAuto.com and CarClub.com into a single Web portal with the real estate, autos, loans and home improvement services.
Reply!’s founder and CEO Payam Zamani expects the single portal to increase opportunities to monetize consumer traffic by offering more than one type of service. The company found that many of its customers were interested in cars and homes at the same time.
“We’re able on average to generate 30 percent more revenue from the same number of visitors,” Zamani said.
He believes as the cost of online advertising increases, it will become more critical for companies to have efficient systems in place for profiting from their Web site traffic. He pointed out Amazon.com, which grew from selling only books to now selling music CDs, electronics and household goods.
Reply.com also includes school district information, neighborhood crime rates, costs of living, climate details for specific regions and how-to guides, among other things.
AgentConnect and RealtyNow are online matching services that connect home buyers and sellers with real estate brokers and agents. AgentConnect and RealtyNow will continue to operate under those names and consumers will still find them at their respective Web addresses. However, consumers can also find these services by going to Reply.com. Zamani expects the company’s advertising campaign of the new portal to result in more leads for agents already using these services.
“Agents now have more choices for local leads,” he said.
The company charges realty agents $30-$40 per lead. There are no referral fees or membership costs on top of that.
Reply! will offer regional training sessions this summer for agents that use the real estate leads service. The free training will focus on teaching agents how to turn their leads into sales.
The company also plans to add an insurance channel this summer for homes and autos, but has no plans to include home listings on the portal.
“The idea is to be the one-stop Web site for all these services,” he said.
Walnut Creek, Calif.-based Reply! has 75 employees, according to Zamani. He said the company has grown rapidly since its inception less than three years ago and its network of 12,000 service providers includes about 10,000 real estate agent and brokerage relationships.
Zamani formerly was a co-founder and CEO of AutoWeb.com, an online car-buying service that that is now part of Autobytel.com.
Some of Reply!’s competitors for matching consumers to real estate services online include HouseValues, LendingTree, HomeGain and ServiceMagic. ServiceMagic offers many of the same services under one domain in that it matches consumers to real estate agents, lenders, home builders, remodeling contractors and other moving and home service providers. However, ServiceMagic does not offer lead generation for auto purchases.
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